The Norwin High School Science Olympiad team completed another season, competing in an array of competitions including the 2025 Dick Smith Memorial Science Olympiad Invitational, the 2025 Carnegie Mellon University Science Olympiad Invitational at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Regional Tournament at PennWest California. The competitions took place from December to March, and the team missed the state competition by only one spot coming in 6th place at the PennWest Regional Tournament.

The Science Olympiad team is a hardworking group of individuals. Being involved in this organization involves research, workshops, hard work, friendly competition, and above all a love for S.T.E.M. The team comes together in the months leading up to the competitions to be the best they can be through collaboration and hard work, led by Mr. Anticole’s leadership and preparation.

“Once the team is selected in September, students are assigned events based on surveys they completed sharing their interest & experience in each individual event,” said Matthew Anticole. “From there, students work independently with their partners for much of it.  We do get together as a team a couple of times: we had an online competition in December, an in-person practice Invitational in February, and then Regionals this past weekend.”

They placed 48th overall and scored 1342 points at the virtual 2025 Dick Smith Memorial Science Olympiad, they place 25th overall with a total score of 571 points in the Carnegie Mellon University Science Olympiad Invitation, and they placed 6th overall with a total score of 200 points at PennWest California tournament, unfortunately missing states by one spot.

“Although the team was very disappointed, I know everyone could have done better in at least one event,” said Science Olympiad President Lillian Chaney about the Regional tournament at PennWest. “It doesn’t feel good spending the whole day competing just to not hear your team’s name called to advance to the state tournament at the end of the awards ceremony, but I think that it is a good wake-up call. Every year I have competed in the Science Olympiad we have always qualified for the state tournament, but it has been very close pretty much every year. Everyone is always like are we going to qualify this year? And this year, we finally didn’t.”

Even though the team missed states by one point at the PennWest Tournament, their hard work and efforts didn’t go unrewarded. 9 students earned medals in a variety of areas from Robots to Air Trajectory, and the Norwin Knights gave it their all.

Though the Norwin Science Olympiad team is done for now, their brains will keep ticking away in the off-season until they start again next September, ready to come back better and stronger.

“Next year for the Science Olympiad we are definitely going to make some changes as to how we prepare for the events,” said Chaney. “I think that this year’s results were a good heads up to kick it in gear so we can hopefully qualify for the state tournament next year.”