by Djones » Sun Apr 19, 2015 7:45 pm
The OAC committee decided to not fund the team in 2015, so things have been in a great deal of flux over the last few weeks. (Hence my lack of response to Jasper- I didn't know what was going happen). The situation was resolved by having Northmont agree to pick up a significant portion of the cost of the team, with participants having to cover a portion of the cost to play. We finished our analysis yesterday, contacted the players to confirm their attendance and ability to contribute to the cost, and our team was approved by HSAPQ this afternoon. Team Ohio will be:
Sam Blizzard (Northmont)
Jack Martin (Sidney)
Nour Hijazi (Sidney)
Rohin Devanthan (Solon)
John Xiang (Solon)
Laurel Spangler (Tippecanoe)
I am very confident that this team has the potential to do very well in the tournament and build on our solid finishes the past couple of years. We have two tremendous generalists who are good at science, as well as specialists in lit, fine arts, social science and history. Additionally, the three teams who have consistently finished at the top of just about every event in the state are strongly represented. After talking to the Texas folks when we played Texas Open, we mirrored their process of analyzing data (of which we have plenty) and knowledge of teams and players to make team selections.
There were several great players who were considered, but one thing we took very seriously in our selection was reliability. We had several players who were selected last year withdraw from the team in the weeks leading up to the tournament for various reasons, so we took a great deal of time this year confirming that the players selected this year were committed to playing. Our team was definitely weakened last year by the withdraw of players, and while Nour and Kara did an admirable job filling in with next to no notice, Joe was clearly left scrambling to fill our roster at the last minute and we definitely had a hole in our fourth spot that cost us at least one game. I was committed to making sure that did not happen this year and know that each of the players selected is excited to represent our state.
David Jones
Coach, Northmont High School