Sam Sublette | Managing Editor

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Avon’s Science Olympiad team is building their season off right even with the obstacle of COVID-19. One of the team’s sponsors, Zachary Rohrbach, has been with the team for seven years and is still unclear about the direction the season will take relative to COVID-19.

“It is unclear at this point whether we will actually be traveling to meets. So there may be a degree to which the events are virtual, but we are not sure yet,” Rohrbach said.

Even though Rohrbach is unsure whether a season will occur, the team is still meeting up and preparing for the possibility of one.

“We’re going to start a weekly schedule after break and then eventually we will have specialized practices,” Rohrbach said.“The build groups will get together and the biology type groups will get together so we can focus more.”

Within these practices, senior Eric Tran, who is the president of the team, practices a process of trial and error.

“…we are just kind of working on our events to know them better and get better results on the things that we do for the events like if we build a boomilever,” Tran said. “We build one, we break it, and we get the results and next time we go to the club we try to make it better.”

Tran has been in Science Olympiad since his freshman year and said that Science Olympiad is not just work, but also communal.

“It’s not always just working and working. It’s really communal I feel,” Tran said. “It’s really fun to be in there and just experience, and mess up, and to succeed with all these people around you.”

Tran is not the only one who appreciates the community within Science Olympiad. Rohrbach looks forward to the new members of the club that he may gain a connection with.

“I like getting to meet new students. I don’t very often get to have the same students for more than one year, and so the fact that we have underclassmen join who get to do it for four years and getting the opportunity to work with them for four years is a lot of fun,” Rohrbach said.