State Odyssey of the Mind Tournament - 3rd Grade Team

Yesterday was the day!  The 3rd grade team was finally attending the State Odyssey of the Mind tournament.  Lucky for us, the venue (a high school) was only 45 minutes away.  Other teams drove over 3 hours to get to the competition.  Each team hast to have two volunteers, one for a judge and one as a general volunteer.  Our judge for the Regional competition was out of the country so we had to find a new judge.  No one else could do it, so I stepped up so our team could compete.  That meant I would work the competition for about 10 hours and possibly not get to see the team compete. Because they were last on the schedule for the Problem 1 Long-Term problem, I thought there might be a chance for me to see them.






The Team's first presentation was the Spontaneous at 11am and then they had to wait until 3:20pm for the Long-Term Problem presentation.  After the Spontaneous presentation, there was some crying from two team members which lead the coach to believe that it did not go well.  The eventual story was that one member questioned the other member's answer and then another time, a member said the same answer as someone else and another member pointed that out.  Well, that's not good because they will get a lot of points deducted for not working well together.  During lunch, I was able to find them to catch up a little.  I missed Collin because the boys went "off campus" for lunch and the girls stayed behind.  I at least got to catch up with the team and find out how they were doing so far.  Plus, one mom had some great snacks that she shared with me.  Yeah!!


I went back to my judging station to work the rest of the afternoon.  About an hour later, one of the parents from our team sent me a text saying that Eli, one of our team member's, was headed to the ER for a peanut allergy.  What?!?  He must have touch some nuts somewhere.  I hoped that he was OK but that also meant we were 1) down a team member and 2) had to figure out how to replace his part in the presentation.  The team eventually figured out that one of the other team member's would wear both costumes and remove one of them when it came time to pretend to be Eli. 


Seeing that the Long-Term Problem I was judging was on time and that our team's Problem was behind, I was excited that I would be able to see them perform.  Eventually, there were further delays including them having to wait for about 20 minutes while sitting in the gym while the judges discussed the prior performance, the team eventually performed an hour late at 4:20pm.  That meant they were tired and antsy.  They did well together but, two of the three vehicles did not work again and, the team members did not work as well together causing the presentation to not flow like it did before.  I could tell they were tired and happy to be finished. 

I stayed an hour later to get the scores.  They received about 50 less points than they did at the Regional tournament which means they will likely not advance to World's.  I was still very proud of them for going to State and having that experience.  They were the only team from their school to go!