The following are emails from March 2006 after the 2006 Science Olympiad.
Rich Ellis emailed the following to the rest of the team.
"Yay everyone!
2nd place makes me feel all warm inside. I feel like we finally did something really really right, after our miserable failure at bowl. I also wanted to say that I'm really proud of everyone. We got fewer first places then Belmont, Wayland, LS, Newton South and of course Acton Boxborough. We won because we placed in almost every single event. We did so well because every single one of you had your stuff together, knew what your events had in store for you, and owned them. This was a team competition and we did well because we worked as a team. That is why I am so proud of you all. Great Job Everyone!
-Rich"
Jonny Kalow emailed the following to the rest of the team.
"Hey everybody
This is kind of sad, cuz its my last science team competition, and I am kind of sad that we weren't good enough, but I was happy that we managed to somehow squeeze our way into second place =)
Yeah so good job everyone.
Despite lots of stuff going wrong, I think that our major problem lay in that we in general just weren't smart enough to beat Acton-Boxborough, that they probably beat us by like 40 points, and even with Ian being not-dead, robot working, tower pwning, etc., we still wouldn't have enough points to win. From what I remember, when we won two years ago, we had a lot more medals and really high-ranking stuff, and this year we definitely didn't have the same level of excellence, although our depth and our consistency
was great.
Also Acton-Boxborough was really frickin good (like all their team members were wearing medals), so we shouldn't put too much stress on ourselves, b/c I think we basically did everything well, just nothing was quite good enough.
For the future I suggest you pay attention to the build-aheads a lot, because I think ours were really amazing this year (even though tower and robot practically didn't work, they were so good to begin with that they could place top 10). I think that a hybrid of past knowledge and inspiration is the way to go, like for scrambler, which was really good, we got our launching mechanism idea from a really old alum, and Ian came up with a fancy braking mechanism etc, and altogether we had a really great event.
Yeah so next year talk to people from the past, because their ideas will probably be really solid, and then you can improve on them however you want. build-aheads have always been among NNHS's strong points, so keep that up and all you need is solid studies and we can bring back some former glory.
I'm also really happy that Dr. G got to participate a lot, b/c now she can build up some expertise and guide the team to victory, one step at a time.
Jonny Kalow"
