On March 6, the 2013-2014 Academic Superbowl subject squads competed in their first competition at Brebeuf Jesuit High School. While the first competition is generally good practice for later, more imperative competitions, Academic Superbowl sponsor Matt Dillon said that the competition at Brebeuf does not “define their overall stance” for the remainder of the competitive season. Dillon said that he hopes that the subject squads will continue to prepare and improve for the next round of competition, scheduled to take place at Ben Davis High School on March 18.

According to Dillon, the first competition, on the whole, went “well,” but it also exposed several holes and “missing links” in the teams’ collective knowledge of their topics.

“I think what they need to do is to work on the holes in their knowledge. That’s what they really need to work on. We still have some growth, as a team, to do,” Dillon said.

Likewise, Academic Superbowl co-sponsor James Ziegler noted that while this year’s competition at Brebeuf left some of the participants unsatisfied with their results, most were well aware of the prestige of simply participating and performing well in such heated competition. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to qualify for the state competition in early May.

While qualifying for State is both significant and difficult to accomplish, William Chen, participant and junior, hopes to help his team qualify at this year’s Regional competition, set to take place in April.

“As of right now, it’s all about preparation. What we need to focus on, really, is that no matter who is up there competing, they need to make sure that they have all their bases covered, and that they have an expertise in each of those little subsets of information,” Chen said.

According to Dillon, participants should be fully focused on learning the provided material and gathering more information about their respective topics. In addition, Dillon said that the Academic Superbowl captains should be organizing group meetings and holding practice sessions on at least a bi-weekly basis in preparation for the upcoming competitions.

While Dillon said that all of the teams collectively have more work and preparation to do before they’re ready for the next competition, he also said that math team, in particular, performed especially well at the first Invitational.