Science Olympiad North Regionals

This Saturday was regionals for Science Olympiad at Mississippi State University. I've never done Science Olympiad before, and I didn't know what it was going to be like at all. I only had one event at regionals, although I have three events for state.
I took the A&P test for MSMS, along with my partner. We scored 2nd place. One of Oxford's teams placed 3rd and one of Oxford's teams placed 1st. We understood that only the nervous and integumentary systems would be on the test, but we found out that immune was also on the test. I suppose that was just what we got for not studying ahead for state. Luckily, I knew some of the immune system answers. However, there were others that I could not remember for when I took AP Biology, which was frustrating.
I have a lot of studying to do before state - the immune system, more about the nervous and integumentary systems, chem lab, and water quality. However, I feel like the whole team did really well at regionals. Regionals forces us to prepare for state before the last minute. Our build events were all pretty spectacular.
Collectively, our team placed 1st in the competition. There were six or seven other high schools present, and Oxford's two teams took 2nd and 3rd. Oxford will be upset about the loss, and ready to win at state, which is why we cannot rest on our laurels yet.

Science Bowl, Part II

We played our own A team. And we won. We weren't expecting it. We didn't really want it - we had enjoyed proving ourselves against them at practice, but knocking them out of the competition was not something we wanted or expected. We were all very upset after that game, but we had to move on to the next round.
We played Oxford for this game. We knew that after we had beaten our own A team, we had to win the rest of the competition. It was the least that we could do. We didn't. The match was very close. 36-26, in Oxford's favor. Ten points difference - less than one tossup and bonus between us. There were a thousand different ways the match could have gone in our favor - any one of us slightly faster on a question, or a lucky guess, or whether Oxford got the bonus correct on the final question - the match hung on the edge, and I suppose we were just on the wrong side of that edge.
After that match, Oxford beat Walnut for the first place. So technically, we took third/fourth place (more like third in my book). One of our A team players and one of our B team players placed for most individual points scored. Perhaps things would have been very different if we had drawn a different bracket. This was the second time in twenty-six years that MSMS did not send a team to the national competition.
We will come back next year, and next year we will be smarter, faster, and better. We have a score to settle, and I know that I will do everything I can to fix that.