When a group of LT Science Olympiad competitors walked down the hall at a typical meet this year, it was not uncommon for someone to start singing the Spice Girls anthem,  “If You Wanna Be My Lover” or the NSync hit, “I Want You Back.” These serenades, however, were not just out of the blue; the whole LT Sci Oly team was dressed as different ‘90s bands, including the Spice Girls, NSync and Kriss Kross.

“Honestly, nothing is better than coming out of a challenging test on Biology or Chemistry and seeing one of your teammates running around in cheesy costumes, singing movie theme songs up and down the halls,” Sci Oly captain, Mike Le ‘16 said.

While the group had fun experimenting with different themes, such as Disney characters and safari animals, they also had a lot of success at the state meet on Apr. 15-16^th, earning the fourth place title.

“We lost a fair amount of seniors last year, and there was some worry that without them we would be at a real loss,” Le said. “However, I feel that our team really applied themselves as the competition neared and although we didn’t improve our overall placement when compared to last year, many events that were once weaknesses, dramatically improved.”

Practice for the state meet began at the beginning of the year, captain Claire O’Connor ‘17 said. The team competes at different high schools on some Saturdays, takes practice tests from previous years and does outside research on their topics.

“We want Science Olympiad to be no prior knowledge needed, [so] students have to prepare for their different events which requires a lot of practice,” Coach Bruce Falli said. “We ran hundreds of trials for our different engineering events. We had to try to shoot a ball into a bucket and took maybe 1,000 shots.”

Besides all the hard work and numerous trials during the season, the students on the team were able to learn valuable skills that will greatly benefit them in the long run.

“Kids keep Science Olympiad on their resume until their first job,” Falli said. “It gives them exposure to content they don’t normally see [and] a lot of kids chose their major based on the different events.”