Twenty-seven students placed first through sixth place in their events at the UIL District 3-5A Academic Meet held Friday, March 27 at West Texas A&M University. Canyon won their fourth consecutive district championship with a total of 434 points.

Fifteen placed first through third place and qualified for the regional academic meet at Texas Tech University April 24-25. Also, the one act play, “Paolo and Francesca,” qualified to compete at bi-district April 9 at Amarillo College.

“After all the hard work the one-act cast did last year, being able to advance this year has really been a great experience for the whole company,” Koontz said. “We’ve put in months of hard work, and it’s starting to pay off.”

Koontz also competed in both the news writing and the editorial writing competitions.

“For news writing you get a prompt based on an event that’s happening at a fictional high school and you have 45 minutes to write it,” Koontz said. “In editorial, you are given a prompt on a controversial topic that’s happening at a high school and you have to write your opinion of the topic in 45 minutes.”

Koontz placed first in news writing and second in editorial, and plans to compete in both at the regional contest.

“I think stress is going to be my biggest challenge at regionals,” Koontz said. “At regionals, there’s the added pressure that if I do well, I’ll get to go to state.”

Senior Bella Barnett also competed at district, placing second in persuasive extemporaneous speaking and first in prose interpretation, but only after she suffered a mishap in her first preliminary round for prose.

“We were supposed to have seven minutes to perform our piece, but the person who was timing for us thought it was only six minutes,” Barnett said. “That freaked me out a little during my first performance, and I took out two whole pages of my piece in order to finish on time, but I did end up saying something about it. When I went again, I wasn’t as nervous, because I had already gotten sort of a practice round in, and I wasn’t in as much of a crunch for time.”

Earning the highest number of individual points for the academic team, Landon Work brought in 75 points by placing first in all five of his events: calculator applications, computer science, mathematics, number sense, and spelling and vocabulary.

“I always get a little nervous during the competitions because I’m really competitive,” Work said. “But all the other competitors are nice, and I had a really good time.”

At the regional meet, if the students place first, second, or third, they will earn a spot in the state meet, which will take place May 26-28 in Austin.

“The biggest challenge will be earning a top spot at regionals,” Work said. “We will be competing against some schools that dedicate a lot of time to their events, and they will probably be in the running to earn many of the top spots.”