Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools across the commonwealth and the country, the Northwestern Academic Challenge Eighth team earned this year’s championship in a faceoff at Lehighton Area Middle School in March.

The team went undefeated in the competition winning the championship.

Members of the team include Daniel Jenkins, Nathaniel Smolinsky, Gavin Kline, Bailen Smargiassi, Tim Burnard, and Emily Chukoskie.

Smolinsky, a veteran from Sixth Sense, is captain of ACE.

“We are very proud of this team,” said co-adviser Gina Wood, describing the team captain as visionary.

“Several students were returning champions from Sixth Sense and they really wanted to keep their winning streak alive.

“Together, they had a lot of personality which made practices very amusing.”

Northwestern competed against seven neighboring schools: Lehighton, Panther Valley, Tamaqua, Northern Lehigh, Catasauqua, Jim Thorpe and Palmerton.

The competition consisted of three rounds.

“In the first round, the team works together on questions from geography, history, language arts, science and math,” explained co-adviser Rich Kulp. “The second round is a 10-minute buzz in round like Jeopardy.

“The third round is a buzz-in style round as well, but for five minutes, but this time wrong answers count against your score.”

“The competition is divided into a winner’s and loser’s bracket,” Wood explained. “Since our team won each round, they competed in three competitions.

“There are two rounds, with the winner of the first loser’s bracket playing for the trophy against the winning team from the other bracket.”

The team went undefeated in the double elimination tournament.

“This is not the first time Northwestern has won first place,” Kulp said. “Four of these students were on the sixth grade version of this competition where they had won gold for that as well.”

About 20 eighth graders took the preliminary test for ACE, though any eighth grader could apply.

“The team was selected after a second round of tryouts” Kulp said. “We started tryouts in December and we trained weekly after school.”

Wood said they meet with students once a week after school for about 90 minutes.

“We divide students into teams to participate in mock competitions where they learn the rules of each round and answer a wide array of questions.”

“The final championship is held in the evening with an audience of families, administrators, and friends,” explained Wood. “There is an air of excitement accompanied by a good degree of nerves.”

The team was grateful to compete against the other schools. They enjoyed the atmosphere and food, specifically the Orange drink.

Lehighton has nice facilities and a new auditorium with comfortable seats and great acoustics.

They particularly enjoyed any questions asked regarding communism, France, Greek mythology, percentages, palindromes, Schrodingers cat, and quantum physics.

Nerves could not stop the team that “credits everything they learned in life to SpongeBob SquarePants,” Kulp joked.