Members of the Academic Team sat poised with buzzers in hand at the Fayette County Academic Team Meet on Tuesday at Whitewater and thought they were prepared for a tough match.
It was the first meet for Areesh Abdullah, Jeremy Gura, Shane Mudrinich, Chris Pham, Donald Shoaf, Jeremiah Smith, Julia Stitt, Nisha Sunadham and their coach Nancy Close.

“We were pretty excited, and we thought it was going to go well,” Stitt said. At the end of the play, McIntosh emerged as the winner with 55 points and will go on to represent Fayette County in WSB-TV Channel 2’s game show “High Q.” Whitewater finished with 36 points, and Fayette and Sandy Creek tied with 25 points. The Panthers found themselves on the bottom with 20 points.
“We just didn’t specialize in what everyone else did,” Shoaf said after the meet.

“We kept up a good fight,” Sunadham said, “but the questions were different. They were easy but were worded weirdly.”

In fact, members of the team plan to practice the question-and-answer process in a different way in order to be prepared for the rest of the season. The single match consisted of all toss-up questions instead of the usual mix of toss-up and bonus questions.

Close said her team is “better than they played. We’re going to rally and end up doing a lot better” in future meets, she said.
“We’re not down in the dumps,” Stitt said. “We’re ready to come out strong.”