Oakdale High School’s Science Olympiad team finished this year’s regional Science Olympiad competition tied for fifth. The team fell short in the tiebreaker, number of gold medals, which will send Central Catholic to the State finals. The top four go to finals. The team faced an unfortunate circumstance when one event was thrown out do to a scoring mistake by the event supervisor.

“We might have done better with that event, but we will never know,” Team Coach Cameron Nickerson shared.

The difference between fourth and the tie for fifth was two points. The tiebreaker for fifth, with the ‘winner’ moving up to fourth, was the number of gold medals.

“We earned one gold medal, which we are very proud of,” said the coach.

Nickerson also shared that while the team was disappointed to not advance to state, they have met, regrouped and are ready to apply the lessons learned to next year’s strategy.

“It just didn’t happen on this day,” Nickerson said of the loss. “The good news is that we did medal in half our events, half of those in the top three. One gold, one bronze and four or five silver, and we are celebrating those events.”

Results are as follows:

Gold medal in Mission Possible: Liz White and Sarah Sorenson.

Silver Medals - Bridge Building: Jared Kahler, Austin Romito; Experimental Design: Taryn Lane, Austin Romito, Katie Schultz; It’s about time: Brandon Fischer, Michael Winders; Protein Modeling: Rachelle Pabalan, Sarah Sorenson, Jasmine Yong.

Bronze Medal - Disease Detective: Rachelle Pabalan, Michael Winders.

Fourth place medal - Fossils: Taryn Lane, Jasmine Yong. Fifth place medal - Entomology: Jared Kahler, Taryn Lane; Technical Problem Solving: Michael Winders, Jasmine Yong; Wright Stuff: Julianne Kummer, Katie Schultz; Write it- Do-it: Hailey Brown, Liz White.

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