BY MARY ANNE ROSS
Correspondent
SCOTT PILLING staff News 12 New Jersey anchorman Tom Layson talks with four of the five members of the East Brunswick High School Academic Team during a May pep rally held at the school. Seated to Layson’s left is team co-adviser Shirley Read. EAST BRUNSWICK – It’s the best versus the best.
The East Brunswick High School Academic Team, after outlasting 32 other high schools since the inaugural New Jersey Challenge kicked off last fall, will represent New Jersey on television this weekend. They’ll go up against St. Anthony’s High School, of Huntington, N.Y., winner of the ninth annual Long Island Challenge.
The two teams will be shown competing for the first-ever Challenge Cup trophy on News 12 New Jersey this Saturday and Sunday at 6:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. The competition, sponsored by the Power to Learn Division of Cablevision, is a “Jeopardy” type of quiz game where academic teams are paired up against each other and asked questions testing their knowledge of math, science, literature, history and the arts.
Recognized at their school during a recent pep rally in the style of a football homecoming, the East Brunswick Academic Team members have – in addition to outlasting 31 other schools in the New Jersey Challenge – consistently achieved top honors in tournaments throughout the state and country.
“If not first, we usually place within the top three at national competitions,” said Martin Bordak, a physics teacher who advises the team with Shirley Read.
The team has competed in New Orleans, Chicago, Texas and Florida.
Bordak attributes East Brunswick’s success in the New Jersey Challenge to the hard work and many hours of practice the team puts in every week.
“They go over strategies and study questions,” he said. Bordak has been the coach since 1990 and noted that the competition has gotten tougher over the years. “There are more schools competing, and the students are better prepared,” he said.
Bordak has given the East Brunswick team an extra edge.
“I have kept almost every question they have been asked at every tournament they have attended,” he said. The number of questions he has accumulated runs into the thousands.
Becoming a member of the Academic Team is no easy feat. Students need to go through a series qualifying exams that even include how fast they can use a buzzer and how well they work as part of a team. Bordak finds the students who make it to be “free, independent thinkers who are very self-motivated.
“They don’t need a lot of baby-sitting,” he said.
Five team members have participated in the New Jersey Challenge. All are graduating seniors, whose major focus of study has been science or math.
Dennis Jang is class valedictorian and will be studying at Brown University in the fall. He said there is “joy in having knowledge and being able to recall the answers to these questions.”
Yi Shi is the only female on the team, but she noted there is nothing unusual about a girl enjoying the sciences.
“Most of my friends are science majors,” she said. She has decided to attend the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University this fall.
Alex Zozula will be visiting Korea this summer before he heads off to Princeton University. He will compete overseas as one of four students from the United States chosen to compete in the International Chemistry Olympiad.
The team is rounded out by Aaron Fin, who will study biomedical engineering at Yale University in the fall, and the team’s captain, Aditya Panda, who makes sure everyone is practicing and helps choose which competitions they will attend. Panda will also attend Princeton in September.
To learn more about the New Jersey Challenge, visit www.powertolearn.com.