South Bristol School’s Great Maine Book Tournament team became state champs on May 24. From left: Co-coach Erin Mower, students Monette Swall, Eddie Seiders, Aysel Fraser, Ava Larrabee Cotz, Helen Rice, co-coach Kayla Wright, Yzze Bhe, Carmella Fraser, and Helena Bigonia. (Photo courtesy Erin Mower)
South Bristol School’s Great Maine Book Tournament team, composed of eight students ranging from sixth to eighth grade, became state champions on Wednesday, May 24 after competing virtually with teams from across Maine.
“Proud is not the word. I looked in the thesaurus; there is no word that comes close to the way I feel, (which is) beyond proud,” said South Bristol School Librarian Erin Mower, who co-coached the team with English and language arts teacher Kayla Wright. “Galaxies and galaxies away is the word that best describes how I’m feeling right now.”
The competition is a fast paced trivia game that rewards participants for both correct and quick information. The game-based learning platform “Kahoot!” is used to facilitate the competition.
According to the competitions website, to enter into the Great Maine Book Tournament, a team needs to form of three to 10 fourth to eighth grade students from a school or public library. After the team is put together, members read the list of 15 books compiled by the Great Maine Book Tournament from the current Maine Student Book Award nominees.
The themes of the books included friendship, self-acceptance, courage, inclusion, and growing up, students said.
“‘Amari and the Night Brothers’ was my favorite. It reminded me of Hogwarts,” Seventh grader Yzze Bhe said, which was met with nods from the team.
The team becomes experts on those books in order to give themselves the best shot at in the competition.
The journey to becoming state champions has been a long one, Mower said.
“We started meeting at the end of October two times a month and started meeting weekly in January,” she said.
South Bristol beat out teams from Great Salt Bay Community School, Bristol Consolidated School, and Nobleboro Central School in the district round to move on to regionals.
At regionals, SBS placed first of four teams, beating out competitors from Mt. Ararat Middle School, Windham Middle School, and Dresden Elementary School. Finally, at the state level, they competed against four other teams representing their own regions.
“The first round was done remotely, so there was a bit of waiting before we found out if we were going to the next round or not. The kids would email me, ‘Do we have an update? Are we going to the next round?’ and it eventually became a joke. I would say ‘Yeah, I have an update – there’s no update,’” Mower said.
This is where seventh grader Eddie Seiders, nicknamed “Fast Eddie” by his teammates, excelled, said Mower and teammate Helen Rice, a seventh grader.
“(Eddie) was very, very good at clicking fast, so we all nicknamed him ‘Fast Eddie,’” said Rice. “We had to do it really, really fast and there was lots of yelling … there’s a lot of pressure on trying to do it really fast.”
“I bet you could hear us from five miles away,” Seiders said.
Most of the team is eligible to return next year, and when asked if they were interested in returning to defend their title, they took a minute to workshop an answer. Eventually, they said to write down that they were “interested.”
To learn more about the Great Maine Book Tournament, go to greatmainebooktournament.weebly.com.
