Saturday afternoon Elliot and his pals participated in the oral round of Battle of the Books.  The fact that they had made it to the oral round meant that they were already in the top 16 out of the ~ 64 teams that participated this year.  Eight teams had already competed in the morning round to determine the first team that will participate in the championship round (The Cryptid Chickens from Blessed Sacrament).  Elliot’s team (Boomslang) was competing against seven other teams (5 from Woodcrest, 1 from Plymouth, and 1 from Freeland) for the second spot in the championship (to be held on Thursday at 4:30 PM in the auditorium of the Grace A. Dow Library).  Boomslang made it to the oral round last year and came up just short of making the championship (here is a link to a photo).

Out of the ~ 45 questions they received on Saturday they only missed two, so we knew they had done very well.  However, they had lost one of the battles, and the way points are assigned makes it hard to predict your performance (since you don’t know how well the other teams did).  When the emcee announced that Boomslang would be moving on to the championship battle, we were surprised and thrilled!  It wasn't even very close this time since there was a large cushion of points between Boomslang and the second place team.  Congratulations to the team and coach Marcelle for all of the hard work they’ve put in over the last several months!

Here are some photos of Boomslang: