Sunday, December 11, 2016

December Tournament in Jackson

35 Clague students participated in the Region B Saturday tournament in Jackson on December 10.  Clague won both Top 5 (with a perfect score of 100) and Team Average (15.83).

Congratulations to everyone who participated -- top scores (18 and above) from Clague were earned by Matthew, Karinne, Aarnav, Jason, Henry, Alex Z, Alex V., Evan, Catherine B.L., Marisa, Kaiwen, and Zihao.  

The tournament also included a practice round of Propaganda while the cube games were being set up in the next room.  Congratulations to Natalie and Aarnav who each got a perfect score of 28 from the 7 questions in the practice round.  

As you can see from the blog post below, we are looking forward to the State Tournaments in March in Grand Rapids.  57 team members have now participated in at least three Saturday tournaments, which is the Clague expectation towards preparing for States.  Another 11 have competed in two tournaments, and can get their third tournament on January 21, at 8:30AM, at St. Lawrence in Utica. 




Clague at the Super Tournaments in March

Time once again for the December looking-forward-to-States post...

If you are reading this blog, you hopefully know that the Clague teams will be competing at the Michigan Super Tournaments (“States”) in Grand Rapids in March. You might not, however, know how the tournament works.

The State Tournament is something the team looks forward to all year. The team members have a lot of fun at States but also are working very hard. Hundreds of students from around the state come to demonstrate the academic skills that they have developed all year.

The “Elementary” teams (this group includes 5th and 6th grades, so yes, we have Clague players playing "Elementary") will compete March 1-3 and the “Middle” teams (7th and 8th grades) will compete March 8-10. Both tournaments are similar in structure.
  • We take a bus to Grand Rapids and then the entire tournament takes place in the hotel. Competition and meals all take place in the hotel’s meeting rooms.
  • Players compete in teams of five. We form these teams in late January. Last year, we had four Elementary teams and eight Middle teams.  Of course, we will all be rooting for all Clague teams, but if you have a team member in the family, find out what the team name is so you can follow along. 
  • We compete in two types of games. First, “cube” games include Equations, On-Sets, Linguishtik, and Wff ‘n’ Proof. Each of these competitions consist of four “rounds”. We play two rounds of each game on Wednesday and two on Thursday. Results are posted each day, so you can see first the scores after the first two rounds and then the final standings. Teams that do extraordinarily well go to playoffs either Thursday evening or Friday morning to determine champions.
  • Second, “reading” games we compete in are Presidents and Propaganda (there is also Current Events and World Card Theme, but Clague sticks to six games). We play Propaganda on Wednesday and then Presidents is either Thursday (Middle) or Friday (Elementary).
  • We will try to keep our twitter page @clagueag updated with results.  Results also appear on the instagram page @eric_nelson_ag.
  • No matter the results, we are all proud of every member of the Clague team for their hard work and the integrity they show in competition. 
Families will be getting more information on the technicalities of signing up soon. We will also need some chaperones to help out.  There is no extra cost to being a chaperone (although you still pay for your student).  The cost per student includes registration for the games, transportation, the three days and two nights in the hotel, food, a t-shirt, and a share of the cost of chaperones.  If you are a team parent and have the time to be a chaperone, it is a great way to spend a few days seeing what the teams from around the state can do.