Carlsbad High School’s Ocean Bowl team took our first win at a recent Ocean Bowl regionals. This win is a huge accomplish for our school and community. Our Ocean Bowl team’s hard work and preparation lead to this great win.

Although this may seem like simple trivia, it took great studying to accomplish this.

“Ocean Bowl is a marine science competition between schools where we answer questions about oceanography, ocean chemistry and ocean policy,” senior Everett Williams said.

This year, the team was able to advance past the point they have in previous years. This advancement in regionals helped prepare them for nationals.

“We had regionals down at USD and we won against the previous champions, Dana Hills, which means we got to advance to the national championship,” Williams said.

Although this may not seem that stressful, it can be at times. But once they got past this, it was smooth sailing.

“It was pretty stressful at the finals because we had actually lost our first round against Dana Hills,” said Williams. “But we were undefeated until that point, so we got to play another round and beat them.”

These competitions can be quite difficult and stressful, but when the hard work pays off, they have fun too.

“I really like how much fun we had,” senior Oshean Lerhmann said. “A lot of it was tough, the trivia was hard and writing questions out was hard, but I really enjoyed hanging out with the guys.

One may wonder how they were able to accomplish this. Well, the answer is coffee and hard work of course.

“I drank a lot of coffee that morning. They handed out water bottles and they let you fill it out with water or coffee and I filled out the entire thing with coffee,” Lerhmann said .

However they did more than just drink coffee. They prepared for many weeks before their competition individually, and as a team.

“We did a lot of practicing independently, just looking at exam questions, or just researching stuff on our own, and then we would meet once every tuesday as well,” Lerhmann said.

This team is a great opportunity to get involved with the school and learn more about the ocean. In addition, many of us know more about marine life and the ocean then we may think.

“It is not terribly difficult, and we live in California, so many of us have our lives based around the ocean, so there is so much stuff you already know,” said Lerhmann. “It’s not too hard.”