After several weeks of planning, the Heritage High School Odyssey of the Mind team competed in the regional competition.

“It took a lot of planning,” said one team member, “We were pretty behind, working late the night before and running lines the day of the competition.”

Although the team seemed behind, they got high scores, moving onto the state level of the competition. They are currently preparing, hoping to get good enough scores to move onto the next level.

Asking this year’s team members a variety a questions, we got a rundown of what Odyssey of the Mind members do. Odyssey of the Mind, or OM for short, is a program in which students creatively solve problems including making skits and building things.

“I’ve been doing OM for ten years, since the third grade. Personally, my best moment was last year finding out we got third place at state, meaning we were very close to moving onto world, the highest level of competition. The hardest thing is definitely organization and getting everything done on time,” said Odyssey of the Mind club president, Alejandro Lara-Agraz (12).

Another member, who has been participating for a couple years, also commented.

“I’ve done OM for four years, all throughout high school. One of the worst and best things that has happened was that one year our sound effect alarm wasn’t working, so we had to improv and create the sound ourselves. The highest I have ever gotten in competition is up to the state level,” said vice-president Gurjiwan Dhaliwal (12).

Secretary Cierra Pierce (12), who has only been in the club for two years shared some funny things that happened:

“One day we were working at Alejandro’s house and I went to go buy some supplies we needed. My car wouldn’t start, it was the first time I ever had to jump start my car. I’ve also been sick twice during the competition day. We just had to power through everything and during breaks, I would go sleep.”

Members were also asked for the process of preparing for the competition.

“The first thing we do is choose what problem we’re going to do for the year.

First get the problem, discuss general ideas going through the problem synopsis, pick the best formed idea and expand to meet criteria of the problem, build an outline of character/scene, making script from outline, and the build scene,” said Alejandro.

Considering how well they did during the regional competition, during the state level, they did not do as well as they expected.

“During the regional competition, our main problem was our background. At the time, our script was pretty good. However when we performed at state, our backdrop was amazing, but no one knew the lines that we had changed,” said treasurer Naomi Mason (12).

Overall, although the team did not get as far as they were planning to, they had a fun and eventful year. It has been undecided whether there will be a team next year, because the advisor is retiring and the team members are all seniors, they will leave behind a positive legacy for the school.