Fort Hamilton High School’s JROTC program hosted its annual Academic Bowl competition on January 21, 2023, featuring ten other high school’s competing academic teams. This event showed the dedication of each cadet and competitiveness of each team, as each school vied for first place in their categories.
Each school’s academic team comprised two groups, leadership and academic. Both the lead and academic teams had their own schedule, where they competed against other schools.
The day started off with individual competitions between all contestants with written exams about different topics including government, thinking maps, learning techniques, and more. Leadership and academic were then separated and moved to their respective rounds. Leadership continued on to the school library where they had a competition on map reading, while Academic moved on to the jeopardy portion. After a brief lunch break, the leadership teams went on to jeopardy and the academic teams moved on to a round of Quizizz. Non-competing cadets also engaged in some activities with the JROTC Robotics team where they learned to build and operate parts.
Once all the rounds were over, all the cadets were free to buy JROTC merchandise, play games, and interact with each other. All proceeds collected went to help fund Fort’s JROTC program and its teams. The cadets enjoyed slices of pizza and snacks and played different games with other cadets from other schools such as Scrabble, Jenga, and checkers.
At the end of the day, all cadets gathered around in formation for the Commencement of the Awards Ceremony. Fort Hamilton’s Color Guard team presented and honored the flags as part of its color guard routine while Collins Owusu Jr., a Fort JROTC cadet, played the Star Spangled Banner on his viola. The final winner of the Academic Bowl was Francis Lewis High School, having earned the most points overall.
The event was a huge success and it would not have been possible without the JROTC cadets and instructors. All participants showed appreciation for Isaac Deng, a Fort JROTC cadet, who took the time to help prepare for the event. Fort’s JROTC program is already looking forward to the next Academic Bowl for the year 2024.
