Washington County Enterprise-Leader
Farmington ACE(s) Championship Again
FARMINGTON — For the second year in a row, Farmington High’s Academic Competition in Education team won the season championship.
Farmington now has six firstplace trophies, which moves the school into second place for the most first place finishes in ACE history, according to Clayton Williams, coach.
Bentonville High School has won the finals 22 times. West Fork, which didn’t participate this year, has won five times.
Farmington scored 51 points in the championship game on March 12 at the Farmington Performing Arts Center to defeat Prairie Grove with 31 points and Bentonville West High School with 21 points.
As champion, Farmington takes home a large trophy and $2,000 in cash for team members. Prairie Grove received $1,500 in reward money and Bentonville West received $1,000.
This year a record low number of schools participated in ACE and officials had been concerned it might be the last year for the program.
When ACE first started years ago, possibly in 1993 or 1994, 15 teams participated in the competition. This has dropped over the years to 12 teams, nine teams and for 2018-19, only five teams participated. Fayetteville, Siloam Springs, Lifeway Christian and Shiloh Christian decided not to return this year for different reasons.
Williams said the schools are discussing some changes for 201920 so that hopefully more schools will participate. Ideas include reducing the fee to join and maybe lowering the prize money.
“We’ve heard there are a couple of teams that will come back,” Williams said.
Each team plays three games during the season and teams accumulate points from their matches to come up with a year-end total.
Farmington finished with a high of 141 points and received an automatic bid to the championship match. The other teams competed in semi-final matches on March 12, with the winner of each advancing to the championship game.
Prairie Grove defeated Bentonville High in the first semi-final game and Bentonville West
defeated Gravette.
Williams said this is the most diverse team he’s had and included one student from South Korea who is still learning the English language.
“I’m really proud of how they came together,” Williams said following the championship. “We had a lot of new students. They pulled together and made it game by game.”
One of his seniors, Nicholas Erickson, said he had been on the Quiz Bowl team in middle school and decided to try ACE as a sophomore.
“This seemed like the next step,” Erickson said.
Erickson said he prefers ACE to Quiz Bowl because he’s able to “master” a subject through hard work, rather than “just knowing random trivia.”
In ACE, teams are given specific books and chapters to study in preparing for their matches. Erickson said his subject was U.S. government.
Other subjects include math, chemistry, Shakespeare, literature, physics, art history and world history.
Donna Mitchell, Prairie Grove’s ACE coach, said she was especially impressed with her team’s support and encouragement of each other throughout the year.
“Every team member contributed points,” Mitchell said. “I was very proud of all the individual work they put in outside the class to prepare for the competitions.”