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Local team competes in Academics Games Leagues of America national tournament
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Travis Court
By Jeanne Starmack
ELLWOOD CITY, PA.
To Travis Court, they’re just games.
He’s in them for the fun and doesn’t take them too seriously, like some of his peers do.
But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t excited to bring home a third-place trophy, along with the other four members of his team, from the Academics Games Leagues of America national tournament this spring in Kissimmee, Fla.
Travis, 15, will be in 10th grade at Ellwood City’s Lincoln High School this year.
Since he was in third grade, he’s played the games. There are six of them — LinguiSHTIK, On-SETS, Propaganda, Equations, Presidents and World Events.
The rules for the games get more complex the longer you participate in them, Travis explained.
“It’s better to start early and work your way into it,” he said last week at his home in Ellport, Pa.
Travis, who is in the gifted program in the Ellwood school district, is involved in helping some young novices learn the games in the elementary schools.
He also helps other high-school students — and has even taught some of his friends.
The gifted-program students practice the games, usually on Tuesdays, every week.
There are tournaments every month from October to March at Slippery Rock University for his league, the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV, which includes kids from Lawrence, Butler and Mercer counties.
There also is a regional competition in March at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., where the MIU IV plays leagues from Beaver and Allegheny counties.
To get to the national competition, which was April 28-30, Travis had to be undefeated twice either in the local tournaments or once in the local and once in the regional tournaments. He was undefeated in LinguiSHTIK, which focuses on sentence composition, grammar, vocabulary and spelling, and in On-SETS, which is based on the mathematics of set theory.
In Florida, he played four games — all but Presidents and World Events. Ellwood 10th-grader Matthew Barnes, who played Presidents, came away with a first place for his team — teams are made up of members of the MIU IV League, Travis said.
Travis’ favorite game is Propaganda, in which players try to identify what techniques are being used in advertising to persuade consumers.
But it was in Equations, where someone sets a goal number and the team tries to make an equation that equals that number, that Travis and his team scored the third place. The school districts, with Laurel and Mohawk represented on Travis’ team, will get larger versions of the trophy, a replica of Rodin’s The Thinker.
Travis will continue playing the games. “I enjoy it,” he said. “I like the challenge.” But, he said, he also likes meeting people through the games.
“Some people are real serious about it,” he added. “I’m like, ‘Why?’ Just have some fun.”