After winning first place in state, the LifeSmarts team represented Illinois at the national competition from April 9-12 in Denver, Colorado.

LifeSmarts is a quiz bowl in which students answer questions related to consumer education.

Junior Garrett Hosticka led the team as the captain. Seniors Sarah Venen, Jacob Wiegele, and sophomore Mike Sawicki also competed. Senior Jesus Moreno served as the alternate.

“It is kind of a lot of pressure (being captain) compared to the previous years. There is a lot of responsibilities and the whole team handled it well. The team was very responsible which makes my job easy,” Hosticka said.

One of the goals the LifeSmarts team had was to make the final eight in nationals.

“It is cumulative points through the first eight matches and at the end of the match we were eight points, which is less than one question out of the top sixteenth. So, we go eliminated from the top sixteenth from one question,” adviser Nancy Blume said.

At nationals, each state is paired with another state in a competition known as a sister team. The sister team for Illinois was Pennsylvania, who won nationals this year.

The competitions include a quiz bowl, a buzzer match, a public service announcement video, a sister team activity, different activities with a panel of experts, and the buzzer round.

“We came one question away from making the final eight. It is kind of disappointing, but next year I think we will come back tougher and make the final eight,” Hosticka said.

Although the team did not make the final eight, the team took first place in the sister team activity.

“One of the competitions with Pennsylvania required to work together to promote teamwork. So we had one event where we had to work with Pennsylvania to collect points. Our points were the highest out of all of the states in that competition,” Blume said.

The students worked hard to prepare for nationals.

“It was great, this group of students really worked hard. They were studying in their free time and they were very competitive,” Blume said.

According to Blume, being the fastest to the buzzer was the most difficult in competing, even though the team knew the answers to the questions.

“I think it went well. There were some tough teams that definitely knew just about everything. I think we did really well as a school representing the state,” Venen said.

LifeSmarts prepares students to be consumers as adults.

“I think LifeSmarts is important because the team knows more about consumer skills than I did at their age. All of these topics such as credit, technology, and identity theft are topics that adults know about, but they are already learning about it when they are 15, 16, and 17 years of age,” Blume said.