Track and field continued their strong season this past Saturday at the league championships as both the boys and the girls teams placed third in the team standings. Claudia Tischler, grade 11, won the 1,600m after leading the entire race, then came from behind in the 800m to claim her second championship of the day. Isabelle Connell, grade 12, won the 100m in 12.24, then placed second in the 200m, setting a new Harker record in that race with a 24.85. Sumit Minocha, grade 12, roared back from sixth place all the way to second place in the final half of the 100m, finishing with 11.15. Again in the 200m, he stormed back, breaking his own meet record and cracking the 22.00 barrier with a 21.76. Corey Gonzalez, grade 10, won the 1,600m field, starting out with two 70-second laps then pulling away from the field with a 65-second lap and finally blazing a 63-second lap to win the title with a 4:29.79. He also led the entire 3,200m race from start to finish, setting a new meet record with a 9:50.37.

In 4×400 relay action, Tischler led off the race with a 62-second 1,600m relay, then handed off to Nadia Palte, grade 9, for a 66-second run and Ragini Bhattacharya, grade 12, for a 63-second lap before Connell charged forward with an unbelievable 57-second lap, sending the Eagles from fourth place all the way to first with a new school record of 4:10.10.

Julia Wang, grade 10, set a personal record in the discus with an 80’9″, giving her third place. Michael Chen, grade 12, placed second in the discus with a 124’7″ and sixth in the shot put. Matt Giammona, grade 12, placed third in shot put with a personal record of 41’1″ and wound up in sixth place in the discus.

Connell, Minocha, Gonzales, Chen and Tischler all qualified for next week’s CCS championships, as did the girls 1,600m relay team. Seven Eagles are moving on!

Swimming

Congratulations to all our swimmers and divers on a terrific season!

This weekend, Craig Neubieser, grade 10, set a personal record in the 100m butterfly, bumping up his CCS ranking from 52nd to 45th. Aaron Huang, grade 10, finished 17th out of 56 swimmers in both the 200m individual medley and the 100m breaststroke. On the girls’ side, Manon Audebert, grade 11, finished 14th overall in the 200m freestyle with a time of 1:57.16 and 13th overall in the 100m freestyle with a season-best time of 53.81. Angela Huang, grade 9, finished 15th in the 50m freestyle with a time of 25.26. The girls’ 400m freestyle relay team of Huang, Audebert, Kimmy Ma, grade 11, and Anika Mohindra, grade 9, finished 15th overall with a season-best time of 3:43.23.

Baseball

The boys closed down their season last week with a 7-1 loss to Menlo. Seniors Kevin Cali and Jacob Hoffman and sophomores David Lin and Ayush Midha all recorded hits in the final game. The boys end their year at 9-15-1 overall.

Softball

In playoffs, Harker drew the #11 seed which pitted them against sixth-seeded Aptos High last night, where they went head to head at Aptos in a very tough game. Harker led the game 2-1 until the sixth inning when Aptos pulled into the lead capitalizing on a hit and an error to take the lead and win, 3-2. Aptos is a Division II team, versus Harker’s Division III status, and each team had seven strikeouts; there were a total of five hits between both teams for the entire game (three were by Aptos). Coach Raul Rios noted that Aptos players repeatedly congratulated Harker players on a tough game, and our girls ended the season heads held high. Congrats on a great season!

Volleyball

The boys volleyball season came to a close this week in the CCS quarterfinals at Leigh High School. The Eagles fell to the Longhorns 25-27, 22-25, 24-26 to finish the season at 17-15 overall. Thank you to the supportive crowd!

Info about Harker’s new entrepreneurship academic program: http://bit.ly/12v03ES

The TiE Conference link: http://tiecon.org/entrepreneurship/youth

The Winged Post story on Harker’s recent TEDx event: http://bit.ly/13xtfw0

The team also managed to place 12th in a non-academic portion of the event in which the students had to build a vehicle that could carry a container of salt a distance of 20 meters in the shortest possible time, powered by a lithium ion battery. The Harker team’s vehicle went the distance in 7.6 seconds, just over one second longer than the first-place finisher’s vehicle.

Not ones to let a trip out of state go to waste, the students also saw the many sights offered by the nation’s capital, including the Natural History Museum, the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol Building.

Last Friday, student representatives from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Department of Defense and State Department schools worldwide participated in the 2013 Raytheon Mathcounts national competition.

Each state is only allowed four competitors, making it much more difficult to qualify from California than other states; more than 250,000 students and 5,050 coaches participated in the opening round. For the national event May 9-12, 56 teams of  four members each were invited to Washington, D.C.

Zhu was top scorer on the California team, with a perfect score of 46. The other California three team members were selected from a group of five students, all with 44 points, by tiebreaker. He was one of only four students nationwide who scored a perfect 46 in the State MathCounts competition. One of the others was the eventual national MathCounts champion.

In the National competition, the written round has two parts totaling 46 points. On Friday, 224 top “mathletes” competed over a two-hour period. Zhu, the only California team member to reach the top 12, scored 44 points, placing him seventh in the written round with the top 12 advancing to the countdown round. In the first part of the countdown round, “he beat his opponent,” said Vandana Kadam, middle school mathematics department chair, but was outpaced by his opponent in the next round, finishing a stellar fifth place at this year’s national MathCounts.

“This is a phenomenal achievement!,” said Kadam. “David has been extremely consistent in all math competitions during his middle school years and this is a perfect end to his MS math journey. Ranking fifth out of 224 top math students is no small feat.”  Congratulations to Zhu on this major accomplishment!

Guests will be able to peruse some of the wonderful comments her former students have sent in and honor her invaluable contributions to Harker and to the lives of so many students. There will be a few formal remarks and guests can share memories from 4-5 p.m.

The school is creating a book of messages to give to the family after the event. To have a message included, email it to Nicole Hall at nicoleh@harker.org.

Padgett’s family has requested that in lieu of flowers, please send all donations to The Sandy Padgett Memorial Endowed Scholarship Fund, established in her memory. Checks can be mailed to the Sandy Padgett Memorial Fund, Harker Advancement, 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, CA  95129. Please note “Sandy Padgett Memorial Fund” in the check’s memo line.

So that we can prepare adequate refreshments, please RSVP to Nicole Hall at nicoleh@harker.org by May 24 if you plan to attend.

This has been a sad and tragic loss for the Harker community. The school continues to provide support to the students and staff, and we hope the outpouring from our community about Sandy Padgett’s impact in their lives is a comfort to her family.

Set in pre-statehood Oklahoma in the summer of 1906, the production centers around the love triangle between Laurey Williams (Cecilia Lang-Ree, grade 12), niece of the respected community figure Aunt Eller (Cristina Jerney, grade 12), lovesick cowboy Curly McLain (Ian Richardson, grade 11) and the mysterious and dark farmhand Jud Fry (Justin Gerard, grade 12).

Meanwhile, the flirtatious Ado Annie Carnes, played by junior Shenel Ekici, reaches a crisis of conscience when she realizes her attraction to the Persian merchant Ali Hakim (Rohan Chandra, grade 12), despite her engagement to the good-hearted but fiscally irresponsible Will Parker (Kevin Moss, grade 11).

Drama and comedy naturally ensue, as conflict grows between Curly and Jud over who will win Laurey’s favor, and Ali Hakim tries to undo the situation involving himself and Ado Annie.

The huge upper school cast included several grade 5 students, all of whom gave splendid performances. Musical director Catherine Snider led the “Oklahoma!” band, whose interpretation of the beloved score was both accurate and inspired, providing the perfect backing for the student singers.

In order to ensure the best performance possible by the students, Lang-Ree enlisted the services of dialect coach Kimily Conkle, who instructed the cast in how to effectively convey the time and place of the musical with the right pronunciations and inflections. Fight choreographer Dexter Fidler was also brought in to direct the fight scenes, most notably during the iconic 15-minute dream ballet that closes Act I.

Crucial to all Harker musical productions is the set design, and longtime designer Paul Vallerga came through with a set that remarkably evoked the plains of the early 1900s. Harker students, as always, did a terrific job as the show’s crew, managing the stage, working the light board, assisting with wardrobe and attending to all the other important tasks required to execute a production of this caliber. Meanwhile, sound engineer Brian Larsen, lighting designer Natti Pierce-Thomson and costume designer Caela Fujii were again indispensable.

It marked the first time Lin had ever sold a story, which was recently featured in the prestigious magazine’s special section for science fiction short stories called “Futures.” Started in 1999, “Futures” has today become an award-winning series. Publication in Nature Journal can lead to attention from the mainstream media.

“I still feel like I’m dreaming,” she said of the story acceptance, the best birthday present any young writer could ask for. “I can officially say I got published at the age of 18!” enthused Lin, who is double majoring in comparative literature and psychology at University of California, Berkeley.

Lin said she got the idea for the short story several years ago when she went on a “Wikipedia tangent” and discovered Sarajevo roses, which are deformations in the concrete caused by mortar shell explosions that are later filled with red resin as a memorial to the dead.

“As the concrete is being replaced in Sarajevo, these roses are disappearing. When I read that, I was immediately struck by the enigma of how they came to be, and I thought it was a terrible loss that they were being wiped out by construction. Three years later, I still hadn’t forgotten about them! It occurred to me that I could weave these two ideas together. Immediately, I had this vision of a flower boy in a fantastical war-torn city,” she said.

Despite having endured her share of literary rejections before landing a contract with Nature Journal, Lin has already sold another story called “Dark, Beautiful Force” (about love, disillusionment and doughnut holes) for publication at Daily Science Fiction.

Ever since her days at Harker, Lin’s writing career has been on a fast track to success. Back in 2011 and 2012, she was recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers when she won two annual Scholastic Art and Writing Awards (both national silver medals) in the novel writing category. She accepted the second award at Carnegie Hall in New York City last June.

Lin recalled that during the awards ceremony, “Whoopi Goldberg and Meryl Streep gave very inspiring presentations about the importance of art and its impact on society. I will always remember something Meryl Streep said which was that the gift of writers is to express the things that we all feel, but are unable to put into words.”

“I’ve no doubt this is not the first the literary world will hear from Jessica!” said Lauri Vaughan, Harker’s upper school campus librarian, who served as Lin’s adviser before she graduated last year. Vaughan praised Lin for her magazine publication as well as for her remarkable previous accomplishments, winning the Scholastic silver medal two years in a row.

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards have an impressive legacy dating back to 1923, with past winners including such notables as Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Robert Redford and Joyce Carol Oates. And, of course, Harker’s very own alumna, Jessica Lin!

Students must be enrolled in honors or advanced placement Spanish and receive at least an A- in their classes the previous semester, as well as finish three semesters of high school-level Spanish, in order to qualify for induction into the Spanish NHS.

This year’s inductees are: Manon Audebert, Juergen Buchsteiner and Ariana Shulman, all grade 11; Stacey Chao, Nathan Dalal, Shreya Dixit, Riya Godbole, Corey Gonzales, Juhi Gupta, Matthew Huang, Vivian Isenberg, Rahul Jayaraman, Andrew Jin, Allison Kiang, Daniela Lee, David Lin, Cindy Liu, Samantha Madala, Juhi Muthal, Nicholas Nguyen, Sachin Peddada, Archana Podury, Karnika Pombra, Apoorva Rangan, Sindhu Ravuri, Nikhil Reddy, Anokhi Saklecha, Vedant Thyagaraj, Helen Wu, Menghua Wu and Samyukta Yagati, all grade 10.

The USACO (usaco.org) is one of a small number of national high-school Olympiads in mathematics and the sciences that are tasked with identifying and training the very best students in the country in their respective disciplines. Harker has finalists in various Olympiads each year, but having two in the same discipline is unusual.

During the academic year, the USACO hosts a series of challenging on-line programming contests – many of these are notoriously difficult, since they require high proficiency in both programming and algorithmic problem-solving, said Brian Dean, director of the USA Computing Olympiad and associate professor of computer science, Clemson University. “My graduate students usually cannot solve the problems in these contests,” he added. 

“Based on their performance on these contests, Alex and Lawrence were selected as part of a group of 24 finalists – the very best in the USA – to attend a rigorous academic summer training camp where they have the opportunity to learn advanced concepts and hear about cutting-edge challenges in modern computer science,” said Dean. “This camp is a unique and unforgettable experience, and helps to bring participants to the point where they are truly world-class in terms of their talent.  Many of our alums have gone on to make impressive contributions in academia and industry, and the most highly-selective universities know well that our finalists are indeed the best in the world as prospective applicants.

 ”Selection as a finalist in any Olympiad is one of the most significant honors a high-school student can earn in any discipline of study.  The fact that the Harker School has two USACO finalists this year speaks volumes about the quality of your computing programs, and reflects very highly upon your school. As director of the USACO, I’m looking forward to working with Alex and Lawrence in a few weeks when they attend our summer program,” said Dean.