Fossil Ridge High School

Fossil Ridge High School

Brian Riedel, Coach
Coach Brian Riedel has been a chemistry teacher at Fossil Ridge High School for seven years. This is his first time coaching Science Bowl, which has been an interesting experience to say the least. He is often found picking up after Sophie’s plastic babies during AP chemistry, putting a cover on the smoke detector, pouring baking soda on spilled acid, being a fluent speaker of sarcasm when necessary, disposing of sodium metal in bodies of water when necessary, putting pleasing backgrounds on his lecture notes (like Canyonlands National Park), and being by far the most laid-back and social person in the Science Bowl organization. He is not outspoken against people drawing amogus and forty two on his whiteboards, desks, and other sites in his classroom. This may indicate a secret society based in his classroom, which would not be entirely surprising. Unfortunately, Coach Riedel was not available for comment, so this biography is being extrapolated from information gathered from Sophie’s phone.

Sophie Wang
Sophie Wang, a junior, is returning to the Science Bowl for the fourth time. She is known for her fascination with aquatic animals—especially the kind found in sushi—as well as leafy specimens—of which her favorite is her Devil’s Ivy. Her plants, which she grovels in the backyard for, have been pressed for use as ornamentation in her acclaimed handmade envelopes. Sophie is also a hot pot aficionado and has an anthology of haikus with a reader count of one. Day-to-day, she can be found making unintelligible spelling errors, attempting (still) to memorize Wikipedia, blasting “Pompeii” by Bastille in the shower, grinding Protobowl with Jackson, planking her way through Raven Biology of Plants, wondering how she ever lived without Notion, ordering strawberry lemonade with no black balls at boba shops, or hiding rubber duck mounted plastic babies around Fossil. If you have found this review satisfactory, please leave a five-star rating at tinyurl.com/roastfish.

Jackson Dryg
Jackson Dryg is a tenth-grade student at Fossil Ridge High School. He has participated in Science Bowl since sixth grade, and currently is the resident math nerd, submits stupid guesses to organic chemistry questions, and studies physics (with Kary) without AP physics background. He also does competitive math; he took the USA Junior Math Olympiad this year and used Cartesian coordinates on only traditional geometry, to his eternal shame. His favorite AP class was music theory. Jackson sporadically composes music and enjoys classical piano. Predictably, he embodies the nerd stereotype. Some nerd things he has done include: learning anime soundtracks on the piano, going down quantum mechanics Wikipedia spirals on the last day before school break, doing graduate-level Protobowl (with Sophie) and absorbing her wisdom (when he understands it), memorizing the Pokemon type chart, caution-taping his middle school Science Bowl coach’s door (with Colin), delivering unmarked grocery bags after dark, researching thermal decomposition of explosives (with Quentin), and writing seventy two word inflated sentences like this.

Colin Magelky
Colin Magelky is a sophomore at Fossil Ridge High School. He’s been in Science Bowl for five years now, and this will be his third time at Nationals. If he’s not looking up and talking about obscure philosophies like antinatalism, he’s most likely employing the Joestar family secret technique and running away from his work. He liked Nietzsche for a while until his English teacher told him that his essays were no longer remotely about the prompt and were instead defending Nietzsche. His favorite topic is biology, specifically anything to do with the medical field. Apropos of that, his favorite disorder, because everyone has one, is Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, and not because he has anything against the French. To everyone’s dismay, he is also the president of Science National Honor Society now. His number one skill, to which he attributes most of his success in life, is short-term memory loss. He will forever believe that the quads in a cat should be renamed truads.

Kary Fang
Kary Fang is currently a tenth-grader at Fossil Ridge High School, Fort Collins, Larimer County, Colorado, US, Earth, Milky Way. She already exhibits symptoms of senioritis, which is most likely the result of her relatively famous quote, “Procrastination is the key to success.” When Kary is not trying to drive off the instant gratification monkey, she can usually be found screaming into the Discord microphone, hitting (more specifically, chopping) a plastic ball on a table, or breaking her wrists…wait. What? Some of her very few hobbies include finding loopholes in meaningless games, creating master plans but never executing them, obtaining perfect scores on lyricstraining.com, and advocating for the addition of socks and sweatpants to Science Bowl merchandise (*ahem*). She would also like to mention that she is often belittled for her Casio fx-9750GII calculator, and to those with TI-84 CE’s, suck it - my calculator can graph in x=f(y). There are definitely more wheels than doors in this world.

Quentin Perez-Wahl
Quentin Perez-Wahl is a tenth-grader at Fossil Ridge High School, Fort Collins, Colorado. This year is his fourth year in Science Bowl, and his second time going to Science Bowl Nationals. He has liked science since he was three years old, enjoying AP computer science and chemistry, and to-be-taking AP chemistry and physics. He hopes to go to Colorado University to study aerospace engineering. Speaking of, he develops his own rocket engines, which are not at all dangerous. He has done Chung-Do-Kwan taekwondo for eleven years and gotten a black belt, does gold panning, occasionally scares neighbors with failed rockets, playing Microsoft Flight Simulator for inhuman amounts of time, skiing, biking, and presently purposefully precariously practically presiding as president of his micronation, Sempura. He is the only latino in team one, and the 42nd worst at math in his Science Bowl team. He is evidently not sure that all of the team’s biographies are one word under the 160-word limit.