The Farmington Economics A Team won the 12th Annual Harvard Pre-Collegiate Economic Challenge on Saturday, April 1. Team A, which consisted of seniors Allen Haugh, Spencer Buzdon, Chris Ware and junior Dylan Suffredini, placed first out of 35 four-person teams representing 22 schools from across the country.

“I was proud of all of the team who placed first, and I told them that they’re champions. They really are champions; it was fantastic,” coach and economics teacher Joel Nick said.

Team A defeated Mounds View High School, a Minnesota public school, in the final round with a score of 9-3.

Both schools beat private schools in the semifinals, with Farmington narrowly besting Phillips Exeter Academy’s A Team in a sudden death tiebreaker question about Risk Aversion Theory.

“This win was especially satisfying, given we had fallen just short in the final round last year. We put a lot into prepping and we’re glad that it paid off,” Haugh said.

After several rounds of quiz bowl-style competition, in which teams competed to answer questions on economic history, policy, and theory, students at the Harvard Challenge took a test where Buzdon scored the second highest out of the 140 students present. Only 16 teams advanced to the final round. These teams were determined by the combined score of the first two rounds.

 “I think the success was thanks to the studying by the group outside of school and thanks to Mr. Nick’s teaching,” Buzdon said.

Going into the final stage of competition, which consisted of four bracketed matchups between teams in further rounds of economics quiz bowl, Team A was seeded eighth.

In addition to Haugh, Buzdon, Ware and Suffredini, juniors Jay Cohen and Sushane Sharma, sophomore Stewart Buzdon, and senior Erik Weigmann participated at the Harvard Pre-Collegiate Economic Challenge as Team B but did not advance on to the final round.

“Part of [Team B’s] success was just in prepping with our A Team. Asking questions, asking for clarifications… that exchange of information between our A Team and B Team really helped our team A as well as it helped our Team B,” Nick said.

This was the second competition the team participated in this year. The first was the National Economics Challenge, a video contest run by the Council for Economic Education (CEE), where the teams submitted a video concerning economic principles that was assessed by economists for quality and logical progression.

According to Nick, the team is arranging to compete in the National Economics Challenge later this month.