By Kyle Auger
Sports Editor

Unprepared, and inexperienced as a unit are two words that are applicable to the Westford Academy Programming Club. Victorious, however, is also another. The team won first place at the Worcester Polytechnical Institute Annual High School Programming Contest at the university on March 4.

This was the team’s first competition together with this roster, comprising of freshmen Michael Colavita and Alok Puranik, and senior Pat Long. But apparently, their skill overrode their lack of experience. A total of 139 students forming forty-seven teams from twenty-nine school districts registered for the event, representing the most number of teams and students ever to participate in the contest.

The day started when the teams arrived at WPI at 8 am, and the contest kicked off at 9. The competitors worked for four hours, until 1 pm, even working through lunch. To win, the teams were given sets of problems and tried to solve them using programming software like Java and C++ while being timed.

“You would write a solution for a problem, you would submit it to them [the judges], they would tell you if it was right or not, if it was wrong you would get a penalty. Then it’s whoever solved the most the fastest,” said Puranik

The results were extremely close, with six schools successfully solving all of the given problems. However it came down to the aspect of time, with WA finishing the fastest.

“[It was] fun. It was intense, it was pretty down to the wire. Initially, we were just hoping we would do well, we did not think about winning,” said Puranik.

However, they completely exceeded the expectations they set for themselves, thriving under the leadership of WA computer science teacher Anjli Trehan.

“As Programming Club Advisor, I run international contests four times a year through the American Computer Science League where our students have been doing really well this year,” said Trehan.

With any competition, youth can always be a bit of a risk. Often inexperience can lead to nerves and lower performance, but this was not a problem for the young team.

“I’ve done programming competitions outside of school so I wasn’t really too nervous,” said Colavita.

The team worked as a unit quite impressively, and being the sole senior, Long did not feel much pressure to lead his younger teammates.

“If I was the leader, then we would have lost, because it would have made a bottleneck, so we had to work together. If one person was in charge, that it wouldn’t have worked at all,” said Long.

With such a rare combination of skill, and chemistry the team will look forward to other competitions including one at Fitchburg State University on May 3rd.