First it was the girls’ basketball team winning a state championship and on Tuesday it was Redhawks UIL science team taking first place in the state academic meet in Austin. 

“So I didn’t want to jinx it by getting my hopes up like real high, but after they took the test, they were like, ‘Oh we’re feeling so good!!” coach Christine Rittenhouse said. “And they were arguing about some of the tougher questions there. I was just like, trying not to think about. So then, you know when we went in there and got like our test scores back and they saw that our combined score was over 500, we were like ‘ooh we might be in the running for this.’”

Consisting of seniors Jason Xie, Adler Xu, junior Jenny Wang, and sophomore Bryan Zheng, Xie and Wang took first and second individually.  

“It’s an individual test, it has biology, chemistry, and physics. So at each level, it gets harder,” Wang said. “We definitely could not have done it without our teachers at Liberty.”

Entering the contest with the highest scores, Zheng felt the team was in a good position to do well. 

“I wasn’t that shocked [when I found out we made State] because my team was really good-we prepared a lot,” Zheng said. “It was the first time we ever won state for science. It was kinda a shock for the school but for me, I already knew my team was amazing.”