The University Interscholastic League (UIL) competition held at FMHS on Saturday, January 14 featured competitions based mainly around literature and math, with a few odd science competitions. Flower Mound hosted a plethora of schools such as longtime rivals Marcus, Lewisville, and Hebron, along with the School of Science and Engineering, Denton, Liberty, Allen, Keller, Argyle, Plano West, Highland Park, Southlake, Ryan, and Guyer High Schools.

In Number Sense, sophomore Aditya Durvasula took second place. Freshman Nikitha Samy got second in Spelling with Doyel Das coming in fifth. Freshman Leon Jacob took sixth place in the Accounting competition. In math, Durvasula got fourth and senior Lakshimi Menon placed fifth. Sophomore Rishab Goel placed second in Social Studies while fellow sophomore James O’Leary came in fifth. In Science, Saikiran Srirangapalli placed second.

“While we did take more awards than schools like Marcus, Lewisville, and Hebron, they each had at least one first place medal while we had none,” Samy said.

Flower Mound students placed more often than students from most other schools, except the prestigious School of Science and Engineering took more number of places than any other school overall.

In previous years, FMHS has placed more often than most other schools, including rivals Marcus, Lewisville, and Hebron. In this competition, however, the UIL team found it difficult to gain traction due to some students taking a leave of absence because of conflicting schedules or other issues.

“Even though we didn’t do as well as we could have, I am rather pleased that we got as many places as we did,” Goel said. “If we were going to be outdone by any of the schools present, it was going to be the School of Science and Engineering considering it was ranked as the number one high school in the country only two years ago.”

Students had a generally positive view of the competition despite giving up first place awards to rival schools. Many believe that even though they did not do as well as in previous years, this competition gave them an idea of how to prepare for the next.

“After seeing what the other competitors can do and what I struggled with, it will be much easier to study and prepare,” Samy said. “Now that I know what I need to work on, I can focus on and refine my weaker skills for the Argyle and Denton Ryan competitions.”

The next UIL competitions will be held on Saturday, January 25 at Argyle and Saturday, February 8 at Denton Ryan.