Mind Games

Each week during the school year, The

Times almost always devotes the front of our second section to high school sports. Athletics are an important part of school life, and in our small towns, they are an important part of community life.

When WP or Dayton win a state cham­pionship (as WP football and soccer did two years ago, and Dayton basketball did way back in 1995), it's as big a deal to us as the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl is to Seattle.

But some of our high school students ex­cel at things other than athletics. This week, we had the pleasure of covering two groups of students who excelled in competition against other schools using primarily their brains.

On February 12, Dayton's Future Busi­ness Leaders of America - or FBLA - club traveled to Kennewick to take on students from 15 other schools at the FBLA South­east Region Winter Business Conference. The conference featured competitions in a wide variety of business-related categories.

Between them, the 26 Dayton students who attended took 67 top-five places in 32 out of about 100 events. That included 19 first-place finishes. Ken Graham's story on Page 6 lays out more details.

Dayton has a long history of success in FBLA, and that's mostly a tribute to busi­ness teacher and FBLA advisor Rob Moore. Moore has been FBLA advisor in Dayton for 27 years and has taken a generation of Day­ton students to regional, state and national FBLA competitions.

The opportunity for our local students to learn about business and to gain self-confi­dence while presenting themselves in front of large groups of students from around the state and the nation is priceless.

In Waitsburg on Monday, Waitsburg High's number one Knowledge Bowl team took second place in the regional competi­tion and qualified for the state champion­ships on March 22 in Arlington, Wash. They won a close match against Dayton to take that spot.

Knowledge bowl is a trivia game, sort of. But it makes Jeopardy look like a kiddie game. Dena Wood's story on Page 5 gives the details.

Brad Green has been coaching Waits­burg's KB teams for many years and, like Moore, has seen his students excel at re­gional and state competitions.

We salute Rob Moore and Brad Green and all of the students who put in many hundreds of hours to prepare for these competitions. They don't draw the crowds that football or basketball teams do, but they sharpen skills they'll use for the rest of their lives.