Each member of team ‘A Good Few Pounds’ held a rope in their hands, preparing to tie a knot as quickly and accurately as they could at the Tech Olympics, April 3. The team, made up of Taylor Young (10), Sara Butman (10), Maya Tse (10), and Rebecca Azcona (12), placed first place overall in this year’s Westview’s Tech Olympics.
The Tech Olympics, hosted by Westview, intend to bring students passionate in theatre and tech from all over PUSD together to apply their tech skills in a friendly competition.
The idea was inspired by a discontinued Tech Olympics that included schools from all over Southern California. After years of wanting to have a form of team bonding between students in tech, Westview revived that concept through their own spin on the competition. Westview used to attend the CETA Festival however, they discontinued the Tech Olympics and Westview stopped attending the event.
‘A Good Few Pounds’ competed in various events such as tool relay, costume quick change, and knot tying—which was the event the team was most prepared for. The team spent the night before tying knots on call and even practiced the morning of the competition.
The team was notified of who they would be grouped with only a week before the competition. Butman said everyone had dedicated a lot of time to practicing and had a lot of fun along the way.
“To me, I was just having so much fun,” Butman said. “We studied our knots, and we had quizzlets about tool identification. The night before, we were on Facetime [practicing], and it was a blast.”
According to Butman, knot tying became one of the most enjoyable events due to the extensive preparation. It was what ‘A Good Few Pounds’ had spent a lot of their effort on and seeing it all pay off made them feel amazing with a view of their time.
“I really like knot tying because I studied it so much,” Butman said. “I was like, ‘I have this one. I know that we have this one. We’re prepared.’ The second [Young] hit the button and [I] saw 29 seconds flat, I was ascending. [There were] zero mistakes. We crushed that and [I] just [got] that feeling of, ‘Oh my God, we did it, it paid off.’”
Tse said the event also served as a way for people to get a glimpse into how difficult the fast-paced nature of tech can be.
“I think specifically for Tech Olympics, it shows how intense tech is,” Tse said. “Although this specific event is a competition against other schools, it reflects what we do in actual productions where we’re racing against the clock. If something goes wrong in the middle of the show, we have to be able to quickly adapt and fix whatever problems there are.”
Butman said the sense of community within all the teams superseded the competitiveness.
“[There was] a lot of clapping, a lot of high fives and cheering,” Butman said. “It’s a great sense of camaraderie among theater, we’re all theater kids at the end of the day. We all know what it’s like to go through this process.”
For ‘A Good Few Pounds,’ the Tech Olympics offered an opportunity to highlight their skills while exercising their passions.
“I think we’re just super competitive, our company is really strong in tech,” Butman said. “We know this, and we have awesome resources, we have a great setup, and we have people who are really passionate about what they do. For the tech people, this was awesome to be able to rally around this thing that we all love doing, and that we’re good at.”
