 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
Texas Tech's Meat Science Academic Team is bringing home the bacon.
The team won the 2007 national championship at the 60th annual Reciprocal Meats Conference at South Dakota State University, according to a press release from the Office of Communications and Marketing.This is the team's third national championship in six years.
The competition was a quiz show format where a moderator asked questions and then the teams buzzed in to answer. Despite the fact that questions ranged from meat quality to USDA regulations, biochemistry to imports and exports, and everything in between, team coach Heather Rogers said the questions were mostly about topics the students had learned at Tech.
"All of the students are involved in Meat Science," she said. "Most of them are in the Meat Science track, so they've taken classes on the material the questions covered. We also read journals, textbooks and studied current events."
The team members were extremely confident going into the competition, said Travis O'Quinn, a senior animal and food sciences major from League City.
"We worked about two and a half months at probably 10 hours a week," he said, "and then we did a lot of studying on our own over the summer. We were so prepared that when the competition started, we actually felt even more confident than we had before."
Tech's two three-person teams began the competition strong, neither losing a round until they faced each other. The team of Megan Mitchell, Travis Chapin and Austin Voyles came out on top, with O'Quinn, Landi Woolley and Matt Sellers falling into the consolation bracket. Because it was a double-elimination competition, each team had to lose twice to be out of the contest.
The Mitchell, Chapin and Voyles team lost one of their rounds later, leaving both teams in the consolation bracket. Winning their way through the consolation bracket, the two teams eventually faced each other once again, and this time O'Quinn, Woolley and Sellers won. They ended up competing against Angelo State University in the finals and emerged victorious.
"It wasn't really like two teams," O'Quinn said. "It wasn't like one Tech team won and the other Tech team lost. It's just a matter of formality. If all six of us could have been on one team, we would have. We consider ourselves all one team. The Tech team won."
Rogers noted that combined the teams only lost three rounds.
"Two of our losses were to our own team," she said. "It really was a group win."
In the six-year history of the competition, Tech has won three national titles - in 2003, 2005, and now 2007.
"It felt really good," O'Quinn said. "It means a lot that Tech has a commitment to excellence. It's good to be at a school that wants to succeed.
Be the first to comment on this article!