Hands hovering over buzzers, four Wasatch High School students in military uniform answered obscure trivia questions asked by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Denise Harris.
“The ancient ouroboros motif shows,” Harris began, before junior Joe Grayson hit the buzzer, answering that a serpent eats its own tail.
Other questions left the quartet stumped, like when they were asked to name the novels “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf and “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe based on only a few plot details.
These four students — sophomores Hilary Palmer and Jonas Bevan and juniors Emilia Charlton and Grayson — are participants in the Leadership & Academic Bowl, a club that is part of the high school’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program, known as JROTC.
On Friday, they will be traveling to Washington, D.C., with their instructors as the only Academic Bowl team in Utah to advance to this year’s national finals at The Catholic University of America.
JROTC, an elective course with voluntary after-school clubs and service projects, uses the roleplaying of military service to instill self-discipline, civic engagement and leadership in student “cadets.”
Wasatch High School’s Air Force JROTC unit began in 2017. It’s the only one in the Wasatch Back and has about 70 cadets currently enrolled.
The elective course teaches the expected, such as the history and science of aviation, as well as other, less military-specific lessons, like how to fill out a college application, land a job interview or manage finances.
“We’re just trying to build future citizens that can affect their community in a positive way, giving them the tools to be a good human. … Learn how to be a follower. Learn how to be a team player. Learn how to be a leader,” Harris explained. “We hope they just become better people. They don’t have to become better military people, but just better people.”
Some clubs within JROTC focus on physical fitness, marksmanship or cyber security.
Meanwhile, the Academic Bowl was created to prepare students for the ACT or SAT standardized tests they take in their junior year. Cadets answer questions in categories including math, English, science, social studies, financial literacy, college readiness and current events. Math, Harris said, is always the trickiest subject.
All students in Wasatch High School’s Air Force JROTC unit take the Academic Bowl practice test at the beginning of the year, but often it is only those who performed exceptionally well who decide to join Academic Bowl.
Advancing to nationals involves making it past two rounds of tests. Sixteen Air Force/Space Force JROTC units will be advancing to nationals out of the 715 who took the first test.
These 16 teams will compete against each other this weekend to determine which will represent the Air Force in the final round against the top teams in other military branches of JROTC, including Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard.
Wasatch High School’s Academic Bowl team advanced to the national competition and got second place in the Air Force qualifier in 2022 and 2023.
“It was a race to the buzzer,” Harris said about the final tiebreaker question in the 2023 competition.
Harris and the cadets this year are hoping to take home the gold — and its prize of bragging rights. But, Harris noted, they’ve already won in a sense: Outside of souvenirs and meals, their trip was entirely paid for by the College Options Foundation, the organization that runs the Academic Bowl.
The thing that excites Grayson most about the trip is meeting other cadets from across the United States and its territories. He said he was “timid” when he joined JROTC as a freshman. Now, he’s a more confident leader — but still calls himself “antisocial and an introvert,” despite his obvious love for his teammates.
“The people, in general, are the main reasons I stick around. It’s like a second family to me,” he said.
Grayson will likely join the Army or Marines after high school.
Cadets Palmer and Bevan are also looking forward to military service.
Palmer wants to join the Air Force as a stepping stone toward becoming an anesthesiologist. Military scholarships, she hopes, will help her pay for medical school.
Palmer is the commander of the Academic Bowl team. She said JROTC has made her someone more willing to serve others, stand up for what’s right and be a leader. She recently became cheer captain, a role she doesn’t think she would have volunteered for if she hadn’t flexed her leadership muscles in JROTC.
Meanwhile, Bevan has wanted to join the Navy ever since he was a kid listening to stories from a Navy SEAL neighbor about the excitement and grueling physical training.
Additionally, Bevan’s father is a foreign service officer, meaning Bevan has lived in countries like Gabon, China and Albania for much of his life. He’s lived with his grandparents in Wasatch County since his freshman year, when his father was stationed in the Central African Republic.
“We always lived in embassies, and there were a lot of families near us (with) parents who spent time in the military or were working for the Department of Defense while working at the embassy. So, I was just surrounded by veterans or current military officers. I grew up with a lot of those people,” Bevan said.
He added that learning military protocol and ceremonies, like how to march or fold an American flag, have prepared him for what he’ll deal with in the actual military.
“I’ll be ahead of kids in the future when I do join,” he said.
Three years of JROTC service also equates to two promotions in any branch other than the Marine Corps as soon as a student enlists, according to Harris.
That’s why JROTC models the actual military as much as possible, which can be a sticking point for students and parents alike. Cadets must follow a military dress code, right down to their haircuts, and those who are even 30 seconds late to the first-period class must request permission to enter the classroom and explain why they are late.
“You’re following a system. You’re learning discipline,” Harris explained. “We’re trying to build you into a person that’s going to succeed when you leave here, so we’re taking the training wheels off.”
She said the values JROTC instills are useful no matter what career path a cadet chooses.
Charlton, for example, joined JROTC three years ago because she was dead set on becoming an FBI agent and had heard that military service would be a good gateway into that career.
She’s since changed her mind and isn’t sure what she wants to do with her career, but she’s stayed in JROTC all the same.
Charlton was a bit of a British fish out of water when her family moved from England to Utah seven years ago, all so her father could pursue his dream of becoming a ski instructor in Park City.
The culture shock first came with bathrooms being inexplicably referred to as restrooms, then, the food, and finally, her American peers, who seemed, by and large, more extroverted and bold than she was.
By the beginning of high school, she found company in literature more often than people and wasn’t sure how to prepare for the ACT or navigate the differences in university here versus in England.
JROTC helped her with all of those problems — culminating in an above average score on the ACT this year — all while giving her an outlet to express her love for literature in Academic Bowl.
“Every Tuesday, we’re answering questions and laughing,” she said. “It’s just super fun because then you’re shouting, ‘Oh, I know this answer!’ and then you’re arguing about it, and you’re just sort of making fun of each other. It’s that companionship.”