At Hershey High sports often steal the headlines, but there’s more to HHS than athletics.

With championships at the district and state level, it might be understandable to think that HHS is a sports focused high school.  However, HHS boasts a number of accomplished academic clubs as well including: Model UN, Brain Busters, Robotics and Science Olympiad.

Hershey High School’s Model United Nations Club attended the Susquehanna Valley Model UN, a regional highschool conference, on December 13th where Hershey brought home two awards. This club has been showing a trend of success, winning at least two awards per conference they’ve attended in the past five, and has gone thoroughly unnoticed. 

Brain Busters, another academic club focusing on random trivia questions, won their first competition of the year as well, also going mostly unnoticed. Overall, Hershey High Schools academic clubs have not been getting nearly as much credit as the athletic department in their successes.

Brain Busters member Joey Owsley said, “I think it’s pretty early on in the competition to say, but I think it’s more difficult for people to watch our competitions since we’re more in a recording studio than a sports field. I still hope that everyone is able to get on YouTube and check it out though.” 

Vice President of Model UN Mia Caldonetti would like more students to join the club. 

“I didn’t expect the club to be popular,” said Caldonetti, “but I just wish more people knew about it and that we have a good team that they can be a part of,” said Caldonetti. 

Both Robotics Club and Science Olympiad have had immense success not only recently, but dating back several years. Hershey’s Robotic Club were finalists in a world championship and were able to win all of four of their off season competitions as well as over 103 wins in 2022. Similarly, the Science Olympiad was able to make it to states last year.

Students are sent a Bulletin daily via email which lists all the sports teams that will be competing that day. If academic competitions and clubs were listed as well, this might help to spread awareness. 

Social media also plays a large role. With many students having an active social media presence, clubs and organizations could gain more awareness by creating and maintaining accounts with information about what they do.

Caldonetti said, “We are an academic based school, we have many graduates that go into IVY League schools, we should create more awareness for Derry Township’s main focus.”