NATCHEZ — The path to state championship success led through many late night trials for the Cathedral Science Olympiad team.

The team brought home the state championship trophy Saturday after competing in the Mississippi Science Olympiad on the University of Southern Mississippi campus in Hattiesburg.

The high school team won four gold medals, three silver medals and eight bronze medals during the event.

As state champions, they will travel on May 19-20 to Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, to compete against the nation’s best team in the Science Olympiad National Tournament.

Cathedral’s middle school team placed fourth in the middle school competition.

In the state Science Olympiad teams compete in 25 science challenges, ranging from chemistry and biology to physics and technology.

The Cathedral high school team placed in the top 10 in all but one event.

“I am incredibly proud of all of the students who put in many, many hours of work,” Science Olympiad coach and science teacher Denise Thibodeaux said Monday.

The four seniors on the team of 16 students said they were also glad to see their many hours of trial and error pay off.

“None of the seniors left before 9 p.m. for a solid three weeks,” Carmen Serio said.

Serio and her partner Miranda Allen spent many hours, through trial and error, building towers out of thin pieces of balsa wood until they found the right shape that would hold up a bucket of sand. Each tower took more than 6 hours to build, Serio said.

Meanwhile team members, Miller Downer and Emily Hootsell were building and rebuilding robot arms and hovercraft.

Both contraptions took the gold medal in their respective event.

The hovercraft was one of 10 new events the team had to prepare for between their regional win and the state competition.

“It was difficult because it was completely different and completely new,” Downer said.

The senior joked the small tissue box shaped hovercraft made out of a fan, four 9-volt batteries, tape and Styrofoam was powered by “magic.” But when forced to describe how the box levitated a couple millimeters off the floor, Downer began to tell how the air flows in and around the device.

“Most of it was trial and error, modify and test,” Hootsell said.

“It was a million trials and a million errors before you found the right one,” Allen said of her electric car project that all of the projects the team built.

Thibodeaux said the Science Olympiad became a community event for the entire school.

School alumni and faculty offered advice and guidance for many of the projects, including the robot arm that could pick up stacks of pennies and then lay them out side-by-side on a bullseye.

“We had alumni Facetiming students after hours and coming in and help students at night,” Thibodeaux said.  “Other teachers offered words of encouragement and inspiration.”

“I was very proud of how the whole school came together.”

Other high school team members were Alex Dale, Hayes Daly, Markayla Fleming, Samuel Frieberger, Mallory Hinson, Fisher Iseminger, Hannah Jenkins, Damira McGruder, Piper Mophett, Daphne Sullivan, Emma Thibodeaux and Will Vaughan.