![The cross country team poses for the camera after finishing the district meet. The varsity boys, JV boys and JV girls all placed third and the varsity girls placed fourth. “Coach put in the right training for us for this season, so I think we will be peaking this week and the next couple of weeks,” varsity runner and junior Nathan Kukla said. “The chances of making it to state are very high, but we don’t settle for the lowest and there is always going to be that chance, so [we] race for the best.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Heidi-831-1200x900.jpg)
![Sucking in a breath of air, freshman Lily Pope competes in the 200 yard individual medley. On Oct. 25, the swim team competed in the AISD Swim Invitational. Overall, the girls team took second place and the boys team came in eleventh. “My favorite stroke is butterfly because I do the best in that stroke,” Pope said. “I feel like [butterfly] can test how [your ability] to convince yourself to keep going. The hardest part of swimming is convincing yourself to stay strong and keep pushing during a hard race [when] everything is tired.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/POPE-1200x804.jpg)
![Smiling at the camera, Author Ehigbor Okosun, members of Page Turners, and other students reflect on the author's visit. “I thought the visit was great,” Senior Amia De Leon said. “It was interesting talking to her and [getting to know] her process and her thoughts and books in general. But I think the reason it went well [was that] people got to ask questions. I'm glad that she said so much in response to the questions and it wasn't just one and done. [The author’s responses] felt very articulate.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Sebastian-5-1200x800.jpg)
![Standing in front of the field at a freshman football game, cheerleader freshman Jacob Gaudreau along with teammate freshman Bella Gibson pose for a photo during halftime of game. “[Cheer has] definitely given me a much more outgoing personality,” Gaudreau said. “I used to be very introverted, so it's definitely made me more extroverted towards people.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Ingrid-204-1200x800.jpg)
![Holding a wooden pizza toy, senior Taylor Peterson plays with small children in Bucaramanga, Colombia. During the summer, Peterson traveled to Colombia to help build an elementary school that only had two classrooms but five or six grades with one teacher. “We add[ed] two more classrooms,” Peterson said. “It’s kind of hard when you have two or three grades in one classroom and you only have one teacher. It’s very hard to actually get some beneficial learning. [The extra classrooms will give the students] a better quality of education because they’ll actually have a place specific for their learning.” Photo by Taylor Peterson](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Taylor-P.png)
![Swinging with his arm extended, senior Nolan Park hits the ball smoothly over the net and to the opponent’s side. Park is one of four varsity tennis captains and helped the team win district championships. “Winning district champs was a pretty awesome feeling,” Park said. “We had lost to Liberty Hill a couple of weeks before, but when we played them [again], we came out and really took care of business. We took them out and it was just a really awesome night.”](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Kassidy-419.jpg)
![Standing proud, varsity senior athletes Rafael Escobar, Griffin Jacobs, Jakob Martin, and juniors Jackson Springer and Jack Morris pose with their newly earned medals. The varsity team finished third out of 14 teams on Sept. 25. “The team's primary goal is to win the district championship,” head coach Cody Price said. "We're confident that with our action plan in place, we can accomplish this mission. [For the next tournament], our preparation involves assessing our strengths and weaknesses, celebrating milestones and creating individual development plans." Photo courtesy of Cody Price](https://cphswolfpack.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/golf.jpg)
13 Students Win Scholastic Art Awards
Art Students Recognized in Scholastic Art and Writing Awards
February 4, 2019
Art students earn Gold Keys, Silver Keys and Honorable Mentions from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
This year, the Austin Texas Art Region received nearly 1700 individual submissions for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards that were then judged by a panel of creative professionals on Saturday, Jan. 12. The following students received recognition in the form of a gold key, a silver key or an honorable mention.
Megan Bonsall (11)
Title: Serene
Category: Photography
Award: Silver Key
“My inspiration for the piece was my favorite photographer, Ansel Adams, who is a nature photographer,” Bonsall said. “I really wanted to incorporate his calming nature elements into portraiture. I feel like the setting and coloring of the photo helped me create a strong serene feeling.”
Sydney Deen (11)
Title: Shade
Category: Photography
Award: Honorable Mention
“Lately, I’ve been really fascinated with the idea of intimacy, and how that translates both physically and emotionally, and that was sort of the direction I went with my photo,” Deen said. “This piece is fairly significant in my development as a photographer. I’ve never really felt confident in my learning curve or my ability in photography, but this photo really surprised me with how it worked out.”
Faith Elliott (11)
Titles: The Hands We Hold, Faces of Rwanda
Category: Photography
Awards: Honorable Mention, Silver Key
“What’s important to me about my piece is how it captures a small amount of the beauty and joy in Rwanda and brings it back to the US,” Elliott said. “I feel super lucky to have had the opportunity to photograph people of Rwanda. It’s such an amazing country [and] it’s impossible to visit and not fall in love with the country and people.”
Diana Gutierrez (12)
Title: Insecure Identity
Category: Photography
Award: Gold Key
“I guess the whole ‘brown paper bag to hide your insecurities’ trope is what initially inspired me to create my piece,” Gutierrez said. “I really like my photo because it’s engaging in the sense that it’s trying to tell you something. The room itself is a mess, but the lovely dappling sunlight coming from the window really reveals the room’s appeal. This piece is important to me because it shows the audience who I am throughout the little details.”
Hyunjun Jeon (12)
Title: Tibetan Dyes
Category: Drawing and Illustration
Award: Silver Key
“I didn’t have an inspiration, to be honest,” Jeon said. “It was an exploration of color with more important details. When you look at it it’s really intricate how the colors blend together and create like different shapes.
Natalia Peck (11)
Title: Mani.
Category: Photography
Award: Honorable Mention
“I don’t really have an inspiration, but I knew that I wanted to do something with depth,” Peck said. “The importance of the piece to me is that it’s a door from a childhood place that’s special to me.
Ryan Sawicki (11)
Title: Play
Category: Photography
Award: Honorable Mention
“I was inspired by the feeling of nostalgia, because almost everyone can remember playing in a playground as a child so I wanted to create a picture that invoked that feeling,” Sawicki said. “It was important that I made something everyone could understand and relate to, but also something that was visually interesting and different.”
Amelia Tapia (11)
Title: Garden of Eden
Category: Photography
Award: Honorable Mention
“The one thing that I love about photography is that you can truly have total control over how your picture comes out,” Tapia said. “It was important to me that I truly portrayed the essence of the person photographed. On the other hand, I wanted my submission to be something I was proud of and, in the end, the photo definitely was.”
Dylan Glauser (11)
Title: Cells and Veins
Category: Ceramics and Glass
Award: Honorable Mention
“My biggest inspiration for that piece would be this artist called Clint Ferguson,” Glauser said. “He does a lot of really geometric pieces and he is also inspired a lot by biology and cells. The subtractive work I did on the piece I actually did with a needle.”
Kelsey Jones (12)
Title: Taking Root
Category: Ceramics and Glass
Award: Gold Key
“This was my first time ever working with the brown clay so it was a really exciting thing for me,” Jones said. “I didn’t really have an exact idea for this piece when I first started it. I knew the shape that I wanted the vase to be but I had no further ideas after that. Once it was built, I realized that a more natural design would look better with the brown clay.”
Tomas Spratt (12) 
Title: Narrow Mouth Vase
Category: Ceramics and Glass
Award: Honorable Mention
Lindsey Elford (11)
Category: Ceramics and Glass
Titles: Jane Doe, Green Tea Set
Awards: Gold Key, Honorable Mention
“I love working with clay because I’m able to start a piece without much of a plan and build off of that with whatever I’m feeling,” Elford said. “I didn’t sketch what I wanted the end pieces to look like because I wanted to go with whatever came to my mind at the moment.”
Abby Teicher (12)
Titles: Southern King, Multiplied
Category: Ceramics and Glass
Awards: Honorable Mention, Gold Key
“For my honorable mention piece, I was inspired by my trip to Colorado and Santa Fe so I decided to incorporate some of the culture and other things I saw and experienced while I was there,” Teicher said. “For my gold key piece, I had nothing to really go off of but I knew I didn’t want to stick to the normal shaped everyone else is doing. I decided to make my own blobs and that’s how the bowl was formed.”
Gold key pieces are currently being reviewed at a national level in New York City by a panel of creative evaluators. National medalists selected by these panels will be announced Feb. 1.
