Over these past few years, the Hayfield Latin Club has grown immensely. Not just the size of the club, but also their accomplishments. Starting in the pre-covid era, the Latin Club wasn’t really at the forefront or considered a strong competitor. But that started to change during online learning.

“ Since there weren’t any other extracurricular or other things happening we suddenly had all this free time that we could spend studying and having time to prepare.” Senior Alexander Molina(12) said.

That’s when they started to dominate Certamen, a jeopardy-style game where teams with a maximum of four students compete against each other in different levels and categories. Hayfield currently has five teams.

“Last year my intermediate team was nearly undefeated except for their first tournament and was often the strongest team in the state.” Latin Teacher Nadia Ghosheh said. 

But it wasn’t only the intermediate team that was dominating the competition, the level 1 team and the advanced team were also racking in the points.

 “Coming out of last year it felt the whole hayfield program had taken a turn.” Ghosheh said.

Alexander Molina, Nathan Grunkemeyer, Jordan Kirkpatrick, and Annabelle Huang the level 2 team got 7th at the national level after putting in thousands of hours of work. The last time that there was a team made up of entirely public school kids from Virginia, was back in the ’80s.

Not only that, but after this year’s Latin convention the Hayfield Latin Club came back with 64 awards. With Alexander Molina winning the Spirit of JCL( Junior Classical League) award. A teacher nominated award that emphasizes people who have put a lot of effort into Latin as a whole, is then reviewed by the board, and the winner is announced at the convention. A well-deserved award for all the hours and effort that has been put into building the Latin team this year. This last year has been all about growing the newly rebuilt Latin program. And since then the program’s growth has spread. The after-school Latin club has over 40 members currently, and now that Ms.G and the Latin students have rebuilt the Latin program, they can enjoy the fruits of their labor and go even further.