Belmont High's Economics Team Takes Second in State Championships

There are some great rivalries in Boston: Yankees and Red Sox, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, Jesuits and Franciscans.

Now you can add one more: Belmont High School and Phillips Andover Academy. The topic? Economics.

For the third year in a row, the two schools ended up in the finals of the Massachusetts State Economics Challenge, a nationwide contest sponsored by the Council for Economic Education. 

The stakes of winning are quite high: for the past two years, the Massachusetts champs hasve gone on to win the national championships in New York.

Last year in May, a team from Belmont High – John Lazenby, Robbie Gibson, Ben Goodman and Evan Green – easily became economics champs as it romped through the competition.

But there will be no return trip to the Big Apple for the Marauders to defend their title, as Phillips Andover beat out Belmont in the finals of the state championships on Tuesday, April 9 at the contest held at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. 

Belmont – made up of juniors Anna Hillel, Lingene Yang, Amy Zhang and Ziling Zhou – had the distinction of being the only team to achieve a perfect score during the preliminary macroeconomic section where teams were given a scenario/case study of a macroeconomic situation and wrote a one-to-two page analysis and policy proposal in a pre‐set time period.  

But the team lost to Phillips Andover during the quiz bowl section where speed is a great asset.