Rye Country Day School was the winner of the 2026 Young Physicists Tournament (YPT), an annual physics research and debate tournament for high school students. YPT was held January 31-February 1 at Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts.

The exciting win makes four YPT titles for RCDS in the 19-year history of the United States International Young Physicists' Tournament—placing the Wildcats in the top category of competitors. No other participating school has won four times to date!

The tournament’s hallmarks are "physics fights," hour-long student-led debates over the quality of each team's solution to the posed problems. The debates begin with the reporting team giving a ten-minute summary of their research on one of the four official tournament problems, and then they engage in discussion with the opponents—just as members of competing research groups at a conference might discuss a presentation.

RCDS students in the YPT course spend the year leading up to the tournament collecting data and developing theory around the tournament’s four problems. After their exploration of the published literature and testing in the lab, the RCDS team had an excellent understanding of the concepts behind each problem (listed below). 

Congratulations to the YPT team and coaches on the impressive win!

Scores after the Final Rounds
Rye Country Day School, New York 88.97
Nueva School, California 87.46
Harker School, California 86.99
Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire 86.70
Phillips Academy Andover, Massachusetts 86.66
Woodberry Forest School, Virginia 86.22

“I couldn’t be more proud of the work done by the team,” said Dr. Krasovec, an RCDS physics teacher who has been coaching the YPT team since 2012. “It was clear at the tournament that they really understood their problems, both experimentally and with theory that involved undergraduate level math and physics. It took months of effort and excellent team work to reach that point. They really earned the win.”

Dr. Angelo Bove shared, “The students performed admirably. They worked extremely hard going into the tournament and during. We also had a number of students who did not travel to the tournament but helped the team with some final experiments that turned out to be crucial to securing the win. I am also very proud of the way our students helped bring out the Science out of other teams' struggles with their compassion and smart questioning. Overall, Go, Wildcats!”

Coaches        
Dr. Mary Krasovec        
Mr. Craig Burt
Mr. Matt Stanger    
Dr. Angelo Bove
    
TEAM (by problem)

Photometry of Flash Bulbs
Michael Goneos ’27 (Travel team, Presenter)
Amy He ’27
Illaria Liedtke ’27 (Travel team)
Steven Ren ’26 (Travel team)
Shawn Wei ’26
Annabella Yu ’26

Eddy Currents and Braking Forces
Chaaranath Badrinath ’26 (Travel team, Presenter, Captain)
Niev Bhandare ’28 (Travel team)
Aarush Dey ’27
Charles Iwanski ’26 (Travel team)
Felix Mao ’27 (Travel team)
Magnus Rasmussen ’27 

Euler-Eytelwein Equation
Salvatore Bove ’26
Tyler Hadstadt ’26 (Travel team. Presenter)
Claire Jiang ’26
Xindi Liu ’26 (Travel team)
Arav Ramaswamy ’26
Cooper Wu ’26 (Travel team)
Leon Zhou ’26

Multi-Bounce Kinematics
Arjun Arora ’26
Andrew Eason ’26 (Travel team, Presenter)
Alison Gipstein ’28
Alex Gurion ’26
Xavier Perkins ’26 (Travel team)
Jason Ren ’26 (Travel team)
George Zhan ’27