In a race against the clock challenge, three Andover students competed in a speedcubing competition hosted by Phillips Exeter Academy (PEA). Representing Andover’s Twisty Puzzle Society (TPS), the students pulled out a placed second finish at the event.
The event was mainly organized by PEA students, with the first half of the day starting as a public tournament sanctioned by the World Cubing Association (WCA). In the afternoon, the competition shifted to an interscholastic New England Interscholastic Speedcubing League (NEISCL) event.
Daniel Chen PEA’27, the head organizer, described his motivations for the event and how he wanted to revive it from years past.
“I was part of my elementary school’s math team. There was this event called the math field day, where one of the events was an interscholastic Rubik’s Cube competition,” said Chen. “I always had this dream of hosting an interscholastic Rubik’s Cube competition. Our predecessors, [Exeter students] Brian Liu and James Wong hosted [Phillips Exeter Cube Day] in 2015 and 2016, and so we wanted to continue that legacy,” said Chen.
He continued, “I had this idea in January of my ninth grade year but then we weren’t a club yet… This is a first year event. So it can be much more formalized next year, although I do think we’ve done the best of our abilities for our first year competition.”
Robert Kong ’27, a co-head of the TPS, noted that the event was originally planned to happen last year but was delayed due to logistical difficulties. He mentioned that the purpose of the tournament was to foster community over a shared interest in speedcubing.
“We were initially planning on having this last year, but due to issues with securing a venue down at Exeter, we weren’t able to do that…[The goal was] just to have fun. Bringing people together from various different schools who have a shared passion or hobby of speedcubing…Overall, [it was] really successful. We did have a lot of fun. A lot of schools participated,” said Kong.
Another co-head of the club, Oliver Zhang ’28, mentioned the preparation process for the tournament. He noted how the team played on each other’s strengths and focused on events where teamwork mattered the most.
“We knew that our skill levels weren’t good enough to get us into the podium just by pure speed solving and all, and because the events were not only individual events, it was mostly team-based, so we spent a lot of time preparing for team solve, where it’s two people holding the same 3×3, and then one person only uses their right hand, one person only uses their left hand,” said Zhang.
He added, “We spent a lot of time practicing for that, and also 2×2 team blind, which is where the solver is blindfolded, and the teammate instructs them what to do. So we came up with our own names for different algorithm sets, and that really helped us in the competition.”.
Zihan Zhao ’28, another competitor, shared his hopes for growing the tournament moving forward. He explained how the TPS aims to make the competition a consistent part of Andover-Exeter (AE) Day and include more widely recognized events.
“This would be a recurring event annually, and maybe on AE Day in the spring, [we can] make [it] an official AE event. I would like it to have some more standard WCA events in there instead of these odd events like Team Solver. For example, Oliver and Robert did 2×2 Team Blind, where Robert was blindfolded and Oliver had to describe it to him, but I feel like we should do more conventional events,” said Zhao.
