JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

The Franklin County Odyssey of the Mind team members (from left) Rachael Hallock, Alyson Garst and Graham White listen to Kathy Hixson (center) during a practice last week. Fellow teammate Kasey Davis (right) looks on.

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Last year, a group of Franklin County students finished second to a team from China in the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competition.

This year, the same Franklin County High School team is again headed to the finals with their eyes on the top prize ... and the pins.

The competition is a month away, and the seven high schoolers don't seem a bit nervous. They're excited, reworking a skit into a musical. What they're mostly looking forward to, they say, is not the prospect of becoming the world champions, but pin trading. Teams, states and countries have sets of decorative pins to represent where they come from, and trading the pins encourages the participants, third-graders through college students, to mingle, meet new people and make friends -- but it can get a bit competitive.

"It's like our money," said Odyssey team member, Kathy Hixson, a 17-year-old Franklin County senior.

Before getting to the pin-trading stage, however, the team had to win the regional and state competitions. In addition to the skit, their long-term project involved building a structure out of balsa wood that could weigh no more than 18 ounces (that's less than a handful of paperclips) and hold as much weight as possible. Their record this year is 731 pounds.

Tyler Price, another 12th-grader and the team's resident balsa builder, tries to make a test structure every week or two. It takes him about seven hours to build one, but he gets the most satisfaction when the balsa is crushed by what he hopes is as much as 800 pounds of Olympic weights.

"If you [build them] as much as I do, you pretty much fall in love with it," the 18-year-old said. "People think it's crazy that I put that much time in it just to demolish it, but I enjoy it."

Price was literally born into a family of OM competitors on the eve of his sister's first competition. All four of his siblings have participated in OM, and Price's mom, Bonnie Price, is in her 11th year of coaching.

"In our family, it's just something you do," he said.

But not all the team members are so acclimated to the OM universe. Kathy is headed to the world finals for the third time, but had never competed before becoming part of a state-winning team her sophomore year. Many of her teammates have been in the competition since elementary school, though, including junior Rachael Hallock, who moved to Franklin County from upstate New York and joined the team last year.

After making her way through tryouts, she quickly became part of the team "family."

"We wind up spending a whole lot of time together, and we're really close," agreed her teammate and governor's school classmate Alyson Garst.

Kathy and Price are also governor's school students, and each of the students participates in after-school activities -- the team boasts band members, actors, singers, builders and the school's yearbook editor.

Their wide range of interests is what their coach says keeps them going strong.

"It's really the team that has a combined talent that is the best because you can put the artistic quality with the technical ability," Bonnie Price said. "That's where you get the really good teams."