Two Ballard school champions represented their respective schools last Friday in the Washington Geographic Bee in Tacoma.

Erik Hammarlund, an eighth-grader at Whitman Middle School, and Jasper Wensnahan, an eighth-grader at Salmon Bay School, continued each school's succession of qualifying its champion for the state-level competition.

Wensnahan was one of only 17 girls who qualified for state in this boy-dominated field of study. She and Hammarlund were each eliminated in the morning's eight-question preliminary round.

Only the top 100 school champions, as identified by the National Geographic Society, are invited to the State Bee. Of the 10 students from Seattle, two made it to the Final Round in the afternoon. A seventh-grader from West Seattle went on to place second.