The Fairfield Prep hockey team has nothing to worry about. The Prep catapult team won't eclipse its limelight anytime soon.

Both neon yellow softballs fired from Prep's 4-by-3-foot wooden catapult fell far short of the mark Tuesday during the 24th annual Connecticut State Latin Day held at Holiday Hill in Cheshire.

No matter — the five-member Prep Latin team led by sophomore Lawson Kurtz, 16, of Westport, professed to be in it merely for the competition.

On a day when 2,000 students from 69 middle and high schools across the state helped shake a dead language awake, Connecticut Latin Day had something for everyone.

For Chris Audie, 16, of Ansonia, there was the chance to model a Roman legionnaire costume made out of overlapping metal strips pinned together with chain links. "It taught me why legionnaires wore certain types of armor," said Audie, a sophomore at Notre Dame of West Haven.

For Tom Keane, 16, a Prep junior from Fairfield, it was a morning spent checking out the competition in the chariot pit. He was draped in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bedsheet.

"It's a lot of fun," said Keane, who took Latin because he was tired of French and had no desire to learn Spanish. Plus, Spanish doesn't come with its own day.

For Rebecca Schutzengel, 13, of Stratford, it was a chance to wile away the morning creating a Roman bracelet, a sculpture and a mosaic, outside on a picnic bench.

Inside the main pavilion, a waxed tablet Schutzengel entered in the projects competition placed first in the civilizations category. Students in ancient times carved notes into such tablets, then smoothed out the wax for reuse, thus saving a papyrus tree or two, said Schutzengel, an eighth-grader at Hopkins School in New Haven.

In the same category, Henry Hernandez, a Trumbull High student, placed second. Another Trumbull student, Zoe Eisenberg, placed first in calligraphy, and Henni Cottle of Trumbull placed third in sculpture.

Laura Guadagnoli, Trumbull High's Latin teacher, took 24 of her 35 level I and II Latin students to Latin Day.

"They are so enthusiastic about this," she said, even about academic competitions. However, a near-disaster struck when Trumbull High's chariot flew off the back of a pickup on the Merritt Parkway last week, necessitating speedy last-minute repairs.

The theme of the day was "Lingua Latina: Vox Populorum,"