When high school senior Nathan Teaney appeared last week in a photograph taken by the local newspaper, his father suspected the scene had been staged as a prank.

“I think he planned it out as just kind of a joke with his friends,” Ron Teaney told the Peoria Journal Star, part of the USA TODAY Network. “Now, what he didn’t realize was that the media was going to be there.”

Nathan Teaney, 17, said the idea of taking textbooks to a prom began as a joke. But it did not take the senior at Illinois' East Peoria Community High School long to decide that studying for an upcoming Advanced Placement Computer Science test would be prudent.

A member of East Peoria's tennis team, Teaney has been juggling his athletic schedule with college placement tests and final exam preparation. With the schedule he is keeping, study time was at a premium.

“I feel it did help relieve some stress by knocking out test preparation and prom in the same night,” he said. “That ... morning and afternoon, I had been busy with a tennis tournament down in Springfield, so I was in quite a rush.”

Nathan Teaney has apparently been quite successful in balancing athletics with academic achievement. According to his father, Nathan was recently named a winner of a National Merit Scholarship. He plans to attend the University of Texas at Dallas and to major in Actuarial Science.

“Nathan is very fortunate to be in a class with a group of friends who are positively competitive and really supportive of each other,” Ron Teaney said. “They’re a really good group.”

Teaney attended the prom with a group of friends who help drive him toward academic excellence — which meant there was no date upset about being neglected for a computer science textbook. He said he is not usually in the habit of studying at social gatherings.

“I’d say that most of the people who saw me studying," Nathan Teaney said, "were amused, confused, or a mixture of both."