Week after week, junior twins Nathan and Brendan Ney run through set after set of history, trivia and science questions, mentally preparing themselves for the competitions that lie ahead. Working extra hours to memorize the last pieces of information such as facts on American History, the Ney brothers are part of some of the most challenging and competitive clubs on campus.

The twins compete in a variety of bowls at school. With Nathan competing in History Bowl, Quiz Bowl and Science Bowl and Brendan competing in Science Bowl, the brothers collectively do almost every bowl offered at the school.

Nathan, who participates in the lesser known Quiz Bowl team, describes it as being similar to History Bowl but with a more general variety of questions.

“There are 20 questions every round. These are tossups, and if you get them right you get three bonuses,” Nathan said. “[Quiz bowl] is about literature, science and a variety of other general topics.”

Nathan said that the bowls he partakes in are fun because of the people he meets and the topics he learns. He enjoys the challenge of remembering large amounts of facts and testing to see how well he learned everything.

Not only that, but the bowls let him to travel to new places: the most notable being Washington, D.C., for the National History Bowl tournament last year.  

“Getting to know people and learning new things are things I enjoy about history bowl because there is always more to learn,” Nathan said. “Testing what you know by recalling what you know.”

Brendan, on the other hand, is part of the varsity Science Bowl team. Being on the team means specializing in a specific subject and learning everything on that topic.

“For Science Bowl you want to specialize in certain categories, because there is a bunch of different subjects,” Brendan said. “To study I would get textbooks from the library and Wikipedia articles and read through the whole thing.”

This year for Brendan, his specialized category was earth science. Although he doesn’t find it as interesting as other subjects, the experience of Science Bowl made the work worthwhile.

According to Brendan, the twins rarely help each other due to Nathan not making the A team for Science Bowl. But Brendan would still quiz his brother on random facts for history bowl by asking him questions on things he looked up.

Why do they love the bowls?

“My favorite part of participating in bowl competitions is getting to know people, learning new things because there is always more to learn and testing what you know by recalling what you know,” Nathan said.