Just like last year, the Quiz Bowl team is practicing online to simulate what the real competition will be like in the coming months. The club’s president, junior Anthony Wang, said the team is also still trying to secure an adviser.
In Quiz Bowl, competitors from two teams try to buzz in as quickly as possible to answer questions about history, literature, science, current events and more, as clues of decreasing difficulty are steadily revealed.
For example, a question relating to history could be: “This man was forced to surrender Fort Necessity, which led to the Braddock expedition. This general was criticised by Thomas Conway after failing to defend against the (*) Philadelphia Campaign, and he surprised Hessian soldiers at the Battle of Trenton after he crossed the Delaware River. For 10 points, name this first President of the United States.”
Each sentence is read one at a time, in decreasing order of difficulty, such that a participant would have an easier time answering the question after hearing the last sentence versus the first. If a participant answers the question correctly before the marked “(*),” they get extra points.
During online club practices, all members gather in one Discord voice channel, while a selected moderator, typically an officer, reads out questions from a packet of the moderator’s choice. Club members “ping” the reader of the packet on Discord to answer questions instead of hitting a physical buzzer.
Typically, a Quiz Bowl team consists of around four to six members. However, only four participants are allowed to play at once, so teams usually have around one to two students as substitutes. Tournaments can often go over six hours, so substitute players are beneficial to helping the team perform better.
Wang hopes to continue the team’s past success: The team placed top 30 in the High School National Championship Tournament both last year and in 2019 (it was canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic).
“In previous years, we’ve had really good placements,” Wang said. “This year, I think we can continue that because we have a pretty strong team.”
Freshman Shaan Janardhan joined Quiz Bowl this year and has enjoyed the few novice practices he has participated in. Janardhan said that he doesn’t mind the online environment of practices.
“I’ve always loved trivia, and I thought that Quiz Bowl would be a great place to apply it,” Janardhan said. “I’m really excited for my first competition, and I hope I can do many more throughout the year.”
Quiz Bowl is the first buzzer-based academic competition Janardhan has participated in, and he hopes to make it to the competitive team in his junior year.
Wang said that the team plans on participating in the four year California cups, the NorCal Quiz Bowl competition and the October California fall novice tournament.
Though Quiz Bowl competitions are a high-stress environment, since a player must constantly be ready to answer questions at a split-second notice, Wang is hopeful that the team’s freshmen members will be able to quickly adjust to the format of Quiz Bowl. Besides Wang, other members of the team include sophomore Simarya Ahuja, juniors Adam Xu, Nithya Krishna, Nilay Nishra and senior Aahaan Singh.
“The freshmen are very new, and you don’t expect them to be amazing,” Wang said. “But I expect them to improve a lot over the course of the year.”