Members of the school’s Quiz Bowl A group placed second in the California Cup 1 competitive division at St. Francis High School on Oct. 27, cementing their position as one of the strongest teams in the Bay Area.

After having an 8-1 record in the preliminaries with the single loss against Escobar High School, the team moved on to playoffs where the top two teams from each of two brackets played against each other.

The A team won both of its matches against Harker and Stanford Online High School during playoffs and advanced to the finals, where they once again faced Escobar and lost 380-245.

The team’s captain, senior Kiran Rachamallu, attributed the team’s excellent performance to having strong returning players: juniors Brandon Wang, Jeffrey Ma, and Sathvik Kaliyur and Rachamallu. However, Rachamallu was still surprised by the outcome.

“We were kind of expecting it, but there were some exciting matches, and I did not expect to get second,” he said.

Playing in the competitive division, the B team had a 4-4 record at the end of preliminaries. The standard division C team had a record of 1-3 and the D and E teams, both in the novice division, had records of 1-3 and 0-5 in preliminaries.