Falcons excel at History Bowl nationals, participate in concurrent competitions as well

April 29, 2019 — by Jeffrey Xu

The Saratoga History Bowl A team places 14th at the national competition held in Washington, D.C.

The Varsity History Bowl A Team, consisting of juniors Grant Chen, Jason Hong and Jeffrey Ma and senior Kiran Rachamallu, took 14th place at the National History Bowl Competition held from April 26-28 in Washington, D.C.

The B Team, consisting of juniors Sean Chen, Vincent Cheng, Mathew Luo and Shivam Mani and senior Anuj Changavi, fell short of making the playoffs due to a 2-3 record in the morning bracket and 4-1 in the afternoon middle bracket.

The JV team, consisting of freshman Derek Hsu, Henrik Zhang, Bora Alaybeyi, Dhruv Singh and Joshua Feng and sophomores Nirmik Tambe and Winston Liu, went 3-2 in morning and made upper bracket despite losing a tiebreaker. Went 1-4 upper bracket They didn’t make playoffs.

The A team, which went undefeated 5-0 in both their morning and afternoon brackets, entered the playoff as the No. 2 seed.

However, the Falcons lost in playoff round one to the Poolesville High School team from Maryland, dropping around 10 seeds. They then won against Richard Montgomery, last year’s second place team, followed by a loss to Auburn from Washington and a loss to the Pioneers from San Jose.

On top of National History Bowl, several other competitions being hosted at the time included Geography Bee, Geography Olympiad, U.S. History Bee, National History Bee and Sports and Entertainment Bee.

Cheng and Oaklander both participated in both of the geography events in the varsity division but did not make playoffs.

The Falcons attending the event were chaperoned by Biology teacher Lisa Cochrum and the school nurse Janet Verson.

“Overall, we finished around what our initial rank was, so I was satisfied by our performance, especially upsetting national champion Beavercreek and Richard Montgomery, who was seeded third going into the tournament and finished second last year,” Rachamallu said.

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