What is Quizbowl?
You may see the occasional mention of the Quizbowl team in the weekly newsletter but have absolutely no clue what it is.
Taken from the Greater Pennsylvania Quizbowl Website (GPQB), Quizbowl is: “an academic competition in which two teams of students compete to buzz-in before the other team on toss-up questions and collaborate with their teammates to answer bonus questions.”
Quizbowl is basically competitive trivia – but not like the traditional Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! questions you may have experienced. The questions follow a pyramidal style of information – the clue lines given get easier and easier as the question goes on. Each question is typically 4-6 sentences long. Quizbowl requires deep interdisciplinary knowledge that allows a player to answer a multitude of questions. The categories pulled from are from almost every field of academics – the most prominent being science, literature, history, and fine arts. The following example of a question is taken from NAQT’s (National Academic Quizbowl Tournament) sample questions for regular high school difficulty:
This author wrote about Eduard [ayd-WARD], a married man whose love for the beautiful Ottilie [oh-TEEL-yeh] is compared to a chemical reaction, in the novel Elective Affinities. In another book by this author, the title character reads his own translation of the poet Ossian [AH-see-un] to a resident of (*) Wahlheim [VAHL-hyme] named Lotte [“LOT-uh”]. For 10 points—what German author wrote about a man who is driven to suicide by unrequited love in The Sorrows of Young Werther [VAIR-tair]?
answer: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [GUR-tuh]
Each round, a packet of 20 tossup questions is read to two opposing teams of 4 people. Players try to buzz in as fast as they can. If they get the question right, they get 10 points and their team gets a bonus of three additional 10 point questions. If the player buzzes in very early in the question and gets it right, they get 15 points (referring to the question above, the bold text would represent the boundaries for 15 points). If they get it wrong, 5 points are subtracted.
The team experienced relative success in the previous few years, qualifying for nationals in 2020 when they came third place at CMU’s February tournament. In 2021, the team competed against some of the country’s best teams in online tournaments, usually coming around 7th place every event. The 2022 season has been extremely successful for Central as they qualified for the national tournament at their first event. Currently, Central is ranked 2nd in the Western Pennsylvania circuit, beating out rivals Allderdice and Winchester Thurston. This is the first time in years that Central has bested the two teams.
Mr. Sweeney took leadership as the team’s coach in 2019 and remains the coach today. The team is led by senior captain Joe Stern, who is ranked 1st in individual players in Western Pennsylvania. Central boasts a strong and promising cohort of underclassmen who will definitely find success in Quizbowl in the coming years.
The Quizbowl team meets after school in the library every Friday. If you are interested in joining, please contact [email protected] or [email protected]
Joe Stern is a senior and captain of the rowing and quizbowl teams. His favorite past time activities include slamming nerds in Game Pigeon word games...
