Scholars Bowl is a competition in which two teams compete head-to-head to answer trivia style questions in various topics of academia. Despite the difficulty of this activity, very few people see the time and effort these students put into refining their knowledge and preparing for intellectual warfare.
Senior Josh Lin explained that the team meets 4 times a week to hold hour-long practices. Each practice is mainly spent drilling content they will see in competition.
“Typically we run through questions, which is basically just all the subjects. So math, science, social studies, language arts, world language, we have like an ‘other’ section and then we have fine arts,” Lin said. “If we want to do well, like even outside of practice, this is going to be something where just practicing isn’t good [enough]. Some of it is literally rote memorization.”
However, due to the unpredictable nature of the activity, the team’s results can vary.
“It does come down to, a lot of times, the food that is served at the competition, it makes an impact,” senior Jakob Kuehnen joked. “Sometimes we do pretty poorly, sometimes we do pretty well. But we always have a good time, and that’s what matters.”
The team will begin competing with other schools this month. Lin briefly explained the setup of their competitions.
“Typically they’re like Jeopardy style questions where it’s just stuff that you’ve probably learned in school, be it your classes or otherwise,” Lin said. “As a team, it’s important to [answer] fast for sure, but we typically like to at least mouth what we’re going to answer, see if somebody either heavily disagrees or heavily agrees and then we go for it.”
As the season progresses, the number of competitions begins to increase rapidly.
“When we get into big event, which is typically like January, we can have like two or three [competitions] a week,” Lin said.
Even though the activity can be demanding, senior Garrett Ledford explained that you don’t have to have any prior experience in competitions of the sort.
“This is my second year, I did it junior year,” Ledford said. “I just kind of showed up and they were like, ‘here you go!’ I knew that you press buttons and then answer some kind of questions.”
Ledford shared one his favorite memories from his time on the Scholars Bowl team.
“One time Jakob Kuehnen answered a question… The way the question was worded was like, ‘what is the name of ribosomes that are free?’ and he answered ‘free ribosomes’ and he was right. It was fantastic,” Ledford said.
Although his luck has been a valuable asset for the team, Kuehnen also aids the team with his expertise in foreign languages.
“One of my more specialized functions has been the foreign language piece of it, because there’s some lacking in our French department.” Kuehnen said. “But then also, just like some of the general stuff that we get from our core classes. Me and Josh [Lin] kind of work together and cover a lot of ground that way.”
Kuehnen gave praise to the sponsor of the team Julie Miller, and how she runs the activity.
“Ms. Miller does a good job of managing us because she kind of lets us do our own thing to a large extent. But also, when she needs to step in, she steps in,” Kuehnen said. “She’s not as motivated by success as some other members of our team are. She cares about the team, but at the end of the day I think she’s just worried about us having a good time.”
