The Quiz Bowl team hosted a varsity meet on Wednesday, Oct. 26 in which nine varsity teams participated. 

Plenty behind the scenes preparation went into getting ready to host the Quiz Bowl meet. According to Quiz Bowl head coach Landra Fair began writing questions and reaching out to other schools as the first steps in putting on the tournament. 

“We invited 20 [schools] and all said and done, nine came up,” Fair said. “I had to write 11 rounds of questions.” 

The students themselves were able to pick out questions using various books which had to be fact checked before they were used.

Since the activity itself is based around answering questions, the content within rounds really matters. Varsity member senior Madison Koester believes that this is what separates this meet from last year. 

“One of the biggest differences was probably getting different harder questions because I think this year we’re hosting a varsity meet while last year we hosted a JV [meet],” Koester said. “Questions for JV are more things that sophomores in freshmen would be learning.”  

Despite hiccups, which included having to change rooms after discovering the rooms  intended for use were unavailable and originally not having enough pizza, the Quiz Bowl team was able to adapt quickly. Fair felt in the end the tournament was successful.

“There were really no issues that I heard about; everything seemed to go quite smoothly,”
Fair said. “The teams had a clear winner and the questions were not too easy or not too hard.”

Overall, the students played a major role in the tournament doing everything from being  score keepers, to buzzer people.

Freshman Ian Weatherman had the role of buzzer person while helping to host the Quiz Bowl meet for his first time. Weatherman learned a lot about what it takes to run a meet.

“I was kind of disappointed when I realized that because we’re hosting we aren’t allowed to participate in the meet.” Weatherman said. “Also, it’s a lot of pizza that you need to host a meet and I didn’t know that.”

Looking into the future, Fair hopes to improve scheduling and general organization to help combat the chaotic energy, but was very content with how the team was able to come together and have a successful night at this tournament. 

“I was proud of the student helpers,” Fair said. “They just really stepped up and did such a great job of running everything, setting everything up and organizing it and being professional. They’re just great kids.”