Mill Valley is well known for its athletic championships, but some of the brightest minds represent the student body in a competition of a different kind. Scholars Bowl is an academic trivia club that competes against other schools in subjects like foreign language, language arts, science and health, social studies, mathematics, fine arts and current events.
Scholars Bowl coach, Tina Keith, started coaching the club two years ago after her son had previously been on the team.
“I love coaching Scholars Bowl,” Keith said. “It was a huge part of [my son’s] high school experience here and he found a real, cool group of peers who had a lot of the same interests, like trivia and things like that. I just enjoyed watching him do it and I was excited to have the opportunity to do it as well.”
This year, the team has seen an increase in interest from underclassmen, as Keith and Scholars Bowl coach, Stacy Miller, have taken efforts to get more students involved.
“This year, we’ve really tried to reach out to some of the freshmen and sophomores to get them to join the team,” Keith said. “We’ve grown quite a bit this year, almost to the point where we need to have two JV teams to send because we’re not getting enough rotation for our JV team members.”
Making sure each student has the opportunity to grow, learn and eventually move up to varsity is part of the team’s success. Kieth emphasized that with more students up for the challenge, the team has been very successful this season.
“We’re doing amazing,” Keith said. “Last week alone, we had two [varsity] tournaments and we took first place in both. We took third in one tournament [and] second in another. So we’re doing very, very well this year.” In particular, the team had a standout performance at De Soto’s tournament, where they took first place out of 27 teams. Then last Thursday the team went undefeated in their tournament and beat Sumner Academy.
The team’s results not only accentuate the skill that was needed for their improvement, but also emphasize the importance of commitment and teamwork.
However, the bigger the team is, the more dedication required. That means careful planning is crucial for practices and tournaments. To ensure the teams are working as efficiently as possible at meets, Keith explains how students are organized into groups based on what category they are best at.
“If you have two math people, you want to sit them close to each other, so they can work through problems together.” Keith said.
Students typically practice every Wednesday and Friday after school from 3 to 4 p.m. and study Quizlets and other trivia questions outside of school to improve on their knowledge.
During practice, junior Nadia Kindt and her team work on correcting their mistakes from previous meets as a strategy for improvement.
“We do a lot of repetitive questions and then we also take questions from past meets or questions that we got wrong from past meets and we try and run through those, because a lot of questions at different meets are very repetitive.” Kindt said.
On the day of a meet, Kindt goes over questions from past tournaments that she has personally got wrong and studies Quizlets of State Scholars Bowl questions.
However, even with hours of preparation, Kindt explains how the day of a meet can present unique challenges.
“I think the biggest struggle is that there is so much and there are so many different ways to ask a question. Even with the repetitive questions, it could be asked [or worded] in a weird way,” Kindt said.
Other struggles can even include a whole category at times according to junior Sam Bowling.
“We usually do pretty poorly on language arts [and] fine arts but it ends up being fine, but we’re really good at math and social studies, ” Bowling said. “I’m definitely best in social studies.”
The team has a few more meets before the season is over. They hope to grow on their recent success. So far the team has placed 2nd against Bonner Springs, 1st against Piper, 3rd against Eudora, 1st against De Soto and 1st against Turner.
