The Quiz Bowl varsity team has significantly changed since last year. Due to nine seniors graduating, the Quiz Bowl team lost many of their varsity members. As only three students remained on the varsity team — seniors Tom McClain, Ben Stadler and Emma Wilhoit — many new underclassmen have been practicing for the varsity team this year.

Losing many of the senior varsity members impacted McClain because had been working with the same team members for three years.

“It’s a weird feeling, I’ve been going to varsity tournaments since freshman year,” McClain said. “All the people that I’m used to going to state with are gone.”

Along with getting used to the new team dynamic, the Quiz Bowl team has had to “reconfigure [their] strategy,” according to Wilhoit.

“We’re having to discover what our strengths are because last year we had a really well defined idea of who was good at what,” Wilhoit said. “For example [2016 graduate] Rohit Biswas would take the math questions with ease and now we have to figure out who’s going to take over in that sector.”

However, McClain has noticed that the team is stronger in new areas this year.

“I think we’re going to have a lot of depth, particularly in social studies and literature areas,” McClain said. “We lost [students who are good at] math and science. One of the things I’m very interested to see this year is how the team does in science against other teams that have a little more experience in that area.”

That being said, McClain said “[juniors Landon Butler and Sam Phipps] are ready to take on the spotlight.”

Being a new member to the varsity team, Phipps recognizes a difference between last year’s team and this year’s.   

“On varsity, the questions are more difficult because [you’re] expected to have taken AP classes,” Phipps said. “More is expected of you.”

Although the new varsity members are still transitioning to the more rigorous questions, the team’s practices together have gone well so far.

“We’re really starting to find our strengths [as well as] interacting together and being able to come to a conclusion on an answer,” Wilhoit said. “I know that since we’re [in the EKL] now, things are going to be a little different, so I really just hope that we are able to define ourselves well as a team and be able to raise the new members to a point where they can be a very good team next year too.”