On Friday, McLean’s state championship-winning quiz bowl team hosted a trivia night, which is a regular fundraising event that invites the McLean community to partake in a bit of scholastic competition.
“The questions we do at trivia night are designed to be fun and enjoyable for people, whether you’re 60 years old or whether you’re 10 years old, they’re supposed to be fun and make you laugh and make you want to come back for more,” quiz bowl co-coach and physics teacher Jeff Brocketti said.
The team spends weeks in advance writing questions for trivia night attendees, with each member specializing in a specific area of knowledge.
“About a week before we get together, we go through all the questions,” senior Clara Marks said. “There’s a lot of tweaking that happens because a lot of the time we make our questions too hard or too easy.”
In total, the competition lasts eight to 10 rounds, with 10 questions in each round. The questions themselves vary in content, some with an academic emphasis and others with a fun twist.
“After each round, [each team] hands us their answer sheet and gets a score [and] we tally up the scores in the next round,” Brocketti said.
Typically, the quiz bowl team merely facilitates the competition and does not directly participate, unless they plan on playing with a team of family or friends.
“If [team members] are going to have family in town or friends they want to play with, they’ll stay out of the question writing process,” Brocketti said.
In order to ensure that their questions are adequately challenging for trivia night participants, the team takes the writing process very seriously. Because the questions vary so widely in content, the team employs different strategies to help attendees find the answer.
“We tend to add in clues that will help somebody get the answer even if they don’t know what exactly the question is talking about,” Marks said.
The efforts by the team to put on trivia night holds financial as well as educational value, as the night serves as a fundraising event for the team.
“We just use [trivia night] strictly as a fundraiser,” Brocketti said. “But that money is partly going towards paying for our registration for nationals, which helps promote the team indirectly.”
The effort put forth by McLean Quiz Bowl to create engaging and competitive trivia for the McLean community is definitely worth seeing, even for those quick to dismiss the exhilaration of scholastic competition.
“It’s a couple hours on a Friday night with your friends, and it’s weirdly competitive because you want to win,” Brocketti said. “I can pretty much guarantee you’re going to have a good time.”