McLean’s Quiz Bowl team traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to compete in the High School National Championship Tournament (HSNCT) over the past weekend. The competition, hosted by National Academic Quiz Tournaments, lasted from May 23 to 25. Both the A team and B team advanced to playoffs, placing in the top 50 and top 100, respectively, out of 336 teams.
“In terms of overall finish, the A team finished in the exact same position as last year. Last year, B team didn’t make the playoffs, so the fact that we were able to make the playoffs with both teams again was a nice thing,” said physics and astronomy teacher Jeffrey Brocketti, quiz bowl sponsor. “We had a few tough matches in the sense that the questions just didn’t fall our way, but that’s bound to happen in one of these things.”
To qualify for playoffs, teams must win at least six out of 10 preliminary rounds. For both McLean teams, the tournament run came down to the final preliminary round.
“We already had four losses before the 10th round, so the last round was like, ‘Okay, if we win, we go to playoffs, if we lose, we don’t,’” junior co-captain Angelika Tzioumis said. “In my previous years, we always lost the 10th round, so I was pretty scared we weren’t going to make it, but we demolished the other team.”
McLean’s A team cruised through their first playoff round, winning 530-40 against Little Miami High School.
“We had heard that they were pretty much a one-man team, and [the questions] just happened to be very much in our expertise,” Tzioumis said. “By the 10th question, they knew that they were not going to win, and they kept getting stuff wrong.”
By contrast, McLean’s opponents in the second playoff round, Northmont High School, proved to be a challenging team to face. At one point, Northmont had gathered 260 points while McLean only had 5.
“[We had] 20 minutes to get through as many questions out of the 24-question packet as possible, and the packet was not very kind to us in terms of the stuff that was available for us to buzz in—there were a lot of math questions and a question about architecture, which is not a very strong suit of ours,” said junior Edward Burros, the highest scoring member on McLean’s A team. “We had a few incorrect buzzes as well, because we were trying to play more aggressively. The earlier you buzz, the less information you receive, so that made it more difficult.”
Despite Northmont’s staggering lead, McLean’s A team continued to fight for the win, though they eventually bowed out of the tournament with a 220-370 loss.
“In the latter half of the game, we played substantially better and brought it within about 150 points, which in Quiz Bowl is not that much, because every single question can earn you up to 45 points,” Burros said. “We thought we could maybe catch up, but when they continued to get a few questions right, it looked increasingly like they were going to win. By the time it was down to the last five or so questions, we kind of accepted what we were probably not going to win, and we were just trying to put points on the board to make it as close as possible.”
Not to be outdone, McLean’s B team also qualified for the playoffs. Led by team captain and junior Eddie Lin, the team decisively beat Chattahoochee’s C team 345-285 in order to secure their spot in playoffs. The team last qualified for playoffs in 2022.
“It started a bit worrisome, considering the other team had gotten the first three tossups,” said junior Eddie Lin, captain of the B team. “There was a bit of pressure, but I managed to answer the fourth tossup to break their momentum. By the second half, the team caught up, and we went on a run. It was the best we played that day.”
However, their fortunes changed in the playoffs. In their first round against Solon High School’s A team, the team narrowly lost 235-260 by a technicality: Solon protested Lin’s answer “Wat,” claiming that the full answer, the English peasant rebel Wat Tyler, required a surname. After deliberation, organizers gave the points and the win to Solon.
“At the end of the game, before any technicalities were called into play, we were up by 10 points,” Lin said. “One of the toss-ups the other team had lodged was a protest, basically saying I shouldn’t have gotten the question because I waited a few too many seconds to say “Tyler”. While they took the answer at the time, they had the organizers for HSNCT decide that I had waited too long to say it.”
With their success at HSNCT in mind, McLean’s Quiz Bowl team hopes to surpass their performance at next year’s national championship.
“Everybody shined at some point,” Brocketti said. “You have to do that in order to be successful in a tournament like this.”
