the Quiz Bowl/Academic Challenge/College Bowl/trivia team nerd thread

Totally. In Illinois it was Scholastic Bowl.

blood diamonds!

The local tournament is televised, and when I was home at xmas my mom and dad dragged out one of the old tapes. Then I ended up watching them all!

^^^^obv still a dork to this day

me. we won some county-wide contest.

was captain of prep school general knowledge team, we won the IAPS (buzzer-type contest for SE England preparatory schools) two years running (while I was VC and C), sadly my general knowledge has lagged behind many of my peers' since then, or perhaps the fact that we only competed against private schools distorted our actual ability somewhat

i did this one year! tons of fun

i was on a high school team, forget what the thing was called, but it was a local-high-schools competition broadcast on the local pbs channel. we did pretty good for a smallish school, won the first two or three rounds, lost to the eventual champions. my specialty was recognizing "turn turn turn" from the opening bar of the pete seeger version (and knowing pete seeger wrote the music). the host was awful, this doddering guy who mispronounced everything and never knew which part of the game we were in. ("and now, in our lightning round ... oh? not the lightning round yet. sorry. my mistake, uh ... ok, so the next question is for 30 points ... no, 20 points, with a 10-point bonus question ...")

when I was home at xmas my mom and dad dragged out one of the old tapes.

i think my parents taped it when i was on. i wonder if they still have them. the tapes would be 20 years old. would be funny to watch.

I represented my school in a local radio quiz show. We were beaten finalists 1 year, that sucked.

For some reason my high school didn't have a team until my senior year. I was stoked, though, because I'd done it all through middle school. We played a few tournaments and were always pretty solid, but we didn't make it very far in the statewide competition.

I have fond memories of competing against Avery Coonley on their turf in 8th grade. They only fielded their 6th graders, which I think was because they thought they'd be too dominant otherwise, since they were a rich private school with kids that undoubtedly went on to the Ivy League or whatever. We ended up beating them pretty handily, but even their teams' wrong answers demonstrated their precociousness. Like on a political question I wish I remembered, some scrawny kid answered "Ed Meese?" (This was 1992, so Meese had been out of the news for a few years. I mean, the kid would've been like five or six during Iran Contra.)

Another kid on the Avery Coonley team was Graham Smith, who later went on to form Kleenex Girl Wonder. I remember him in particular because I thought his name was gay. In the school's basement, there was a box where you could submit anonymous questions or comments. My friend Steve and I wrote, "Help, I think I contracted AIDS from my dentist. Signed, Graham Smith" and folded it up and put it in the box. What the fuck.

They had it as a one day thing in college. Freshman year three friends and I entered, and got to the final around against all senior boys. They ran out of questions so had to use Trivial Pursuit cards which the four of us had played the night before so we totally won that.

anyone do academic games? i think it only involved (western) pennsylvania, michigan, louisiana, (south) florida and maybe west virginia in my day...

my high school quiz bowl team won the county every year I was there. the second time we won we got twice as many points as the runner-up and were incredible assholes about it (nb: I went to an all-nerd magnet high school that had grade requirements for admission so it really wasn't very impressive that we won anything academic ever).

I came in 9th in the state in the National Geography Bee, if that counts for anything.

the best thing was when they asked a something like "which 1996 capcom game features zombies infesting Raccoon City" and we all jumped out of our chairs and screamed "RESIDENT EVIL!!!"

that geography bee thing is awesome! In middle school I always won my grade in the spelling/geography bees but because they broadcast the schoolwide competition on cctv I refused to participate (saddo goth uggo years) and therefore never got any further.

Did this in high school and loved it, went to the first quiz bowl meeting in college, looked around at the people involved, and never went back. My college's quiz bowl team was comprised entirely of the aggressive and pompous slice of uber-geekdom.

dude you just posted a school picture that was not very uggo

xp

In 8th grade I lobbied really hard for my social-studies teacher to run the geography bee in our class. One of the other social-studies teachers was doing it in his class (which also just so happened to have more honors students in it), but we weren't, which struck me as really unfair, so I like had my dad call the school and everything. Then I ended up not even finishing in the top three in the class, lol. I was better at spelling bees.

I don't think my college even has a quiz bowl.

that was HIGH SCHOOL and post massive jaw reconstruction surgery. I am referring to MIDDLE SCHOOL (which IMO is way worse in terms of bullying and torment and awkwardness than high school but I went to nerd school so yeah). xp

My college's quiz bowl team was comprised entirely of the aggressive and pompous slice of uber-geekdom.

I more or less gave up Pub Quizzes for more or less the same reason.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone on this thread:

http://www.ljkliterary.com/images/bookCovers/Width250/JenningsCover.jpg

ha. they didn't have this in my state, but i used to watch the new hampshire one everytime it was broadcast on public tv. seemed so glamorous!

THE BOOK IT IS INVISTABLE XP.

oh wait there it is. I am retarded.

I was in our school team that won the Scottish final of School Challenge, which was based on University Challenge but not televised or on the radio or anything. As result we then got taken out of school for a couple of days and off down to Wales to represent Scotland in the national finals, where we lost in the semis to the team that went on to win.

I was on a quiz bowl team in high school. I remember a major "penalty-review" when the question referred something being "in the arctic circle" and my counselor questioning where that meant "inside the arctic circle" or a place on the actual "line" of the arctic circle.

I quit because I was tired of listening to that shit. Our quiz bowls are televised on the local PBS network every spring, tho'.

lol I was waiting for you to turn up ailsa.

haha, yes, I am quiz nerd.

oh okay then! xps

As mentioned on the highschool thread -- played it in soph/junior year, won the San Diego championship in junior year. (Then we got creamed in the county championship. Oh well!)

The only quiz bowl I've ever seen on local PBS seems to have a "Know Your Black History!" slant.

i was on university challenge once :(

As of two years ago I still hold the Academic Decathlon gold medal record my high school. I was sweating the speech one - wound up making it up on the spot from a Charlie Parker quote and won.

Quiz League was better, very informal in my district.

Our league was called Academic League. I was team captain my senior year. We were pretty good, but no match for the better, richer schools. I often would be the only person on my team who answered a question right for an entire match!

Wow, look at all us quiz nerdz.

I was on the team in school for two years and was "captain" (this means nothing) my second year. That year we also won the MI state title for our class of school, which was awesome because the hockey jocks blew their own title run the same month.

The best ever, though, was going to an open tournament at the University of Michigan and beating up on overconfident rich kid private-schoolers in their little matching blazers.

None of the schools I've ever gone to had a quiz team. :-(. It's one of my favorite things though. I used to watch Jeopardy with a calculator in hand and keep score against my parents. My husband and I now quiz one another just for fun. Oy. I'm a dork.

The captain gets to sit in the middle and answer bonus questions for the team!

OK but srsly anyone could do that. As exemplified by the rest of the team (I was the only senior) winning the state the next two years in a row.

jaymc we should do more pub quizzes obv.

I got accused of cheating one time while beating up on the richie-rich high school in town. The moderator started a question "This Mexican War general..." and I immediately buzzed in with Winfield Scott. The other team was sure I had access to the questions, but I had just figured that he was the biggest name identified primarily with that war.

I did the same thing as JJ, only I didn't even investigate whether it was an option for college.

xpost That's awesome.

One thing I hated about our local competitions was that they allowed multiple interrupts. All the other tournaments allowed you to interrupt but if you were wrong, the other team got to hear the whole rest of the question and yours was locked out.

jaymc we should do more pub quizzes obv.

You know I'm game.