Saint Joseph Quizbowl was on a roll last year placing 2nd in their state championships. However, many things went wrong as the team found themselves struggling through the final round over the summer. There’s reason to hope for better this year, though. Plus, the team beat Adams’s A team by one rank.
The Quizbowl team’s main issue, Mr. Dillon stated, was being “short handed” as two of the small team’s key members couldn’t show up. Emmanuel Thomas, last year’s valedictorian, couldn’t make it due to difficult circumstances, making the team less effective at getting the literature questions. Teddy Berente, a current Junior and great literature player, also couldn’t make the tournament. The rest of the team was unable to make up the slack. This lack of book knowledge meant the other team often won easy literature questions that the team otherwise often would have already gotten.
Another issue for the team was not being used to the question format. The team mostly had practiced with shorter and easier 4-sentence style questions used most often in the league matches and would guess too early on the harder ones present at the tournament. In addition, there was a greater portion of fine arts questions at the tournament (due to the removal of several other trivia types), which the team was not as adept at answering.
Given how the team did last year with the series of mishaps, there’s reason to believe preparation this year could mean a strong placement at nationals. Quiz Bowl plans to focus on broadening and deepening their knowledge as well as practicing a wider variety of question styles.