Saturday, March 9, Westside’s quiz bowl team traveled to Savannah, MO to compete in the National Academic Quiz Tournament. The team came out with a 5-0 win. According to junior Theodore Jansen, even with hour long practices every week, he said they were surprised to have won.

Theodore Jansen said, “It felt really satisfying because we have been working very hard throughout the past years, and probably not many people throughout the country have heard of our team just because we don’t go to nationally sanctioned tournaments. So it was really gratifying.”

Quiz bowl competitions cover questions that based off of a specific curriculum, but Westside’s team describes them as being outside the realm of classroom curriculum. Junior Reese Pike said the questions are usually manageable for the team since they put in a lot of time learning, but there are always some obscure questions. Some of the questions are based off of subjects such as  books or cities According to Jansen, this year the questions were styled much differently than they are in Nebraska, making them very difficult.

“Usually it hits those big cores…math, science, history and English, and then within English there’s a lot of literature questions,” Quiz Bowl Sponsor Jon Allemang said. “Anything’s fair game that can be potentially learned in high school, and then some stuff that’s like ‘who learned that in high school?’”

Pike said that despite the hard work the team puts in, they have a lot of fun together.

“I would definitely encourage people to join quiz bowl,” said Pike. “Even if you don’t think you know a lot about trivia, you’d definitely be surprised at the stuff you know. Like the weird things I remember are crazy, so it’s a lot of fun and the people are a lot of fun too.”

With the strengths and weaknesses of each member, the team  is very diverse. Each member specializes in a specific category of questions, which in return strengthens the team, making them able to help each other as well as new members.

“The team we have right now is pretty stellar, and they compliment each other well,” said Allemang. “We have a solid math person with Andrew Li, Theo has kind of got little bits of everything, Reese Pike, she’s really good at the English and literature.  Brendan Pennington is amazing when it comes to geography. Between him and Paul Suder, the fifth player, they’re pretty good at their history. So it’s a really well rounded team.”