Dutch Fork’s quiz bowl team aiming for national title in ultimate trivia competition
If you’ve ever played a trivia contest, then what a group of Dutch Fork High School students will be doing this weekend is similar — except with national bragging rights over 200 other schools and a killer college application on the line.
The Dutch Fork quiz bowl team will represent the school in the National Academic Quiz Tournament on Saturday and Sunday. If the four-person team makes it through the preliminary rounds Saturday, they will have a chance to advance through the playoffs Sunday to win a national championship.
Senior Li Ward and juniors Jessica Chen, Alex Downs and Ben Herbst are no strangers to the competition. They won the right to compete this weekend by succeeding against other Southeastern teams at the Tigertown Throwdown at Clemson University earlier this year. Dutch Fork competed in the 2019 national tournament, and would have placed in the 2020 edition if it hadn’t been canceled by COVID-19.
Teams that make it to nationals can have a hard time cramming ahead of the competition. While they have a broad idea of what kind of questions they will be asked to answer, they could be asked just about anything, without a set topic list for each round.
“It covers a range of topics, from history to literature to science and fine arts,” said Herbst, who is Dutch Fork’s team captain.
“But there can also be questions from pop culture, current events, movies, video games,” Chen added.
Like any good team sport, the Dutch Fork students have somewhat specialized roles. Chen knows about religion and mythology, Downs studies art, Herbst is the team’s literary expert and Ward rounds out their knowledge of history and geography.
To prep for Saturday’s showdown, the team is looking through a database of old tournament questions that might give them some hint of the kind of questions they will face. Dutch Fork will face 224 other teams in a bracket-style tournament, with a break for lunch. Normally, all the teams would travel to a single location for the competition, but due to the pandemic, this year’s edition will be played entirely online.
Teacher Katherine Ramp, the team’s coach, said the lineup for Dutch Fork’s team is mostly self-selecting.
“We try to reach out to kids we think would be good at it, but with a lot of them, it’s because their friends have played,” she said.
She compares the mental gymnastics of the quiz bowl to an athlete running a triathlon. Just making Sunday’s playoffs would be “an honor,” Ramp said.
“I’m cautiously optimistic” about Dutch Fork’s chances, said Ward, who will be competing in his third national tournament with the team. But Herbst warns the “competition is stiff.”
But winning it all would bring a ton of clout in the small high school quiz bowl world — which can include college admissions offices.
This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
.jpg)