Voila! In view, this humble vaudevillian veteran, cast victorious by the vicissitudes of fate stands vivified!
With the Memorial Day weekend coming to a close, I am proud to announce that myself, and the rest of the team from Livingston High School, has won the Quiz Bowl National Championship!
The trophy is taller than I am. I think that’s the sign of success.
NAQT hosted the High School National Championship (HSNCT) this weekend, and after 6 hours of gameplay, 14 hours of crashing out, sleeping, crashing out, sleeping, crashing out, practicing, and 12 more hours of gameplay, we are the champions.
Moreso than even History Bowl Nationals, I think this tournament definitely showed me what it means to stress out. The first day of competition, Saturday, ended with two devastating losses in the preliminary rounds, and I definitely began to blame myself. Across both games, I only got maybe three questions, so when the losses ended up being close, I definitely felt like I could- no, should have done something to change that. Over the next 16 or so hours, I spent maybe four of them sleeping, four of them trying to sleep, and eight of them alternating between pacing around various hotel floors and waving at people who waved at me and practicing for the day after. No matter what, I was determined to perform well.
And then we won eight straight games in a row to get the 1 seed in a double elim bracket where every other team lost once. It feels good to be guaranteed finals when there’s still seven teams left in contention.
The final round was surprisingly chill, with the team making jokes the whole time and just generally having fun. Put simply, we didn’t play like it was finals. We played to have fun, which you will be able to hear on the recording when it comes out in like four months. It was a great time.
Then the trophy was too big so we had to disassemble it and mail the parts to Livingston so we could reassemble it. That was fun too.
I’m not even sure what else to add – everything still feels surreal. The amount of times we lost during the championship is actually the same as the amount of times we lost at every other tournament in the season combined.
Oh and our all-freshmen D team got 8th in the country. Somehow that happened. I look forward to seeing them win next year.
For now, it’s an o7 to all the seniors in the club, and I’m going to have fun running the club next year. Maybe things will go well. Maybe.