Four members of the Washington University Academic Team (WUAT), a student-run quiz bowl club, will advance to a national competition this April where they will compete against 32 other teams for the national title.
This past weekend, the teams competed at the University of Iowa against Midwestern rivals from Minnesota, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois, where the University’s Division II A-team went undefeated in the preliminary games.
The team, consisting of sophomores Katie Shen and Ben Hofstetter and freshmen Neel Kotra and Laura Soderberg, then went on to win the overall tournament in a tiebreaker game against the University of Illinois.
“It was a really fun experience,” said freshman and team member Neel Kotra. “We won a few close games overall and after the prelims [we] were undefeated.”
“It was unexpected in my mind” added Kotra, “since U of I [University of Illinois] is known as a powerhouse team.”
Although Kotra does not remember the specific question that clinched the A-team’s victory, he does recall that the University’s team was winning by a significant margin with three questions left. “We were up by 40 points – that’s the max you can get – and Katie got the third to last question, and [Illinois] couldn’t do it. It pretty much sealed the deal,” said Kotra.
Although the club has seen many incarnations over the past few decades, it has been a solid presence on campus for the past 15 to 20 years.
According to senior Ryan Jacobson, president of WUAT, there are four members to a team and there are multiple divisions that each team can be a part of. The University’s club has one Division I team and three Division II teams, all of which participate in an average of three tournaments per semester.
In addition to tournaments, WUAT hosts an annual quiz bowl tournament for high school students known as Washington University High School Academic Challenge (WUHSAC). The event is entirely student-run with help from area alumni and University of Missouri at Rolla’s quiz bowl team.
The traditional quiz bowl tournament starts with preliminaries, round robin style, which determine who competes in the playoffs.
According to Kotra, each round consists of approximately 20 questions, depending on how many fit during the nine-minute halves. There is a toss-up question worth 10 points, and if that is answered correctly, that team then gets a related bonus question worth 30 points. The toss-up questions are a mixture of five history questions, five science questions, five literature questions and five grab-bag questions.
In terms of how the team prepares for such tournaments, the teams compete against each other every week for practice. But according to Kotra, much of the preparation comes simply from general knowledge.
“There’s definitely stuff you hear at every tournament,” said Kotra. “There’s [also] definitely some generalized specified information.[based on] what your interests are or what classes you are taking.”
Kotra, a chemical engineer, felt that his teammates represented a variety of specialized backgrounds, from history to languages to hard sciences.
“It helps balance the team, and it’s good to have balance that way,” said Kotra.
This will be the third year in a row that WUAT has sent a team to the national tournament, which is hosted in Minneapolis this year. Kotra, who participated in quiz bowl for four years in high school, explained how it would be interesting to see the faces of those he competed against in high school.
“I recognize people who I knew were really good [competing] against them-it’s going to be a new experience.”