Splash No. 112 - Quiz Bowl

Quiz Bowl

For nearly six years, I would give up my Saturdays to travel to other schools in the state of Georgia and spend my day pressing buttons to answer questions. That’s right, I was a quiz bowl player. 

Quiz bowl is a game where two teams of four or five are armed with buzzers to answer as many questions as possible. It seems cool, like Jeopardy! but with no money involved. But, as you start to listen to questions, you start to realize these are no ordinary questions. For no reason at all, these students are answering questions about things like quantum mechanics and obscure operas from the 19th century. Even more bizarre was the intense system of statistics that tracked every player’s performance and advanced statistics like “Points Per Tossup Heard,” which roughly referred to the chance that a player or team would get a correct answer on any given question. Even better, there were forums dedicated to comparing stats to figure out who the best teams were in the country, giving varying weight to the strength of a performance based on the difficulty of the question sets, which were sometimes repeated across the country. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was just like what sports fans do every season. Except it’s a high school extracurricular activity. 

Despite the fact that I was never very good, I loved quiz bowl. There was a nervous thrill every time I buzzed in, half-wondering if I actually knew the answer.  There was the thrill of winning and the thrill of playing frisbee during lunch after eating two slices of Little Caesar’s pizza that our tournament fees paid for. And of course, there was all the fun of being on a team. Since the questions usually covered a wide range of subjects, each team member would often specialize in a certain area. I focused on religion, myth, and philosophy and could help with biology and art history. That was only possible since I had other teammates who focused on literature, music, and history. Without realizing it, quiz bowl simultaneously fostered and focused my interests, which led to me learning a lot more about these subjects than I ever expected to, often in greater depth than I would have in school alone. 


I think what I appreciated most about quiz bowl was that it was a self-contained world, a bubble. Quiz bowl knowledge was only really useful for the quiz bowl community, and the same was true of all of the statistics and apps and forum discussions. Ultimately, it was a really organized group of people getting excited about learning and testing each other on it. A big game that we could all obsess over. I ultimately quit the team, mostly because I needed to focus on my college applications, but also because issues around fundraising and finding a sponsor for the team had tired me out. The self-contained world was invaded by the real world, as our many attempts to get school funding failed. 

I spent some time going through the old sites that I used to waste so much time looking at. The forums are still active, the rankings are more scientific ever, and the world continues to turn in the same way. Without in-person tournaments, online tournaments have taken the community by storm, allowing players from across the country to test their knowledge against each other. While discovering this, I couldn’t help but think that online tournaments wouldn’t need entrance fees. And teams wouldn’t need to break out from the bubble to play.

All this time later, I miss that bubble. I used to wonder why people in college and beyond would volunteer to read questions at competitions, but it makes sense now. Quiz bowl, like any good hobby, was something to center a community around and that community brought knowledge and fun to so many people. It’s been six years since I last played quiz bowl and I probably won’t ever be a part of that world again. What I do know is that bubbles like it are essential to feel connected to other people. I may be done with that bubble, but I hope to find another one really soon.

The fight against systemic racism continues. With each day, we move closer to a more equitable world. Reminders:
 

Ways you can help  

Anti-racism resources

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Softly,
Nikhil