Although Covid-19 has caused lots of sports, clubs, and events to shut down, the Capital Area Activities Conference (CAAC) Winter Quiz Bowl League persevered, using voice chats and online buzzer systems to hold virtual tournaments. Aside from occasional internet lag, competitions went smoothly, as was made apparent by the winter season’s JV champions, Grand Ledge High School. Zack Zulewski, Kiera Haver, Spencer Ries, and Ethan Lowry made up the JV team and won all twelve matches that they played. Zack Zulewski also participated in a national tournament, where he placed 81st individually. The Varsity Quiz Bowl team, consisting of Jason Thieu, Zach Stevens, Rose House, and yours truly, won 5 out the twelve rounds played.

A round of Quiz Bowl is fairly simple, so switching to virtual competitions wasn’t much of a hindrance. For those who don’t know, Quiz Bowl is essentially a trivia competition.

 “It’s not physically intensive, but mentally intensive. You just have to know stuff”, Thieu said. In each game, 20 questions are asked as toss-ups; both teams have the opportunity to buzz in. If a team answers a toss-up correctly, they get a bonus. The bonus consists of three themed questions that only that team can answer. 

“I was drawn in by the similarities to classic trivia game shows”, said Zulewski. Teams usually consist of members with different specialties, because the subjects of the questions vary. 

“One moment you’ll be going from questions about astrophysics, one moment it will be questions about the Bible, another one it’ll be questions about video games…Whatever your interests are, there’s probably a Quiz Bowl question for that”, Zulewski said. On the JV team, Zack Zulewski specialized in geography and general knowledge, Kiera Haver covered science, and Ethan Lowry and Spencer Ries covered math questions. In the case of the Varsity team, Jason Thieu handled math and science questions, Zach Stevens was good with history and geography, Rose House covered literature, and I took on any garbage questions, which is the hurtful Quiz Bowl term for pop culture and miscellaneous knowledge.

On every Wednesday for four weeks, teams logged on to the CAAC Quiz Bowl Discord Server and played three matches against other school teams across the Capital City area. One advantage of playing in the Discord Server was that it was easy to communicate with other teams. After the matches were over, teams would often hang out and play video games with each other. Trivia Murder Party was unsurprisingly a pretty big hit. Even though we were all there to compete, it was a nice, welcoming community of fellow Quiz Bowlers.