The Hastings High School quiz bowl teams were, all around, very successful at their main event on Wednesday, February 8th.
The junior team left with second place and a ticket to the state tournament in Holdrege in April. They beat out the sophomores who finished the day in third place. The seniors and freshmen did not place this year, but their coach, Faye Friesen, is extremely hopeful for them. It isn’t all about the placing for her, she loves to just work with the kids.
“I definitely love working with the students! I get a variety of kids; some athletes, some fine arts, but all very good at thinking on their feet,” Friesen said.
Friesen has been coaching quiz bowl for seven years. She talks about how there was no quiz bowl when she was a student, “…but I would have loved it. I was the nerdy kid who read all of the time and dreamed of becoming a librarian!” Friesen said.
If you are unfamiliar with quiz bowl, sophomore Kalim Dumas describes it as, “…one big stump fest! Almost every question is dumb and ridiculous and that’s why I love it!” In preparation for this tournament, students all agree on the fact that there isn’t really a way to prepare.
“You just have to hope some of the questions happen to coincide with what is actually asked during the competition,” Dumas said.
While there seems to be no way to practice because of the unknown questions to be asked, their coach likes to look at it like school is preparing students for this competition. “The secret of being good at quiz bowl is really being a good student. The information students learn in class is often given as questions,” Friesen said.
Some students join because of their ability to retain random facts. Freshman Hannah Tunks has been involved with quiz bowl since she was in fourth grade.
“[I’ve] always been really good at remembering random trivia facts and it’s just something that interests me,” Tunks said.
Other students started their quiz bowl journey not thinking they would do well, but realizing they wanted to take the new information with them in their lives, such as Junior Sam Johnson. Johnson had taken a test to be on the team in fourth grade. “I was surprised that I had made the team because I wasn’t expecting to be on the team at all,” Johnson said.
Senior Isaac Askey says that trivia has always given him “a bit of an adrenaline-like rush.” He connects this by saying, “Watching Jeopardy growing up may have instilled this trait within me.”
Throughout the tournament, there will always be some questions that will really stump the students. For Hannah Tunks, there are many individual questions that they haven’t been studying because they really have to think on the fly.
“There was one about who the author of Treasure Island was that I didn’t know because I had never read the book,” Tunks said. Isaac Askey said the mental math really gets him because of the short amount of time to figure it out in. “I usually find the answers to these questions after the buzzer sounds. There is simply not enough time,” he said.
If you want to add the most to your high school years, Kalim Dumas would highly recommend it to other students. “Quiz Bowl is a ton of fun! Who wouldn’t want to do it? I would definitely consider it part of the full high school experience.”
Most of the team has come to a conclusion of their season, but it doesn’t just stop there. As long as there are questions, there will be quiz bowl.
