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National Fever
Grinnell Quiz Bowl team advances to Nationals thanks to facts on psychology, biology and Nelly
by Colin Reynolds
Last Monday evening, several Grinnell students gathered in ARH to quiz one another on everything from sports and history trivia to math problems and song lyrics. Two weeks prior, identifying lyrics by hip-hop artist Nelly had helped to qualify four of them for Nationals.
The Grinnell College Quiz Bowl Team took first place in Division II Sectionals in St. Paul, automatically winning an invitation to the National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) national finals. The team will send four of its members to the University of Maryland in College Park April 7 and 8 to vie for the national title.
Quiz Bowl is currently in its fifth year at Grinnell and last year placed third in Division II Sectionals, advancing to Nationals and placing 14th in the nation.
NAQT tournaments are organized in two divisions. Division I is for students who have been to a national tournament before, while Division II is for those who have not. Though most of the team's members were eligible to participate in Division II, tryouts were held to pick a four-person team. "We ran the results through a computer program to optimize the overlap in knowledge [between potential team members] and did what the computer told us to," said team member Avram Lyon '06.
Christine Vigeland '06, Avram Gottschlich '07, Mark Japinga '09 and Jordan Kujala '09 comprised the team that won the Sectional competition and will represent Grinnell in Maryland.
Lyon, Alyssa Hesse '07, Tom Soderholm '08 and David Montgomery '08 competed in Division I and placed fifth, not well enough to qualify for Nationals.
Practice sessions include questions of all kinds. Generally, the room is divided into two teams that compete against one another to answer "tossup questions," which require a participant to press a buzzer once he or she has figured out the answer. Answering a tossup correct gives that person's team a "bonus" question, on which team members can confer.
Quiz Bowl is open to anyone interested. Practices are held on Mondays and Thursdays at 7:30 in ARH's Russian seminar room.
"Most of the time we're just practicing," said Lyon. "We compete as much as we can, but practices are always fun."
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