The BHS Scholar Bowl team is off to a good start. The team is currently 9-0, winning all competitions and tournaments they’ve participated in. This is the second year the team has been active. The team currently has nine members, including three of the remaining founding members: Kaelyn Smithburg, Cara McDonald, and Lila Morris. The new members this year are Amin Gozal, Breleigh Moore, Mason Kuhl, Ethan Morris, Kerynna Jarman, and Odin Bethune. “I’m just happy that Battle has a Scholar Bowl team,” said Ms. Jill Villasana, one of the coaches for Scholar Bowl alongside Ms. Carly Coughlin.

Scholar Bowl, also known as quiz bowl, is a test of knowledge between two teams. These teams use buzzers to “buzz” in and see who can answer the questions faster. Scholar Bowl is played in teams of four or five players, depending on the rule set. In most rule sets, teams can play with fewer players, often as few as one. You can have more than the maximum number of players on your team, but only up to four can be in the game simultaneously. Official Scholar Bowl competitions and tournaments are run by National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT).

The BHS team formed last year when Villasana was at Rock Bridge and saw a Central Missouri Athletics Conference (CMAC) Scholar Bowl champions plaque on the wall.  After she learned what Scholar Bowl was, she was inspired to make a team for Battle. When she did, they hit the ground running. They competed in several competitions and qualified and competed in the CMAC championship in April.

During a Scholar Bowl match, the moderator will read two kinds of questions to the teams: tossups and bonuses. A toss-up is a long question with only one answer. A tossup is read to both teams at the same time, and each team has one chance to buzz in per question. Tossup points earned go to the player’s overall point score for the competition or tournament.  Players may not talk to each other during tossups. Players can buzz in at any time during a tossup, but once a player has buzzed in with an incorrect answer, their team is “locked out” and may not try another answer on that tossup.  A bonus question is read only if a team answers a tossup correctly. A bonus is a multi-part question focused on a central theme but is not related to the tossup that was answered. Bonuses are played by the entire team as a group; each team may discuss possible answers out loud with each other before submitting an answer to the moderator. Bonuses usually have three parts: one easy, one hard, and a third of medium difficulty. Only the team that correctly answered the tossup may answer a bonus question

Practice for the BHS team often consists of being quizzed on past NAQT official tournament questions for around an hour. NAQT occasionally reuses past questions often reworded in the current competitions, so the knowledge and repetition of past questions could give players the edge over the competition. Scholar Bowl meets in E206 on Tuesdays and practices typically last about an hour. New members are encouraged to join regardless of whether or not they have previous experience you can email Ms. Coughlin at [email protected].