LITTLE ROCK — Before the Nashville Junior High quiz bowl team had slapped its first buzzer, the rest of the quiz bowlers in New Orleans knew this was a team to reckon with.
The Nashville Scrappers were about to go up against the team from Rice University’s junior high when Coach Tammy Alexander realized the tournament bracket was wrong. They weren’t supposed to play Rice in the first round.
Coach Alexander pulled a parent aside: “Tell them to refuse to play,” she told her.
“I’m going to fix this.”
And she did.
“I interrupted a senior-high game and asked them, nicely, to fix it.”
The second dramatic moment of the weekend came at the end of the Scrappers’ semifinal match against Jesuit, “the team tobeat.”
And the team from Arkansas’ own Nashville did.
“It was a really overwhelming moment,” says Coach Alexander. “They knew they were going to be playing in a national championship in 2 1 /2 hours.
I have never seen them that animated.”
All you need to know to compete in an academic quiz bowl is all the accumulated knowledge of the ages plus current events. The names of state parks in all the states. Who threw a shoe at President George W. Bush while he spoke in Iraq.
“Not just something you would be taught in school,” she says. “It’s rather like Jeopardy, but you have no idea what category you’ll get - pop culture, politics, Olympics. You must be really quick on buzzers. It’s timing,intuition.”
This was the Scrappers’ second trip to a national tournament; last year the team competed in Washington, D.C., and placed seventh.
Two Scrappers teams went to New Orleans at the end of May for this year’s tournament at Loyola University: The A Team was Cameron Alexander, Hayden Kirchhoff, Alex Kwok, Jonathon Lance, Alex Perrin and Tyler Tollett.
The B Team was Braden Bowman, Luke Dawson, Nicole Drummond, Blake Hockaday, Sydney Hughes, Kathleen Lance and Dillon Roberts.
On their way to the championship match, the Scrappers beat Pulaski Heights’ junior high. Coach Janet Buford “was very gracious and hugged me and told me to go win the whole thing,” Alexander says.
And the Scrappers did.
The Nashville Junior High Scrappers beat the team from Altamont Junior High in Birmingham, Ala. Jonathon Lance was MVP. The next week, the Nashville Leader put the story and a huge team photograph at the top of its front page under a giant headline: NATIONAL CHAMPS!
How tough were the questions?
“A lot of ... the [math] equations,” Coach Alexander says, “took [the moderator] longer to read than they had time to solve them.”
Arkansas, Pages 9 on 07/29/2010