“Finish this rhyme. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house’”
*buzz*
“Red 5.”
“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
“Correct.”
This is what the inside of a scholars bowl match looks like; both teams fighting in a battle of wits to figure out who is the most scholarly.
Scholars bowl matches include a variety of questions on all subjects.
“A normal match has about 15 questions, and each of them is from a different category,” junior Devon Stamback said. “There’s usually world language, there’s English history, science, math, art, stuff like that.”
Scholars bowl matches have a variety of rules that the teams have to follow.
“You have your buzzers and there’s a person who reads the questions and the first team to buzz in answers the question,” sophomore Ana Huerta said. “If you interrupt the question, and you get it wrong, it’s minus five points. On the other hand, if you get it right, you get 10 points.”
The scholars bowl team comes early before school to practice for their meets.
“We get there at about 7:15 in the morning, and then we go to Mrs. Gonzalez’s room,” said Huerta. “We have a couple tables set up on either side and we play against each other with practice questions.”
The team plays multiple matches during a meet.
“For any given team normally, we usually play six or seven rounds; each round is about 10 minutes long,” Stamback said. “You go from room to room playing in a round-robin style. Then they usually cut about half or more the teams for the final rounds, and then you get the medals from there depending on how you play.”
To practice for the meets the team proofread questions to prepare.
“We set up our buzzers and everything we just read off practice questions and we just see which team can win,” senior Will Stueven said.
Stamback has high hopes for the rest of the scholars bowl season.
“I feel like the season going good so far,” Stamback said. “I like our chances of making it to state, considering we were so close last year.”
