The Academic Bowl club will be on TV this Saturday, representing Concord Carlisle High School in a statewide quiz show competition, the High School Quiz Show. While the filming already took place, we at the Voice took it upon ourselves to learn about this spectacular quiz team and their experience.

The team meets under the advisement of Mr. Sawyer on Thursdays after school in room 333. This club has members from all grade levels, including Captain Will D., Leah G., Thomas G., Anthony B., Zoe S., and Kiera B.

Sarah, Voice Representative: What does your club do?

Will: “We meet every week and practice Trivia questions. Usually, we take from trivia packets online to compete in local tournaments, but for the High School Quiz Show, they have recorded videos that we used to practice and to guess questions ahead of time.”

Sarah: What exactly is the High School Quiz Show?

Will: “The High School Quiz Show is a regional tournament for schools in Massachusetts to compete in a quiz bowl competition, so teams from across the state compete on Super Sunday as a qualifier [to see if they will compete], they fill out a test packet in order to see if they are qualified and if they will be one of the seventeen teams who can compete on the show. We were one of those teams because of the Wildcard spot that they give out to teams who have never competed on the High School Quiz Show, so we scored well enough on Super Sunday that we qualified for the Wildcard spot, making it the first time CCHS Academic team went on the High School Quiz Show. For the actual show, it is four teams competing against each other in four separate rounds that are both team-based and individual-based for general trivia knowledge.”

Sarah: What was it like to actually be there?

Leah: “It was a little nerve-racking because it was really professionally done. There was a whole room we went into beforehand that was like a recording studio, and they gave us hair and makeup, and it was like a game show set up, so it was a little scary.”

Sawyer: “We saw the original door for the WGBH studios before it got burned down and replaced.”

Sarah: What’s the actual setup of the event?

Will: “There are four rounds. The first round is a toss-up event where the host, Billy Costlin, reads a question, and the teams, whoever buzzes faster, gets a chance to answer the question. The points are then awarded based on questions answered, and the second round is the head-to-head round where the teams face head to head, with one member from each team going against one member from another team. It is very fast-paced and the third round is category based, where teams are encouraged to confer, so one team has a set of questions that they go through, and it bounces back and forth after completing one set of questions between the teams. Then the fourth round is the lightning round where anyone can buzz in at any time and try to get as many points as possible.”

Sarah: What kinds of questions were asked?

Will: “Questions [at the show] are more general knowledge questions than the ones we usually prepare for, so a good amount of civics, basic science, geography, there’s quite a bit, basic history, and some current events. What made it different was it’s a lot different than our ordinary questions, which have a lot more difficulty and are obscure in High School Quiz Show. It is often about getting to the question as quickly as possible because you probably already know the answer.”

Leah: “Yeah, we were not too fast at buzzing… Probably could have been faster.”

Sarah: What questions were most difficult to answer?

Thomas: “I think we all found questions about state birds to be challenging.”

Sarah: How did you prepare for it?

Will: “We watched the High School Quiz Show on their Youtube channel that has the past three or so seasons, so we just watched through videos and competed along with them. We got the transcript of what was being said and treated it as a regular packet, just with different questions.”

Sarah: What was your favorite part of the show?

Leah: “General atmosphere of the event, an experience unlike any other. I don’t think it is a very common experience to be on a show like that with the lights and stage and the teleprompter and the whole ambiance with the studio audience. I thought it was just a really nice atmosphere.”

Sarah: What was the worst part of the experience?

Will: “It’s kind of like seeing the sausage get made, like you see all the gross parts being put into one piece of meat, so even though the televised part is all clean and produced, it is like a lot more stuff behind the scenes, downtime and correcting over lines since it is not all live even if it appears that way.”

Sarah: Anything else you want known?

Will: “We would really like some more members, especially freshmen and sophomores.”

Thomas: “Even juniors.”

Will: “Even juniors, to keep our club up and running. We meet on Thursdays in room 333.”

The episode of High School Quiz Show will air on Saturday, February fourth, on GBH-2 at 6:00 PM, and we hope that you will join us in cheering them on this Saturday.