Knowledge Bowl is Life!

The Wright County Conference meet was today at Holy Family Catholic School in Victoria. Many WCC schools were there. Not everyone has Quiz Bowl or Knowledge Bowl, but many: GSL, Holy Family, Hutchinson, Litchfield, Mound-Westonka, New Prague, Waconia, and Watertown-Mayer. There were a total of nineteen teams from the eight schools.

The meet was extremely well-run, and things went very smoothly. Because it was all so uncomplicated, I had chances to talk to a lot of people that I would not always be able to talk to. The people who really struck me were the coaches - I talked to everyone, I think. This group of coaches all seemed positive and friendly, and they all put the students first. They have to - they are spending their Saturdays so their students can have a fantastic activity. When I do retire, I will miss these people a lot. I enjoy finding out what KB coaches are up to - they are amazing people! But I would really like to give a little shout-out to two: 1) Charles Miller, the coach at Saint John's Prep, follows our Facebook page, and doesn't hesitate to "like" our posts when we have had a good meet. He has also been known to refer to "our friends from GSL" in his own posts. 2) Jim Walker, from Holy Family, jumped to the top of my nice-person list with something he did today. But first a little about the meet.

The structure for this meet is basically the same as KB everywhere. Mound-Westonka, however, is really a Quiz Bowl school, and so adjusting to KB is a little odd for them. As they described it to me, they "buzz slow", because in QB if you buzz in too early and don't know the answer, you lose points. They try to speed up for this meet, but it's hard to retrain yourself. (So when, at one point, one of our students said "We were against a team who didn't know how to play Knowledge Bowl", he was right.) In addition, the schools in WCC are from three different regions - St. Cloud, Metro and Southwest Central - and things in these regions are not always run the same. Nothing boring about this meet!

Every school is allowed to bring three teams, but not all schools have three teams. GSL's three teams started in Rooms One, Two and Three. By round two, we had two teams in Room One (in first and second), and one in Room Two. This continued through round three and round four, except that the team in Room Two dropped to Room Three for the last round.

There are only two awards and sets of medals given at this meet - Wright County Conference Champion and WCC Runner-Up. And one school can't win them both. So, although GSL teams earned both first (123.0) and second (88.5), GSL won the championship, while Holy Family (with third and fifth place teams - 83.5 and 71.5) was awarded the Runner-Up prize. Watertown-Mayer earned third place. (GSL's third team finished sixth with 71.0.)

And here is where Jim Walker was amazing! He handed me an envelope that said not to open it while on HF property. Later on the bus, we learned it was an extra set of UNOFFICIAL silver medals - labeled "Host's Award Second Place Wright County Conference Meet February 20, 2016." How remarkably nice! So although the team did not place, officially, they did get recognition.

Anyway, it was a great day, and it reminded me of many of the reasons that I like Knowledge Bowl! 

Yellow Medicine East's meet was Saturday, January 23, and I did not write about it. (Our home computer was in the shop! I apologize.) We did well, but the highlight for me in one way was having the reader in Room One, who had seen all three varsity teams during the meet (usually two at a time), tell me that my students worked well together and had excellent behavior. That's enough to make a coach feel pretty good. Winning is nice, but it's good to know we have good teamwork and sportsmanship on the way there.

A week later (January 30), there was no meet at all. We all had a Saturday off. It felt odd, but a person could get used to it.

So we come to February 6, the Little Falls "Lucky Lindy" meet. Several students were missing - we only had 40 total on the bus. It felt so spacious! It also meant that we would not be having quite the teams we might otherwise use. In addition, the Little Falls meet seems to get smaller every year, so the competition wasn't quite as tough as we might like, but we did have Albany, Chanhassen, Chaska, Cloquet, Little Falls, and Pierz to compete against, representing more regions than we have previously met this year even though not as many teams from each region as we would prefer.

We had two teams in the 14-team varsity competition. The GSL Mafia started out in second place with a 48 point written. They and Chaska Purple dominated the first round questions, scoring 17-17 against Cloquet's 5. In round two, Chaska Purple earned 16 to GSL's 15, to Albany's 6. Then came lunch and change in the Room One teams. Chaska Gold moved up to Room One for the last two rounds. GSL noticed that the two Chaska teams were competing hard against each other, and that GSL could pick up a lot of points around the edges. In round three, the scores were 21-12-5. In round four, GSL continued to dominate with 19-10-4. Their high scores in the last two rounds moved them into a strong first place with 126 points, while Chaska Purple took second with 111. (Chaska Gold finished in seventh overall.) Albany had started in room four, but then competed in rooms one and two for the rest of the meet, and finished third with 89.5. 

Meanwhile, GSL's Yakuza had been very consistent, competing in room three for the whole meet, and earning 13, 8, 15, and 14 points there. They finished in fourth place with 88 points. 

Overall, it was a good meet for GSL's varsity. The Chaska coaches commented that even though it felt to us that their two teams were battling each other, that GSL was prepared to take the points that they were losing and take advantage of the situation. Our students commented that the final round felt very slow, because many questions had to be partially reread three times as teams competed to buzz in first, but buzzed in too early.

It was a great meet for GSL's JV, as well! While "The Mist" started in first place with a 42 point written, "It Don't Matter" outscored them in every round that they were against each other (12-10, 21-9, 11-6). In round four, "The Mist" dropped to room two and earned 20 points to rebound for second place. "It Don't Matter" finished first with 101.0, "The Mist" earned second with 92.5, and Little Falls finished third with 90.5.

Our junior high teams were up against an extremely tough team from Cloquet. All four of our teams were in room one at some point, but nobody was able to defeat Cloquet. (In round 2, for instance, they outscored the other two teams 24-10-2!) Cloquet finished in first with 130 points. GSL 4 finished tied for second with Pierz with 97.5 (after two good rounds in room one!). GSL also earned fourth (91.5), fifth (91.0), and sixth (83.5).

When a school has had a really excellent team who all graduated, the coach might have reason to think that the next year might involved some rebuilding. However, this team has shown a strength that I did not expect at the beginning of the year. We hope to be successful in the rest of the regular season and on into subregional and regional competition.

I did have a chance to ask the Albany coach how St. John's Prep has been doing in their region. His feeling is that they have gotten stronger all season, with Buffalo (at the beginning of the season) definitely being their low point. Should we make it to State, which we hope to do, they will definitely be tough competitors. We wish we could meet them again before that, but it doesn't seem likely to happen.

Last year, GSL went to St. Francis (on the far north end of the metro) for an excellent chance to meet some teams from the metro and St. Cloud areas. It turned out to be the only meet all year that our first-place team didn't win (we got second).  Our top three teams did well enough to win a Triple Threat award for having the strongest three teams.

On Saturday (Jan 16, 2016), we went again. The way we get better is by competing against good teams! We had seen a lot of the amazing St. Cloud region at Buffalo, but we needed to see the excellent metro teams. There were a total of 85 teams from these schools: Academy of Holy Angels, Big Lake, Buffalo, Centennial, Chanhassen, Chaska, Elk River, GSL, Holy Family, Monticello, North Branch, Princeton, Prior Lake, Rogers, St. Francis, Tartan, and Zimmerman.  Buffalo had nine teams, Chaska had six, but GSL just had four. Although almost our whole 9-12 group was able to make it, we are definitely a smaller school than most of these.

GSL had two varsity teams. GSL 2 started in fourth place with a written score of 45, and competed in room two for most of the meet, earning oral scores of 13, 13, 7, and 14. (The score of 7 was earned in room one.) Because of their good last round (and low scores in room one during the final round), they finished second with a score of 96.5! Prior Lake finished first with a score of 97.0.  The members of GSL 2 were Jacob Fehrenbach, Marisa Luchsinger, Austin Pinske, Katie Twiss, and Jake Vasek. 

GSL 1 began in room six with a written score of 36. Their high oral round score of 19 moved them up to room two and then room, where they earned 12, 5, and 14 points, for a total of 88.0 points and sixth place.  GSL 2 included Mitch Beneke, Mark Lueders, Maggie Petersen, and Dini Schweikert. GSL was the only school to have two teams in the top six! 

Meanwhile, one of our JV team started in 60th overall, but moved up with oral scores of 12, 11, 7 and 9, to finish in 25th place overall (7th in JV) with a score of 67.0.  That team included Brett Baumgarten, Jack Gepson, Jared Lokensgard, and Charles Urban. Our second JV team began in 67th and struggled with the varsity questions, earning 4, 7, 5, and 3, to finish in 32nd place in JV. The team members were Beth Cross, Megan Fehrenbach, Haley Lukes, Carlee Oberlin, and Laura Popelka.

Now to consider our most amazing award of the day: Imagine you're the coach at a big basketball tournament. Now imagine they have changed the basic rules. Instead of having five starters and the bench, you just have the five starters. You have been told to break up your bench into five people teams. Your original team and the new teams will all be playing in the tournament. They might even have to play each other at some point.

Two junior high meets, and Lac qui Parle Valley

Wow, I totally missed a few here.

First the Junior High Region 6 meet was on Monday, December 21. Mrs. Lamecker did a wonderful job of figuring out how to make our enormous junior high group into 6 credible teams. Only one of those teams didn't advance to the Region 6 & 8 meet in January, and two of our teams finished first and second.  Besides this, the kids were well behaved and when things ran a little too slow, they put up with the delays well. It was a great day!

Next, those teams advanced to the bigger Region 6 and 8 meet on Thursday, January 7. Here we met some tough competition from the far southwest of the state, but our teams did very well! Out of 45 teams, our teams finished first, sixth, eleventh, sixteenth and twenty-sixth. Our top team earned 110.0 points, while Fulda had 104.0, and Edgerton was third with 101.0.  The kids did a great job of continuing to fight for position, even when the competition was tougher.

Lac qui Parle Valley's Nerdtopia was next on Saturday, January 11. Unlike the regional meets, which had run remarkably quickly, this meet was plagued with odd problems and ran rather slowly. Most of our students were there, but not all - there was competition from WCC Honor Band and Honor Choir, as well as from family events and Robotics. 

Another big switch for seventh to ninth graders was that many ninth graders chose to move up to JV, now that they were done with the big Regional junior high meet (in which freshmen can compete). This meant that GSL only had five junior high teams without most of the freshman leadership, and also had a JV team who had never competed in JV before.

GSL had five of the twenty-seven junior high teams. New London-Spicer won the meet, and GSL's top team tied for second place. Our other teams finished 11th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd.

In JV, there were only eight teams. GSL's team was excited to finish third, even though they were all freshmen.

Varsity had seventeen teams. Here were the biggest scoring problems, and at the end of the meet only the first three oral rounds were counted, but GSL's two teams finished first and second.

With the remarkably cold weather on the road home, Lester Prairie's bus broke down, and with our missing students we were able to go pick them up! That made the ride home just a little longer, but we were glad that we were able to help them get home and stay warm!

Buffalo's Invitational is noted for its size and the excellent competition. Although Buffalo is part of the St. Cloud area service cooperative, the host invites us as well as many excellent schools from the metro area. The 57 varsity teams came from schools such as Academy of Holy Angels, Big Lake, Buffalo, Chaska, Chisago Lakes, Eden Valley-Watkins, Elk River, Foley, Kimball, Rogers, Mayer Lutheran, Melrose, Monticello, North Branch, Princeton, ROCORI, Rogers, Sartell, Sauk Rapids-Rice, St. Cloud Apollo, St. Cloud Tech, St. Francis, and our favorite competition, St. John's Prep.

The meet was won by Academy of Holy Angels with a score of 117.0 points. They had spent the entire meet in Room One, and had won or tied every round.  St. John's Prep came in second with a score of 114.0. They had started in Room Two, but moved up to Room One for the final two rounds.

GSL's Landslide came in third with a score of 110.0. They had begun the meet in Room Two, dropped to Room Three for two rounds, then returned to Room Two for the final round. Their last two rounds of 19 and 16 were enough to move them into a strong third position. Sartell was fourth (105.0), while the host, Buffalo, finished fifth (103.5) and Chaska finished sixth with 101.5.

GSL's other two teams struggled a little more, competing and finishing mid-field. Haboob ended the meet in 29th (75.0) after having been in rooms thirteen, twelve, and ten. Tsunami finished in 31st place (73.0), having competed the whole meet in rooms twelve and thirteen.

GSL was the defending champion of this meet, but in our "rebuilding" year, this was a fantastic finish for us. We are proud of these students and what they have accomplished so far!

I was lucky enough to get to talk at lunch with the St. John's Prep coach, Charles Miller. We talked about how proud we are of how hard our kids work, and how it is a little frustrating to have other schools be annoyed with us. We both feel that competing with each other gives us some of the competition we need to make our teams better. 

In addition, you might say we reviewed the history of our competition with each other, starting with 2007, which was the first time GSL made it to state (and won the Class A competition). He said it had been interesting to see us compete in AA at State the next two years and how he thought it must be odd to wonder which category we will be in when we do make it to state. At this point, St. John's Prep has won State four times, while GSL has won it three. He was also impressed that last year GSL graduated two students who had competed at State four times (and twice been part of a winning team).Overall, it was refreshing to talk to Mr. Miller, because I feel sometimes that GSL is the only school who is so disliked by many of the schools in their home region, but St. John's is certainly similar among the small schools in their region. Really I would love to see some of the schools in our region beat us, but we are not going to quit working so that they can do that. They need to win the competition by becoming stronger themselves.