Knowledge Bowl competed at Lynden Highschool for their first competition on Wednesday, Nov. 8. Placing first overall, one of Glacier Peak’s teams, The Knowledge Ballers, won their first competition. With Ajay Sheena, Andrew Leffingwell, Archit Kumar, and Diego Cumplido as their team captain, the Knowledge Ballers put their expertise and quickness of mind to the test.
“I feel like, all in all, we had a really good mix of not only knowing the questions, knowing the answer to the questions, but also buzzing in quickly because that’s a key part of knowledge bowl. If you don’t buzz in quickly, then the other team has a chance to snatch the points away before, even if you know it, the other team does it faster than you do, you’re not going to have a chance to get those points. So, I think as a group, but me especially, we were very fast about buzzing in and being able to beat the other teams to the punch, so to say,” Cumplido said.
Along with buzzing in quickly, the Knowledge Ballers also had a wide variety of knowledge among their group that helped them to win. “Everybody answers questions because you need a wide variety of knowledge. Everyone has their own specialty so, there’s always room for at least one of us to know the answer. For example, Ajay was really a master at like history and literature. And there were quite a few questions about books that I never even heard of that somehow Ajay had not only heard of, but had read and so he knew the answer, which is always very impressive. But there’s also questions about, you know, AP Chemistry, I never took AP Chemistry, but all three of the other people in my team did. So, they were able to answer questions regarding that topic and those were just some of the examples, there’s lots of others,” Cumplido said. “I mean, some of the questions I could have never answered in a million years. You know it really depends. Some of them were instant off the top of my head.”
Although other teams may not have gotten scores as high as the Knowledge Ballers, fun was still had as Akshara Govil, a sophomore on the knowledge bowl team, said. “Personally, for my team, I think we did better than expected. We got, I believe, 11 questions on the first round which is way better than we expected. And we just had really fun overall. Yeah, knowledge bowl, this Lynden competition is one of the most fun competitions of the year because we get to go on, basically, like a road trip and go to Lynden and we even stop at Safeway on the way. And then so we just go there and have fun, while also trying to be smart,” Govil said.
Kate Rhoades, a sophomore on the team, expressed her opinion on knowledge bowl. “I just thought it would be fun, especially cause it’s just, it’s just trivia. Which is really, if you like trivia, you’re going to like knowledge bowl. And it’s fun to slam the buzzer really hard.”
When asked if she would recommend knowledge bowl to other people she replied with, “I absolutely would. Especially, because you can pick, well, sort of, pick who you have in your teams. If you have friends, who, especially if you’re all good in different subjects and you guys form a team, you get to hang out with your friends and then play trivia with your friends basically. And you get to travel and get out of school,” Rhoades said.
With their first competition over, students are taking their work seriously. The team has created a spreadsheet to analyze the questions and subjects that students struggled on and need to study. Getting straight to work, the knowledge bowl team prepares for their next competition in December.