The beginning of the 2023-2024 season is upon Princess Anne’s highly successful scholastic bowl team. Led by coach Jason Tomik, this year’s goal is to follow in the footsteps of a very successful 2022-2023 season and maintain their winning streak from previous years.
A season of scholastic bowl begins with the Beach District from November to January, competing against the 10 other high schools around the city. At the end of January is the regional tournament, where the teams of the region compete for one spot to get into the state tournament in February.
Last year, the Cavaliers went 9-0 in the regular season, won both regionals and states and made it to Nationals, where they finished 49th of 304 of the best scholastic bowl teams in the country and the top performer of the team, Trevor Darr, finished 98th out of the 1500 individuals. On top of this success, the team won “Battle of the Brains,” a televised tournament with teams around Virginia, beating the Knights of Cave Spring High from Roanoke and winning $10,000, making them the first team from Hampton Roads to win the competition.
This year’s season began on Nov. 13, and the team currently has three matches under their belt, all wins against Cox, Landstown, and First Colonial. However, the most difficult match that they have on their radar is against Ocean Lakes, the team that Tomik lists as “always our best competition.” PA’s match this year with OL is Dec. 14 and will be held at PA. As for the regional tournament this year, PA will now need to beat OL to advance to the state tournament, since OL moved into 5A (the region that PA is in).
The format for scholastic bowl at a high school level is similar to what you would see on a television quiz show, with some changes that make it more of a true competition, rather than a product geared towards entertainment. “literature, science, and history are about 75% of the questions (25% each),” Tomik explains, “with about 10% math and the rest electives.” The matches are an hour long and 100 questions, with four players per team competing at a time. Out of the six rounds, four of them are buzzer questions, where you have to quickly buzz in before your opponent answers the question, while two of them are team sections where your whole team gets a total of ten questions to answer.
During the match, much of the responsibility of the coach is to oversee the strategy of which four students to put in each round, as they hope to put in students that each cover all potential subjects. For example, instead of four students who all like history, the coach will try to choose one student who specializes in history, one in classical literature, one in science, and one in math.
Although it is sometimes not considered as serious as typical high school sports, Darr describes that scholastic bowl is a labor-intensive discipline, and to be at the top of the leaderboards like PA requires extensive practice. In Darr’s opinion, “the most dedicated scholastic bowl competitor puts in just as much time and effort as your average college football recruit,” and the top-of-the-ladder competitors are “kids who are plugging 17-18 hours a day into studying.”
To practice and prepare for the many matches that they face throughout the season, members of the team will rehearse buzzing in early by using old sets of questions from previous years, as well as dig into Wikipedia rabbit holes. Darr adds “I do a lot of recitation exercises, saying the same thing over and over again in my head to nail it in.”
To see the team’s schedule for this season, click here.
