Toni Radcliffe ’14, Timmy Freese ’14: EAQT, the Episcopal Academy Quiz Team, began this year under the leadership of Nile Hardy ‘14 and Thomas Meltzer ‘14 along with faculty-advisor Cassandra Keith, Upper School librarian.
“It started when Nile and I played Sporkle, [free online trivia,] together in the library and figured it would be fun to form a group to do quiz competitions together,” commented Meltzer.
Hardy remarked, “I heard of other schools that had ‘quiz bowl’ teams so I figured we should make one because we have a wealth of talent and kids who are committed and would take it seriously.”
However, to form the group Hardy, Meltzer, and Keith first needed the curiosity from the student body. Keith noted, “Nile and Thomas asked me last spring if I wanted to be the faculty advisor. So we started with the club fair and had a lot of interest.”
Once it received student interest, the team was official and initiated internal competitions. “We looked up information on the National Academic Quiz Team website,” stated Keith, “and I was in touch with the contact from the website and asked about visiting other teams from other schools. We decided to do in-house competitions with partners or smaller groups because we were concerned about competing at the national level in our first year with a lot of our team members in a very important year in high school: junior year.”
Meltzer explained the process: “Nile and I have been setting up tournaments and collecting questions. We have a theme every month where we focus on one type of question. For example, we’ll focus on history one month, then sports, then music.”
Hardy noted, “We plan on having an individual competition this upcoming January to kick off the first year of the club. Within our first year we plan on having competitions within our club—solo, double, and triple competitions. We’ll watch Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and do ‘Sporkle Quizzes’ as well. In year two we plan on making it into some actual competitions and travel to tournaments.”
While the team will only compete in “in-house” competitions this year, the goal is to eventually reach national level competitions. Keith stated, “Our hope is to be at the national level.” Meltzer explained his hopes for the club’s future, noting, “I envision the club competing in national competitions as an extremely competitive team.”
The group has already met twice and met great earnestness and excitement from its members. Jeffery Hu ’14 noted, “Our goal is to be a competitive team in our competitions next year.” John Flynn ’14 remarked, “I’m very excited because the quiz bowl team has some great potential.”
Though it is a new club, things are looking up for the future of the team. Hardy commented, “I would hope people continue the legacy. I bet the club will live on because we have kids at the school who are motivated. It may end up becoming a very competitive club or people could join just to have fun during the meetings but the ultimate goal is to help people learn some interesting facts and challenge their minds.”