Science Bowl: Year 1

Today was the first time that Wilson had participated in the Regional Science Bowl competition. After a relatively small amount of practicing, we had our members divided up into two teams: Wilson A: (grades 11 and 12--actually only grade 11 since there were no seniors on the team) Colin Corbett, Ted Sanders, James Lessert, and I (Jonathan Kadish was the alternate, but chose not to compete because he wanted to go to this weekend's speech tournament instead); and Wilson B: (grades 9 and 10) Ari Allan-Feuer, Carlin Kersch, Mark Wasserman, Elliot Firestone, and Erik Werstler. At the regional science bowl, 64 teams were participating in quiz-bowl competitions for two top spots to go to the national science bowl competition in Washington DC. The style of the competition was relatively straightforward. Questions (some of which are multiple choice) are read aloud by a moderator, and contestants buzz in to answer. "Toss Up" questions can be answered by anyone and are worth 4 points. When a team answers a toss up question correctly, they get a bonus question which only they can answer. The bonus questions are usually more difficult than the toss up questions and are worth 10 points. The only significant penalties are for saying your answer before you are recognized, and for answering incorrectly if you have buzzed in before the moderator has finished reading the question. In these cases, four points are added to the score of the opposing team.

When we arrived for the competition at the University of Portland, it turns out that the A team had gotten a fairly difficult schedule, while the B team was slated to compete against much easier teams for the first four rounds. We were put against three magnet schools and Riverdale, quite possibly the wealthiest public school in the entire state (ironically Riverdale is in my backyard, but I can't go there without paying about $10,000. Real estate prices in Riverdale are too high for it to be practical to build a school within the district limits.). To compound our problems, no one on the A team had any experience in prior science bowl competitions, while everyone except Ari on the B team did. Accordingly, our performance was mediocre. We lost our first round 58-62, after being ahead for most of the round. We got demolished in our second round (roughly 20-70), largely because of poor teamwork and avoidable penalties. Finally we found our rhythm in the third round, winning roughly 90-60 (against Riverdale, incidentally), and in the fourth we dominated 112-22. A 2-2 record wasn't enough to get us into the final elimination bracket for the afternoon. We finished a lackluster 4th out of 8 in our division.

The B team from Wilson, on the other hand, had somewhat better fortune--to immensely understate it. Their division was very odd because out of the 8 teams, 4 went 4-0, and the other 4 went 0-4. Thankfully, they were one of the 4-0 teams, and they had won by large enough margins to move into the elimination bracket. The team records in that division clearly indicated that they had played some terrible teams, and the strength of their cerebral-motive forces was about to be tested. In the first round of elimination they crushed the the West Linn A team by nearly 100 points. The next round, they had a close and bitter loss to the South Eugene A team, dropping them into the losers' bracket. For perhaps four more rounds they battled their way through the losers bracket in a combination of extremely close wins and landslides, with Ari leading the way (in one match he single-handedly won nearly 100 points). Eventually they faced South Eugene again, obliterating them by nearly 100 points. Next, they felled Westview A team by about 40 points, despite a minor and cheap protest by Westview which they tried to blow way out of proportion. The protest only would have won them 10 points. This brought them to the final match for 1st and 2nd place against the Skyview A team. By this point they were guaranteed a trip to nationals in Washington DC. Because Skyview was undefeated throughout the tournament and our B team had lost once, we would have had to beat them twice in order to win. With about 4 seconds left, we were down 68-70, but had a bonus question that could have won the round. Under the pressure the contestants couldn't find the answer, even as they racked their brains. Eventually Ari was forced to respond "supernovae" instead of "red giants." But what can I say? After completely and totally outperforming us, earning an all-expense-paid trip to Washington DC for nationals, and receiving thousands of dollars in scholarship money, the B team is certainly quite impressive.

The PIL science bowl competition is coming up soon, and we're hoping that different rules for teams sizes will allow the A team to inherit Ari (the primary scorer for the B team) and successfully obliterate the rest of Portland. There's a team limit of seven for the PIL tournament and Colin can't make it, so the A and B teams could theoreticallybe consolidated into one super-team.

News Flash!!: I just talked to Jonathan Kadish, and the speech and debate team apparently delivered some severe damage at today's tournament. He said that it looked like he and Ian won the final debate round. The future of science bowl and speech and debate looks bright indeed.