The Academic League moderator’s voice echoed inside Westview’s library, asking team captain Eileen Terral (10) to spell the word yellow in French, Feb. 27.
She had buzzed in before anyone in Del Norte had, now she just had to answer the question.
“J-A-U-N-E,” Terral answered.
She let out a breath of relief when the word “Correct,” followed, and leaned back in her chair.
Academic League is a tournament style team-based trivia competition. The answers are short, ranging from three to five seconds to answer. According to secretary Kyla Ho (12), reaction time and fast buzzing is an asset in the game.
“If you know all the questions but can’t buzz fast enough, it’s all useless,” Ho said.
Ho said the match against Del Norte was close in the beginning, but both varsity and JV ended up losing 122-45 and 77-46, respectively. Despite the loss, Ho said the team learned to have more confidence in themselves.
“At a point we were overtaking them, [but] once we let our guard down, they overtook us immediately,” Ho said. ”I believe we learned a good amount from our Del Norte game. Our main issue competing against Del Norte was their ability to buzz quicker. Everyone on our team knew the answers, but [we] were much slower because of our hesitance and lack of trust in ourselves. It’s hard to be confident in your answers and that’s something that all of us need to overcome.”
Ho said the team began practicing in late December and jumped into their weekly Thursday tournaments after winter break.
Terral’s JV team brings their own specialty to the game, tackling the questions they are well versed in.
“Everyone on our team has their own strengths,” Terral said. “Everyone plays to their strengths. For example, I’m the only one on the team who does the French questions because no one else knows how to do French entirely. People would expect me to be able to answer all the French questions, and they wouldn’t need to study that. Different people have their own specialties.”
Even though they lost, Terral said she was thankful for the experience to use in future games.
“Overall, I think my team played really well, even if we didn’t get as many tossups as we could,” Terral said. “There was a lot of good teamwork, we got a lot of experience, and we did some adapting.”
Terral joined Academic League in her freshman year and said she was drawn in by the welcoming environment as well as her thirst for knowledge.
“I’ve always loved learning, so joining Academic League is my way of expressing that,” Terral said. “When I first joined I didn’t really know anyone, but everyone was really nice and the atmosphere was so friendly. Even though there were a bunch of people who had so much knowledge to share, there were no feelings of ‘I’m better than you because I’m better at this game.’”For future games, Ho said her team will work on their weak areas.
“[I plan on] reading the news, studying French, and working on our weak areas, especially buzzer speed,” Ho said. “Since we don’t have access to many Academic League packets, we sometimes use the last line of middle school quizbowl packets to work on buzzer speed. Another thing we do is scour wikipedia articles and quora for weird tidbits of information.”
