Did you know Quiz Bowl is thriving at Hotchkiss? Hotchkiss’s Quiz Bowl club has been active for the past three years, but this winter is the first time the School has offered a Quiz Bowl team as a co-curricular. The team has achieved incredible success in a very short period of time.

This academic year they placed second in the American Quiz Bowl League championship on Oct. 25, first at the VT Pre-Holiday Academic Tournament (known as PHAT) on Dec. 5, second at the Choate Quiz Bowl tournament on Jan. 23, and third in the Winter League Varsity History Bowl (Expert Division) on Feb. 15. According to the co-club head and team captain Cooper Roh '22, “Our rise has been nothing short of astronomic! Hotchkiss is ranked in the top sixty Quiz Bowl teams in the country, which is no small feat considering our three-year existence."

Hotchkiss Quiz Bowl, or “HQB” is coached by Eric Stone, instructor in math and physics.  The “A” team (analogous to Varsity) includes Yihan Ding '22, Cooper Roh '22, Jack McGlinn '22, and Sachin Umashankar '21. Stone also coaches a “B” team (analogous to JV), comprised of Huck Whittemore '22, Jonathan Cheng '23, David Xiao '23, and George Reynal '22, as well as several members of the Quiz Bowl club, many of whom have participated in tournaments. 

Stone has been coaching HQB since it was co-founded by his son, Aaron Stone ‘19, and Jack Kim ‘19, and is a seasoned high school Quiz Bowler himself. He spent 18 years coaching at his previous school in Vermont and served as vice president of VT-NEA Scholars’ Bowl, which runs the VT state tournament and associated matches.

Discussing coaching techniques, Stone explained, “In practice, we move between scrimmages and study sessions. The first objective, and this is important, is to try to instill a sense of fun, because it is fun; but it is also work. To become a better Quiz Bowl player, usually one picks one of the three big areas - science, history, or literature. As the player grows in ability, they start to branch out to other categories.” 

“Team members complement each other,” he adds, “so the team is balanced. Cooper Roh and Jack McGlinn are our history players. Yihan Ding has the arts on lockdown.  But, she can be counted on for science, mathematics, and literature as well. Sachin Umashankar rounds out our squad holding down literature and science.” 

And how does Quiz Bowl work? Teams compete in tournament events lasting one or two days. Preliminary rounds are held in the morning, while reseeding and championship brackets take place in the afternoon. The field could be as large as 32 teams, or larger. To win, a team must make it into the championship bracket by winning their preliminary matches; occasionally a team can have one loss and still advance. To become champions, the team must win all of their matches against the top teams in the field.  

“Whenever I get asked about Quiz Bowl, my go-to statement is that it is like ‘harder Jeopardy’,” offers Jack McGlinn. “Quiz Bowl questions are known as ‘tossups’ and are usually anywhere from four to six sentences in length. The tossups are written in a pyramid style, meaning that the clues start off harder and then get easier. In this sense, Quiz Bowl is a game of knowledge. In many other ways, though, it is a game of speed and recall.”

There is room for strategic playing, Cooper Roh says. “A popular strategy, known as “frauding,” involves using context clues to make an educated guess. This process of elimination play-style is highly effective. By frauding with sufficient knowledge, one can play Quiz Bowl as a game of anticipation, in which one has a guess in their head and thus only needs to hear the beginning of the next clue to confidently buzz in and beat another player.” He adds, “Quiz Bowl is a game won and lost on milliseconds. I subscribe to a theory known as momentum, in which answering a question correctly increases one’s chances of getting the next by building the team’s energy, comfort, and confidence in the game. If another team is making a comeback, it is pivotal to break their momentum, which can often be done by calling a timeout.”

Cooper Roh and Jack McGlinn also compete as individual players at “Bee” competitions (Bees are administered by a separate organization) and at Quiz Bowl, which has an individual competition category. Last fall Cooper and Jack placed third and fifth respectively in the 2020 National History Bee finals. On Feb. 25, after an extremely close and exciting final, Cooper won the prestigious U.S. History Bee. Only a few months prior, Cooper was awarded second place in the World History Bee, Nov. 2020. 

Additionally, the team has enjoyed success in the National History Bee and Bowl. Hotchkiss is invariably one of the top three teams nationally for History Bowl competitions, winning against schools with well established programs and previous national champions.

Yihan Ding shares important reasons for the team’s ascendancy. “Our success is a testament to our individual desires to improve, our sustained curiosity in the academic subjects outside of Quiz Bowl and in the classroom, and our amazing team dynamic. Very few teams share good team chemistry as we do: throughout our journey we’ve grown not only as better teammates but also as good friends.”

What does the future hold for Hotchkiss Quiz Bowl? Yihan Ding, Jack McGlinn, and Cooper Roh founded an outreach initiative called the Independent School Quizbowl League (ISQBL) last spring. The league provides a forum for boarding school players to share their experiences, create interscholastic scrimmages and practices, and help students to start Quiz Bowl organizations in the independent school environment. Members come from Hotchkiss, Choate, Andover, Exeter, and Lawrenceville.  

“We hope that in the future, Quiz Bowl can become a well established activity in boarding schools,” Yihan Ding says, “and at Hotchkiss maybe even become part of the Hotchkiss-Taft day festivities.”