Before the Quiz Bowl team competes Feb. 14, advisor Peter Dangerfield hopes the team will do well in the tournament so they can advance to the playoffs. 

“My goal for this team is to finish in the top fifteen percent, which would definitely make the playoffs and then probably finish in the top sixteen teams,” Dangerfield said. “I would love to see us finish top eight, but that’s shooting for the moon.” 

According to captain and junior Kaylee Quick, the team has qualified for Nationals before even going to the tournament.

“Run for the Roses (a 64 team competition) is really big, it’s a lot of fun. A couple of years ago, that’s where we qualified for nationals at,” Quick said. “This year we’ve already qualified and it’s not likely we will qualify again. It’s just a really good chance for us to practice some before we go to nationals.” 

According to sophomore Truman Fillbrandt, competing gives him a chance to utilize the information that he knows and would otherwise not need.

“It’s just a fun environment for one, and I get to use what I know which otherwise would basically go to waste, because it’s just random knowledge about capitals and other things,” Fillbrandt said.

According to Dangerfield, when students compete they develop a desire to answer the question first.

“I imagine they like the competition aspect, they like the euphoria of answering a question before anyone else does, and I know that after every question they  stop and talk about the topic a lot,” Dangerfield said.

Dangerfield said he will put four students in a team that have a vast combined spectrum of understanding of topics, for the upcoming tournament.

“We’re going to try to get four kids on a team that have as wide a range of knowledge and try to put them together in one team,” Dangerfield said. “Ideally, I’ll take our top kids against top kids from other schools pretty much any day of the week, in hopes that we can compete with them.”

According to Quick she wants to recruit more people for the team to fill in the lack of students created after last years seniors graduated.

“I’ve just been trying to be a leader, trying to get more people to come to Quiz bowl,” Quick said. “It’s also really my hope for the team, as well that we replace last year’s seniors who made up the bulk of our team. We saw a very small representation of underclassmen on the team last year.”

Quick said that she hopes the team will be able to observe what areas they need to focus on more.

“I’m hoping that we can all take away something that we need to study more, a subject area where we were lacking and that we can bolster our knowledge of that going forward,” Quick said.