Quiz Bowl Club Represents: Places Fifth
By Krystyna Wamboldt
Staff Writer

Let’s make things clear right from the get-go: we were all accepted into what is perhaps the nation’s best college. We are bright and engaging kids (excuse me, young adults). We know our stuff. But there is inevitably the fact that there are always those exceptional minds that top the rest, no matter how great the rest may be.

No, I do not necessarily mean people who are “smarter” than everyone else. I’m talking about those students who push themselves continually to learn the extra fact, the piece of knowledge that “just may come in handy one day.”

Such people are those dedicated enough to be part of the Quiz Bowl Club.

Quiz Bowl, for those of you who are not familiar with it, is an intercollegiate team trivia competition, similar to College Bowl (once a TV show, now a resurging collegiate activity, especially in the California area). Such academic competition goes easily hand in hand with debate (the difference is that of rhetoric versus recall), and has been growing in popularity.

Participants create teams of four who compete against other regional schools in tournaments where they are asked questions about anything from historical figures to literature to pop culture. You name it, they have a question on it.

Here’s an example: “His sons were Polyneices and Eteocles, and his eldest daughter was Antigone. His father was Laius, his mother was Jocasta, and his wife was also Jocasta. Name this Greek king whose name was not ‘Rex.’”

Interesting way to spend the weekend, eh? I talked with the club’s founders and presidents, Derek Wilairat ’06 and Andrew Lytle ’06 to learn more about what makes Quiz Bowl tick.

The duo both came from high school Quiz Bowl programs, which differ from the college level in that they are run by teachers, not students. Wilairat, for example, considered it his top extra-curricular activity, and went with his team to roughly five tournaments per year during high school. So, when the two met freshman year living on Mudd second floor, they got together to plan a club for Pomona students to enjoy.

“It’s a way to convert all that hard studying into some sort of fun,” Wilairat says. And he’s not alone in his reasoning. The club has around twenty active members, and just returned from a tournament hosted by UCLA on October 4, Pomona finished fifth out of ten teams, ahead of three USC teams, UC Irvine, and a Stanford team.

In their short history together, the team has already faced the challenges of Quiz Bowl in the big leagues; in last year’s tournament at Stanford, they competed against a married couple from Berkeley, a medical resident and librarian, and various other people twice their age. According to Lytle, “A lot of people never outgrow it.”

I asked Wilairat and Lytle how they train for their competitions, figuring it must be more than just playing round after round of Trivial Pursuit. “Studying hard for your classes,” was one suggestion of Wilairat’s. If that’s not the most appealing option to you, Lytle explained that there are ways to get around it, such as using packs of questions put together by National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) as examples of what to expect. These can be found on the group’s website, www.naqt.com.

Pomona’s Quiz Bowl Club is expecting to attend a tournament this November at Caltech and one this spring at USC. They will also, I am told, be hosting the second annual intramural Quiz Bowl tourney for those of us Pomona students who want to give it a shot. So at least for one day, all students can form teams, win prizes, and know first hand what it’s like to be trivia-savvy.

And by the way, his name was Oedipus.