Knowledge Bowl Team heads to State again

The Cascade High School Knowledge Bowl team will fight to maintain their title of state 1A champion when they compete at the state competition on March 11 held at Wenatchee High School.

Regionals took place on February 15, also at Wenatchee High School. Although each school could only send one team, Cascade’s program is so strong that all three of its top teams have finished highly at the preliminary meets.

The “A Team” at Regionals was made up of seniors Haakon Scheibler, captain, Evan Butruille and Quentin Farrell, as well as junior Adrian Renner-Singer and freshman Ava Schmidt. Senior Antonio Aurilio is the final team member who will be at state.

In Knowledge Bowl, teams are tested, head-to-head against two other teams per round, with questions that range widely— topics in science, math, literature, history, geography, and current events. The first team to buzz in and answer correctly gets the point, and if the first team gets it wrong, other teams have a chance to try. Beyond knowledge, to do well, it also takes confidence in one’s knowledge and an ability to speculate where a question is heading because a team can buzz in before the question is fully asked.

The Cascade team has displayed skill by dominating at every competition of the season. The top team membership varied a bit from competition to competition, with the exception of Scheibler, who is, by far, the points leader. An example of his ability was when he quickly gave the list of assassinated U.S. presidents in chronological order. How many people can come up with, “Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy” in a few seconds?

Scheibler and the other teammates can’t help but smile when they gain a point on a particularly obscure subject, such as the Thirty Years’ War ending with the Peace of Westphalia.

Scheibler’s ability has led him to consider being on Jeopardy someday. “I do want to be on Jeopardy. There is a lot of overlap, but they are in very different formats. I've always liked to learn about lots of different things, so it was a natural progression for me to enjoy different trivia competitions to put that knowledge to use.”

All the same, it’s a team sport, and each team member contributes answers in their areas of expertise, and the team often confers about a strong guess, because no points are lost for an incorrect answer.

Four team members participate in each round, so the others hang out in the wings, ready to sub in, either halfway through a round or at the beginning of another round. Each round has fifty questions, and there are three oral rounds and one written round.

In the written round of the fifty multiple-choice questions over six pages, the CHS team strategy is each person answers one page, and then they swap pages, so by the end everyone has seen all the pages and they have a few minutes to discuss the toughest questions.

State is run a little differently, with preliminary elimination rounds in the morning, and semifinals and a championship round in the afternoon.

“There is always extremely strong competition at state,” said Knowledge Bowl coach and science teacher Dayle Massey. “We took first place last year, but it required winning a tiebreaker in the semifinals and a come from behind win by one point in the finals.”

Scheibler said that Cascade probably has a similar practice schedule to other schools, and a similar knowledge base. “In my opinion, the biggest difference between just having a lot of knowledge and actively being good at Knowledge Bowl is the ability to predict where a question is going, and ring in early,” he said. “At State the teams that make it to the afternoon probably could get 75% or more of the questions right if given unlimited time, so ringing in earlier and reading the questions is necessary to beat the best teams.”

Farrell was optimistic. “We have pretty good chances to win. We have a solid team. We had a hard time figuring out who would go because there are so many team members that could go to state and do well if we were allowed to send more than one team.”