Last year, Solon High School’s Academic Challenge team went on TV and made it to the national competition. In the interview below, Peter Bergman, Academic Challenge’s advisor, details the club’s achievements and his thoughts on its future goals.
Q: Could you give us an overview of what Academic Challenge is?
A: Yeah, so the activity itself that we practice or engage in is the club is actually called Quizbowl, and Quizbowl is an academic competition that involves [putting] two teams of four players against each other. And they answer questions that will range from science, history, literature, fine arts, as well as pop culture, current events, geography and other academic categories. And you know, essentially there’s kind of two aspects to it. One is being quick to answer, being able to answer quickly and also then knowing enough in depth about topics that you can also answer on earlier clues than other teams. So that’s Quizbowl.
So in the club, we primarily practice for Quizbowl tournaments and then another aspect of what we do then is every couple of years, we have the opportunity to go on the local television show that is called Academic Challenge. And that’s kind of the origins of why the club is called Academic Challenge. And so we do the TV show, and it’s [great]. It’s a really interesting and unique experience. So we do that, that’s kind of a highlight that comes up every couple years, but the real kind of core activity is Quizbowl.
Q: What were some of the highlights from last year?
A: [There were] a lot of highlights from last year. First of all, we had a really cohesive and dedicated main group that worked together very well. And that was really a great highlight… And that included two teams that would go out to competition. We had, sort of a so-called A-Team. And then we would often enter a second team in competition. So that would be our soul and B. And both teams were just really cohesive and really came together… a very, very successful season including a couple tournament victories as well as a second place finish in both major state tournaments– which was extremely impressive, a great accomplishment. And then appearances at the [national] tournament that took place in Atlanta, and a good solid showing there.
Q: What are some of the opportunities the team is going to be taking this year?
A: Definitely Saturday tournaments, with competition schedules starting to get going. We’ll be doing a lot of competing in the Saturday tournaments– that’s sort of our bread and butter. We’re looking into potentially doing some more frequent but less intense competition[s] with schools, kind of doing a scrimmage league thing… some of the activities that we had done before COVID [that] kind of got sidelined, and we’re trying to bring [them] back… [We] tend to, for our own tournaments, we travel a fair bit throughout the state of Ohio, and what the league does is [it] keep things a little bit closer [to] Cuyahoga County. [It] allows us to just have… a couple matches because on a Saturday tournament we’ll go and usually play somewhere between seven and ten matches. Each match usually lasts about half an hour. So that’s the main thing. We’re looking forward to the other big thing that is going to be a highlight this year, which is that we host several times during the year– we host tournaments here at Solon as well, and so we’ll be hosting a fall tournament as well a winter tournament, and those events are only possible because our students come together and really coalesce, provide the framework of a staff that, without which, it’s impossible to run a good tournament.
Q: How do you think Academic Challenge will grow in the future?
A: Yeah, interesting question. I think it’s going to continue. It’s an extremely important outlet for our kids, and we have a program in the middle school as well. So I think every year it just gets a little bit more exposure to kids coming up through the middle school, and then every year too– we’re a fairly small program, but I think it’s extremely important for the kids involved with it. But every year we tend to pick up one or two kids that are already here at school but for whatever reason didn’t join up the first couple years or so, so we might pick up a junior there, a sophomore here, or sometimes even a senior, and that’s kind of what I’m hoping for is that we can continue to expand, not only to kids that are very familiar with academic competition, but kids that might enjoy the subject areas. They might know a lot about history. They might know a lot about literature or art, but they don’t necessarily have a background in academic competition, and we want to appeal to them as well. So that’s one area where we’ve had success and we’re just hoping to continue that.
To get a student’s perspective on all of this, see the following interview with club member Angela Sun.
Academic Challenge is always open to receiving new members. The club meets on Tuesdays and Fridays, from 3-5 p.m. For more information, visit Bergman in Room 102 or contact him at [email protected].
