It has come to my attention that not everyone in the world loves baseball. More specifically, not everyone loves to read about baseball. So this week I will not subjugate all of you to the same fate as last week. This week I am writing about a different after-school activity that was important to me during my high school career.
My junior year was probably one of the longest school years I ever experienced. I had been to prom the year before so I wasn’t really excited for another go around, this time in the fashion of staying local for the celebration (the year prior was spent on a riverboat located God knows how far away). I wasn’t expecting to play much in baseball that year and I decided I had enough running in basketball practice to do one more year. So what did I have to look forward to that year? Knowledge Bowl.
My pursuit of knowledge began with an accidental bump-in with Mr. D., Mark Domeier. I ran into him after lunch as I was walking out of the old cafeteria during 7th grade. Mary Sack just finished giving us the spiel about some competition. Well after a two-minute conversation with Domeier, I was hooked.
One of the most reliable parts of my high school experience was Knowledge Bowl. This was an out-of-school activity, kind of like Jeopardy!, only instead of competing against two other people, schools would compete against other teams from surrounding schools. Sometimes we would drive between two and three hours away to compete. That was one of the perks — the longer away the event, the more school everyone got out of attending.
Prior to the Jeopardy!-like questioning rounds, which consisted of three 45-question rounds, there was a written competition. This was a 60-question test to determine which schools started in which rooms to compete. The top three teams would compete in room one and the next three in rooms two and so forth. This round was definitely not the highlight of the competition.
Each team would comprise five to six members and be allowed five competitors during the oral rounds and six during the written rounds. At the end of the four rounds, the top ten teams would get acknowledged and the top three teams would get a trophy and ribbons for all the members on that team.
Some schools would bring as many as four or five teams, and some of the schools could barely man a five-man squad. NRHSEG usually fell somewhere in between. I started competing in Knowledge Bowl in seventh grade and I competed all the way until my graduation. All the way I lettered and won multiple achievement awards for my continued pursuit of knowledge.
It’s like my dad often told me as I was growing up: you should always be hungry, hungry for knowledge.