It was brutal! The late, great Tina Turner was our downfall,”
Upper School (US) Quiz Bowl Team Coach and Math Teacher Chip Rollinson said about the 2024 High School Quiz Show finals. The returning champions, this year’s US Quiz Bowl Team was comprised of Team Captain Bradford Kimball, Ana Chrysa Maravelias, Henry Kirk, and Aaron Rai (all ’24) and coached by Mr. Rollinson and US English Teacher Sam Crihfield.
Filmed in late January, the team’s televised journey began on February 17 with a first-round win over Saint John’s. Next came a victory over South High Community School on April 6 and a rematch of last year’s final against Mansfield in the semifinals on May 4. Their season culminated in a final match on May 18 against Lexington High.
Each matchup in the High School Quiz Show is made up of four unique rounds: the “toss-up” round, the “head-to-head” round, the “category” round, and the “lightning” round. After a category round that didn’t go their way, the US team was ultimately defeated by Lexington in the finals.
The first category the US team selected was “You Had Me at Guten Tag” and answered four out of the five questions correctly. For their second category, the team chose “Simply the Best.” However, the category wasn’t what the team had expected, Mr. Rollinson said.
“Our team thought it was going to be questions about best pictures or other award-winning things, and it wasn’t. It was questions about Tina Turner, a music icon who passed away last year. We quickly learned that high school kids don’t know too much about her, so that category was like quicksand, any team that picked that would have just sunk in it, and we did.”
Mr. Rollinson explained that luck is sometimes part of the game.
“If Lexington had picked ‘Simply the Best,’ we might have won; so there’s a luck aspect of it, and that’s the way the game’s setup—a bit of luck of the draw.”
Bradford Kimball had a different perspective, he said.
“Look, good teams and players don’t need luck; they make their own luck. Fundamentally we got a little unlucky, but it was my mistakes, my category selection, and some decisions I made about whether to submit answers or not that ultimately led us to the point where bad luck could take us out.”
Bradford was proud of the team’s second-place finish but didn’t meet his own expectations, he clarified.
“We are a program that has established a tradition of winning, and when you win a title and you don’t win it the next year, that’s a failure. I’m proud of how we did, but we did not achieve our goals. Lebron James would say the same about losing in the finals.”
A new addition to the team, Ana Chrysa, turned pressure to succeed into confidence, she said.
“I think some pressure came from the people on the team ourselves,” she said. “I think that’s the case in most circumstances; expectations are self-inflicted. I think Bradford and Henry felt it more because they experienced the success of last year. It was most evident when we were telling in a round, but because the team knew we could succeed, we had the push and the drive to do better.”
The team, a tight-knit group of friends, helped Ana Chrysa grow this spring, she said.
“I don’t think it’s just our trivia knowledge,” she explained. “This year and last year, it’s been such a close group of friends, which has made communication and trust so easy because we have it intrinsically by being friends. That’s helped us in our practice, especially for me because I’m someone who likes to be certain in myself, but they made it OK to be uncertain and challenged me to embrace that.”
Aaron mostly felt internal pressure to help the team, he said.
“We won last year, and you don’t want to be the reason that the team loses,” he said. “You just want to do your job, as Bill Belichick says. You want to win, and you want to win just as much every year.”
To Aaron, the team’s secret to success this year and last was not only their diverse areas of expertise, but their buzzer skills.
“It’s about doing the little things right. You can’t account for talent too much in a couple of months [of training], but you can account for how you play the game. Our attention to detail was definitely among the best in the state.”
Mr. Crihfield is proud of the team’s success these past years and, with open spots to fill, is excited about what the future of the team holds, he said.
“The future of the team is kind of wide open to the new generation. I’m excited by that because I think Bradford and Henry, and everyone else on the team, have created this legacy and gotten everyone interested. I think the composition of the team could be completely different from here on out.”
Trying out for the team is half the battle, Mr. Crihfield said. He encourages every rapt student to audition, stressing the importance of having a multifarious team.
“There’s no one profile of a ‘trivia person.’ A strong trivia team is composed of people who have strengths in different areas. One thing that we’re hoping and looking for next year and beyond is getting people with complementary strengths. Don’t be intimidated or feel like you need to know everything to participate; if you have deep knowledge in one or two particular subjects, that could be super useful.”
