Southern's High School Quiz Bowl season is at a close. We had an up and down season this year. I would like to share some of our results from our competitions.
Southern started their season on the radio. The first competition each year begins on B 103 against other local schools. These matches typically happen at 8:30am and are finished by 9am. This competition involves only 3 students from our school versus 3 students from one other school. Teams alternate questions to see who can get the most correct. The team with the most correct after a series of 3 questions is the winner of the match. Most matches are 2 correct to 1 correct, but in the case of a tie, each team is given a chance to get one more correct. This continues until one gets a question right and the other team misses. Sadly, Southern lost both their opening round match and their consolation round match and were eliminated from the tournament.
Southern's second competition took us to HTRS for the annual Pioneer Conference Tournament on March 18th. Southern had a successful day and received 4th place amongst the 20 teams present. This was perhaps the highlight of our season as we did not do quite as well the rest of the season.
Our third competition continued nearly a week and a half later, on March 25th, when we attempted to reach the state competition. This competition is called the ESU5 tournament. Each school from the ESU5 region sends one of 2 schools to Hebron to compete in a double-elimination tournament. This competition is unique in that it is the only type of competition in the state the allows schools from all different sizes to face one another in the same bracket. For example, Southern had to defeat schools from the size of Meridian to the size of Fairbury and even Beatrice to qualify for the state tournament. Unfortunately, this event also fell on the same day as State FFA and an Indoor Crete track meet. This led to many of the local schools not having their full teams available. This hurt smaller schools more than the larger ones. This may have resulted in Beatrice and Freeman being the top 2 teams that qualified for state this year. We did great, but could not manage to beat these tough teams this season.
Southern concluded its competetive season at JCC for the annual MUDECAS tournament on April 13th. This is often the largest competition and contains approximately 32 teams scattered all over Southeast Nebraska. It is also often the toughest opponents Southern sees each season. This year, we faced stiff competition and were unable to place in our final competition.
Next week, we will give our parents, staff, and our Junior High Quiz Bowl students a chance to compete in a full evening competition. This will happen on Tuesday, May 19th at 6:00pm. We hope to see many people show up to see who are our trivia masters!