The academic challenge team competed at the Small Schools National Academic Quiz Tournament in Chicago on the weekend of April 30, placing 17 out of 82 schools and finishing as the top-ranked team from Ohio

Junior Swathi Srinivasan as well as seniors Rachelle Magaram, Lin-ye Kaye and Henry Grasso made up the BHS team.

Their adviser, science teacher Karla Freede, explained how the competitions work.

“Academic Challenge is a lightning fast trivia game with buzzers,” she wrote in an email. “Teams can get extra points by ringing in with an answer before the reader finishes. So it’s about knowing the content and having confidence to ring in fast.”

Srinivasan described the tournament as intense.

“We competed against some of the best teams in the country,” she said.

“The biggest challenge was the buzzer battle,” she continued. “We found ourselves very close to answering at the same time as other teams, and if we’d have buzzed faster, we could have won those matches.”

“Sometimes you’re playing against teams that know more than you,” she added. “I don’t think that was the case in this instance. They weren’t necessarily better, they were just faster.”

Practices this year were held Tuesdays and Thursdays from August to April in Freede’s room.

“The team meets in my room weekly to read through old questions used in previous tournaments,” Freede wrote. “We have a buzzer system, so they treat it like a real game when we practice.”

From experience, team members know what questions are more likely to come up in competition, and they focus on studying those topics. Additionally, they each have their own field of expertise that they study independently.

“Specialization [is key],” Magaram said. “Everyone should have a different topic.”

“For example, Henry is great at history and Lin-ye is knowledgeable about literature,” Srinivasan said.

“You cannot predict how the questions will come up, but there are some topics that are pretty consistent,” Magaram said.

Freede is proud of the team’s performance in Chicago.

“I really thought the team did awesome,” she wrote. “Making Finals at the National level was really exciting. The team overall got faster on the buzzers and increased confidence.”

She hopes to build on this year’s accomplishments.

“Next year I am hoping to [bring the team to] more tournaments leading up to Nationals,” she wrote. “I would also like a more varied team. This year the team was so small we had to cancel tournaments that a single key member could not attend. I hope to have enough students to vary who competes.”