I just received my championship ring from the Panasonic Academic Challenge. It’s pretty awesome.

I need to write more questions! Also, if you’re in Aegis and you’re reading this, go write questions! Also, if you’re not in Aegis and you intend to be, send in your application!

So…I would be writing this yesterday, but we kinda had some…issues…getting home yesterday. Let’s just say that we got to the Orlando airport at 6 AM Eastern, and arrived at O’Hare at 11 PM Central.

In the interest of brevity (I may expand later), TEAM ILLINOIS WON!

I now have $2500 more in scholarship money, a shiny new digital camera, and soon, a custom-fitted championship ring.

Yeah, so this afternoon I’m leaving for the land of the orange, mockingbird, sabal palm, porpoise, key lime pie, and West Indian manatee. Yes, I mean Florida. (Wikipedia tells me those are all official symbols of Florida. Wait, West Indian manatee?!)

Ah, the Panasonic Academic Challenge. Such a misunderstood tournament. See, at Panasonic, it’s not really about top-notch quizbowl. It’s about decent quizbowl against the best players in the country, spending time between matches in the Magic Kingdom, and getting a lot of free meals courtesy of Panasonic. See, everyone gets all upset about the quizbowl itself not being ideal. But honestly, it should be thought of as a TV game show, minus the TV show part. Yes, it’s a national championship, and I even think that becoming champion reflects upon the strength of each state’s top players. For the most part. (Caveat: due to having six teams in the finals, and all the matches being drawn randomly, some good teams don’t do so well, and some bad teams do better than they should.)

But really, it ain’t so bad. It’s Panasonic trying to do something good for high school academics (and perhaps more importantly, to show they’re doing something good for high school academics). This year is the twentieth anniversary of the tournament, so they’ve been around since about the beginning of many high school quizbowl circuits nationally.

Well, off to Panasonic! May Team Illinois do as well as we can, and may that be to win! Twenty-nine states…

I didn’t keep as good a record as yesterday, and the day was a lot shorter, so I’ll be pretty terse.

Nick was going to pick me up at 7:10 this morning. I woke up at 7:15, and was out the door at 7:20, though I wasn’t really particularly awake. I bought a bagel and coffee at the overpriced hotel eatery. Then I refilled the coffee and drank it again. 32 ounces of coffee and vigorous walking helped me regain alertness, though I didn’t perform all that well regardless. Same as last year, actually; I was substantially worse on Sunday both years.

We were seeded fifth after yesterday, which we were really happy about. (Two teams went 9-1. As you recall, we went 8-2.) Maybe we could have placed higher had we not let ourselves get raped by State College A. Oh well, fifth in such a strong field is certainly an accomplishment. As we walked to our first match, I remarked, “This is a change. Now we’re the giants; everyone’s out to get us.”

The format was double-elimination. Placing depended on how many rounds you played until being eliminated, unless you were in the top four, in which case it got more complicated later to determine third place and the championship.

Round 1: New Trier 325 – Arcadia A 60

Round 2: New Trier 390 – Georgetown Day 230

Round 3: Walt Whitman 300 – New Trier 185

Round 4: New Trier 295 – Chattahoochee 220

Round 5: Troy 345 – New Trier 265

We tied for 13th place with seven other teams. That’s better than we’ve ever done at NAQT Nationals, and in the largest and hardest field yet. We’re happy.

Besides, we have PACE Nationals at Ann Arbor in two weeks, and I’m traveling with Team Illinois to the PAC national tournament in Orlando a bit after. PACE has a smaller field than NAQT, but all the elite teams will be there. It will be scary.

Ah, quizbowl. An intense mental activity against the best teams in the nation, with some of the brightest, most knowledgeable, most…interesting high-schoolers. A few quotes of the day follow, without comment.

“Damn, that’s good bread.”

“I was minister of her interior all night!” (after hearing that Sarkozy was previously minister of the interior)

“Wait, I said, ‘Grab Robert’s nutsack’?” (Nick asked confusedly)

“My whole life’s an Irish jig; is that a crime?”

“Eat this, toll man!” (to the guy manning the hotel’s toll booth)

“What has a hardness of 4400?”
“That’s what she asked!”

“Do you think I could beat Yao Ming if I had an axe?”

—

Oh yeah, we had a tournament too.

Our first match was against Novi A (Novi, MI), a team about which we’ve heard a lot of very good things; we were a bit worried before we started, but we beat them fairly comfortably. Our second match was against James Island Charter (Charleston, SC), and it was an extremely close match that we won by only 10 points.

We then had a bye, our first of four, and saw Maine South with a bye of their own.

Our third match was against Minnetonka A (Minnetonka, MN). As the tournament was power matched, every match was against a team with an equal record, so each match should theoretically get harder and harder. As we just barely won our 1-0 match, we were afraid about our 2-0 match, but beat Minnetonka soundly.

We then had another bye, seeing Maine South yet again as we hung around doing nothing. Our fourth match was against Wilmington Charter A (Wilmington, DE), and at one point we had a lead of about 250 points. We ended up squandering this lead terribly and losing by five points, which was a huge disappointment as we headed to lunch. Oh well, we were 3-1.

After lunch (at McDonald’s, as Reinstein almost ran into about five other cars, again…) we played East Lansing A (East Lansing, MI) and beat them by about 100 points, to become 4-1. We also won our next match against Garfield Heights (Garfield Heights, OH), and then we had another bye to relax.

To advance to Sunday’s playoff rounds, we had to go at least 6-4. We were 5-1 by this point, so we were mainly trying to win as many as possible, instead of being concerned about simply making it to the next day. (Record and points scored helps determine seed going into the playoffs.)

Our next match was against the 5-1 Livingston (Livingston, NJ), who we figured would be very good. They weren’t bad, but we beat them by 340 points, which surprised even us.

Our next round was our fourth and last bye. We were 6-1 at this point, so we were guaranteed to make it into the playoffs. It was all gravy from this point…

So we had some serious deliberations and agreed to split an onion pizza. We got it just before the next match began, so Robert and I were busy inhaling a slice each before the match began. And it was against…Eden Prairie A (Eden Prairie, MN). They were one of the most talked-about teams before Nationals, because they had very impressive stats throughout their season, but only against Minnesota teams. Basically, everyone knew they were very good, but had no idea how very good. (There’s a huge difference between “very good” and “very, very good.”) We ended up beating them by a fair margin, and then we were 7-1. (They were 6-2 after that match, and ended up going 8-2.)

We walked into our next room, and after us came Richard Montgomery A (Rockville, MD). Now, Richard Montgomery was national champion last year, so we were…very concerned. Nick and I know how good they are, so we were kind of afraid. Fortunately, this round was my round to shine, as I got 100 points in tossups (3 powers, 6 regular, 1 decent neg). With one tossup left to go, they were 45 down, which meant that they could tie it. Luckily, they negged on it, so we won by 50 points.

Woo! We beat last year’s national champions by 50 points! (They are still a very, very good team this year. It was a very close match.) We were 8-1! None of us thought we’d ever be 8-1 at Nationals with such good competition. We had beaten big name after big name; we were already well-known, but we were making a bigger name of ourselves after that. (Besides that, we had card #2 and were playing card #1 next.)

And our last match was against State College A (State College, PA). This room was the one in which the podcasts were taking place, so our voices would be recorded for all eternity, for quizbowlers across the country to listen to our match. This was huge. We would be first or second seed if we won.

So naturally, we started slow, and only got slower. State College was doing fairly well, but we were terrible. Neg after neg…losing buzzer race after buzzer race…it was pretty humiliating at the half.

And then it just got worse, as they started playing extremely well. Our tiny chance diminished into no chance at all as they kept powering tossups very early, and we sat there helpless. They ended up beating us by about 400 points, as we scored only 50. Needless to say, this hurt our points per game significantly. Instead of being second place, we fell quite a bit by losing and scoring only 50.

Oh well, we’re still way up there, and everything changes very quickly on Sunday; we’re still seeded highly for tomorrow. It’s double-elimination, so we just have to win as many as we can without losing twice…some of our matches will surely be against teams we have already faced. Hopefully we won’t see State College A early.

—

New Trier: 8-2

Carlo, 435 points, 10.0 GP
Nick, 370 points, 10.0 GP
Ben, 320 points, 10.0 GP
Robert, 95 points, 8.5? GP
Jonah, 15 points, 1.5? GP

Today, teams across the country are arriving in Chicago to compete in the 2007 NAQT High School National Championship Tournament. One hundred sixty teams in all are competing in the HSNCT, hailing from as distant mythic locales as California and Florida; one team is even coming from Ottawa. (Yes, that Ottawa. Yes, it really does exist.) The tournament is in a Rosemont hotel, so we don’t have quite as much of a trip.

The ten preliminary matches are all day tomorrow; teams with a winning record will advance to Sunday’s double-elimination playoff. Last year we eked out 6-4 on Saturday with a substantially weaker team; we hope to do better tomorrow. (We quickly bowed out in two matches on Sunday.) Anyway, we looked at our points per game from last year, and it was horrendous. We really were pretty bad, weren’t we…

Tonight is registration and scrimmaging against other teams. Our team is driving down and playing to get warmed up–and perhaps we’ll get to scout out other teams?

Since I don’t really have that much homework nowadays (except a large project for English which I’ve been trying to avoid), I’ve been trying to spend more of my time working on Aegis, especially because we have a big season ahead of us. (Oh yeah, I should also study for the AP Spanish test. I’ll get on that eventually.)

I’m starting by reworking my QED database program for next year. Last year I tried to guess the features that we would need to manage all the questions that we wrote and compile all the packets we had to produce. While it was invaluable for our first year of operations, we came up with a long list of additions that could help us even more. Now that I don’t have much to do anymore, I’ve been spending time programming and refactoring the very disorganized code that was already there.

I’ve been pleased with the writers that have applied this year; while their experiences writing questions vary dramatically, they all are very dedicated to our cause, and I can already see some of them getting better at writing.

I’m itching to start working on next season; our first season was very successful, and we’re even more pleased about our opportunities for next year, as we will take on our biggest and most exciting contract yet. We’ve also got some other initatives in mind, which we will make public later.

All in all, I’m glad that we have so much support from the Illinois (and to some extent, even national) quizbowl circuit, coaches and students alike. In my opinion, it is yet another testament to the pyramidal cause.

As I will read it on the PA tomorrow before advisery:

This is Carlo Angiuli, co-captain of New Trier’s Scholastic Bowl team. I am pleased to announce that on Saturday, our Scholastic Bowl team won its first-ever IHSA state title in Peoria, beating the three-time state champions, Wheaton North, with a score of 325 to 218 in the championship match. This marks the first time in the 21-year history of IHSA Scholastic Bowl that a CSL team has won the title. My co-captain was Nick Matchen, and our players were Ben Cohen, Robert Sido, Jonah Greenthal, Jeff Hirschey, and Sohaib Qadri. I’d like to give special thanks to coaches David Reinstein, Carolyn Gerhardt, and Benjamin Yang, who had to endure driving our team almost every weekend to competitions all over the state.

Wow, It’s been a while since I posted here! I think it’s as our Facebook group is called: I sold my soul to Illinois Scholastic Bowl.

Aegis applications have been going great. We’ve received 14 applications through our online application process so far, and I personally know of at least four other people who have expressed their interest in applying. I will admit that’s we generated more interest than I necessarily expected. I think that it’s a good sign that the pyramidal cause is gaining support, especially among current players who are concluding how much better those questions are.

New Trier won IHSA Sectionals last Saturday and are going to State this Saturday. I think this is our best chance in the foreseeable future. I plan to come back with a big IHSA trophy, hopefully the one that says STATE CHAMPIONS across the front. I suppose we could always steal the Class A championship trophy if we didn’t win AA.