A Tale of Two Academic Teams

Chapter 4: Sadie's taste of international quiz bowl

The Venomous Agendas are going into the HSNCT off from an even better quiz bowl season than the last. That, even though the A team is the only one going qualified for the HSNCT; the B team was a middling team. By now this new formula according to which the other two academic teams are entitled to one slot each on the quiz bowl team seems to have worked. Imélie took the math team's slot, Sadie took the debate team's slot; both proved our star players on the A team. Clearly Sadie represents our history and RPMSS future for the next two years as I don't expect next year's math team player to be as good as Imélie and therefore our math and science future is equally up in the air, Warren reflects on the Venomous Agendas' quiz bowl season.

"Sadie, how do you feel, now that we won our first state championship?" Imélie asks her after the awards ceremony ends.

"Better than about debating, that's for sure. The coach kept comparing me to... Florence I think? Let's say the debate team is hurt by the successes of the math and quiz bowl teams, because the players we do have mostly tend to treat debate as a team for someone wanting their slice of the extracurricular pie but don't have athletic, musical or mathletic talent" Sadie explains to Imélie.

"I knew Florence, she was very much like you in several respects"

From what I am told, this debate season was no better than the last one, even with me as the captain. I bear the brunt of the public forum team's weight, but more people started getting an interest in the other debate formats, we run more debate events now. We now do policy, Congress, Lincoln-Douglas, and speech. But because we are new to these things as a school, we don't win anything, and, as with last year, PF is king, and presumably for the next two years if I keep doing debates, Sadie reflects on her debate season, which eerily feels like Florence's last debate season in high school.

"You're even better than Flo as a quiz bowl player, but you're also the one lodging all our protests this season. Not that we necessarily lodged a lot of them anyway. Even though I didn't ask this of Florence, I heard her talk about debate and quiz bowl, so what do you like out of each?" Imélie asks Sadie.

"I like different things about debate and quiz bowl, Imélie. From quiz bowl, it's about knowledge. From debate you gain a deeper understanding of current events and history"

If what the head debate coach says is correct, Florence was, as of today, one of the all-time greats of Venomous Agendas debate. However, Venomous Agendas debate really came into being only during the pandemic, and same went of quiz bowl. And the previous principal died during the pandemic, too. The current principal was the one who spurred quiz bowl and debate for interscholastic competitions. And, that one time a scheduling conflict occurred between a quiz bowl tournament and a debate one, I prioritized debate because I trusted Imélie and our fine arts player to pick up the slack in history and RPMSS, Sadie keeps thinking about the evolution of Venomous Agendas academic extracurriculars.

Pre-pandemic, there was only a math team, about 4-5 students on it; now there are about 30 students across all three teams, of which only 2 are on more than one.

"I thought I would never see the day where a team would win a state championship with its top two scorers being girls!" Vance, the moderator for one of the playoff games, comments to both girls. "Now that's what I call progress!"

"We came within one interrupt of doing it last year..." Imélie comments, realizing that it would then have been three girls being the top scorers then, and not just two. The Venomous Agendas' high scorers were Marcia, Florence and Imélie, in that order, at last year's State.

And my personal PP20TUH record was in that one tournament Sadie couldn't attend, the LQBA Winter Invitational South, where I scored a whopping 97-odd PP20TUH, and not just because I answered nearly every science question correctly, but also powered history and RPMSS questions that were normally Sadie's to answer. Normally I am not a tournament top scorer, but I was the high scorer of that tournament because of Sadie attending the Isidore Newman Invitational, which earned me the NAQT Player of the Week Award that week, Imélie reminisces about her past experiences as more than just the team's high scorer, triggered by Vance's comments.