"Audrey, we lost. We're eliminated, we finish twenty-first" Pablo starts telling his girlfriend the cold, hard truth. "And Gerard doesn't feel like he can keep playing quiz bowl at this level anymore! We need to step up to the scientific plate next year!"
"For the rest of this tournament, regardless of the outcome, I say, you watch carefully. But I'll tell you a little secret: I sacrificed half an AAU season for this tournament. But for this summer, we'll study for the ACT as a group, with our own basketball and football players" Audrey confides in her before getting to the Marquis ABC ballroom.
"Wouldn't sacrificing half an AAU season hurt your college basketball prospects?" Pablo asks her.
"As I already told you, right now, I'm a Division III prospect at best. Perhaps a strong performance at the HSNCT might help me get a walk-on spot at an Ivy" Audrey responds to her before getting on stage. "For walk-ons, especially in DIII, colleges tend to put more weight on how prospects act off the field"
Pablo then wastes no time asking for availabilities of rising juniors for semi-private ACT studying with him on the football team's social media.
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Late afternoon arrives, and, once again, people all over Jefferson Davis Parish follow their team closely on the parish radio. Which even invites people tuning in to watch the NAQT livestream from the Marquis ABC ballroom, since VA will, once again, get filmed. And hence audiences nationwide will see them.
"Venomous Agendas A advances to the sixth playoff round, and this is a rematch of 2026. For those who didn't follow VA quiz bowl at the time, that game against Detroit Catholic Central A was marred by a vomiting-induced timeout that forced a key player off the stage" the parish radio's anchor comments on the game. "Two of the most rabid quiz bowl fanbases in the country face off once again, on the grandest stage of the quiz bowl world!"
And even parents of VA basketball players on Bayou City's roster start listening to the online podcast of the HSNCT on their way back home from their final game at LGR Takeover.
"Audrey's still playing quiz bowl?" Cora asks her parents. "She might have sacrificed a quiz bowl tournament for a travel basketball one earlier in the season, but she went around and sacrificed half the AAU season for the HSNCT? I'll never understand her!"
She said it so herself that she needed to develop her passing game and rim protection, on top of that, I need to develop some in-game chemistry with her! I really hope the other half of the AAU season will be enough! Cora seems to question Audrey's dedication.
"How deep in are they anyway?" Susan, Lacassine's shooting guard, asks Cora's parents while she is driven to her home, not knowing what the HSNCT is beyond quiz bowl.
"They'll finish thirteenth at the lowest" Cora's mom then explains quiz bowl and the role of the HSNCT in quiz bowl to Susan.
Cora's mom is making it sound like Audrey is a brainiac, and Lacassine sure as hell isn't playing quiz bowl! Susan then starts listening to the first tossup of the DCC-VA game on the radio. It seems like Audrey's quiz bowl successes has hurt her on the court! Is that what she sacrificed half an AAU season for: some trivia game?
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Speaking of the first tossup of the game between DCC A and VA A, the moderator starts reading it, after introducing them to the crowd. The game in question is played to a crowd most quiz bowlers could only dream of, even though the ballroom isn't filled to capacity.
"Here's tossup one: the War of the Bucket was one of the proxy wars fought by these two factions in Bologna and Modena"
To the first clue, both Shamrocks (DCC players) and VAs roll their eyes: not even Leonard seemed able to respond to it.
YOU ARE READING
Can't Stop the Questions
RomancePablo, a sophomore playing tight end for Venomous Agendas High, plays the best football game of his life, but as the season comes to a close, his coaches tell him he can't rely on football to go to college, forcing him to buckle down on academics fo...
