On Sunday, October 9, the Upper School Quiz Bowl team lost in a televised Quiz Kids tournament to last year’s champions, Bellarmine College Preparatory.

The team comprised of seniors Evan Yao, Ananth Subramaniam, and Max Isenberg. They wore their class shirt backwards to show school pride.

“We felt that the word “Beast” would make more sense than a collection of wild animals to our television audience,” said co-captain Max Isenberg.

The competition was organized into four rounds. The first and third rounds contained three-part toss-up questions, with the competitors earning a maximum of 25 points in the first round and 50 in the third round. The second round was a collaboration round, and the fourth was a lightning round where each question was worth 30 points.

At the end of the first round, our team was forty points behind, with a score of 50-90. The questions in this round ranged from history and literature to geography and chemistry.

The second round was collaborative, and Bellarmine gained an additional forty points. For this round, the Eagles chose the category “Animal House,” where each of the seven answers was an animal.

During the third and fourth rounds we fell behind, and the final score was 360 to 870.

The Bellarmine team of three dominated the later rounds of the competition.

“It’s always good to get a challenge early in the season, just to gauge where we’re at and what we need to do to improve.” Ananth Subramaniam (12) said.

While the eight winning teams will have a clear shot at the finals, the remaining teams may compete based on the number of points they earn compared to other schools.

Quiz Bowl advisor Bradley Stoll believes the Eagles faced the competition admirably.

“Considering [Bellarmine] are the defending (Quiz Kids) champions, with a former Jeopardy! contestant on their team, I think we did pretty well,” he said. “In fact, if the format were more like Jeopardy!, where you couldn’t buzz in until the question is completely read, the outcome could have likely been very different.”

He plans to help the team improve their speed and ability to anticipate the question before it has finished being asked.

Peninsula TV aired the competition, which was held in San Carlos, CA.