2024 Vermont NAQT States Results and Reflections

[Ray]

The Vermont NAQT Championship Tournament was played on Friday, March 15 at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont, home of the Crimson Tide. Mr. Michael Whalen of Spaulding ran the tournament, assisted by indispensable Vermont quiz bowl pillar Kevin Commo, and the smooth execution of the event was a testament to their preparation and expertise. I had the pleasure of moderating.

Champlain Valley Union High School’s A-team (senior Frankie Fidler, junior Jacob Graham, senior Collin Ravlin, and senior captain Elias Leventhal) went undefeated over five preliminary and two playoff rounds to finish 7-0 on the day and win the championship.

Full stats for the tournament are available here.

CVU A now has a match record of 42-0 this season over several NAQT-style and Vermont Scholar's Bowl-style tournaments, a remarkable accomplishment. They can punch their ticket to HSNCT at the Scholar's Bowl finals on April 6. I can't claim to have a perfect grasp on the Scholar's Bowl scoring system, but I believe they're so far ahead that there are actually ways for them to clinch even if they take a game loss on April 6. I'm sure they have their sights set on perfection, though.

CVU's individual stats from States are interesting. A sample size of seven games isn’t really enough to be able to tell anything for sure, but given that this is the last NAQT-style tournament of the regular Vermont circuit season, it’s hard not to see this as a passing of the torch from departing senior Elias Leventhal to junior Jacob Graham. These two excellent players have been teammates on CVU A at three tournaments for which individual statistics were tracked:

PHAT December 2022 (IS-216A)
Elias: 17/21/5 over 7 games for 3.58 PPTUH
Jacob: 2/10/0 over 7 games for 1.06 PPTUH

PHAT December 2023 (IS-225A)
Elias: 22/17/8 over 7 games for 2.91 PPTUH
Jacob: 8/23/2 over 7 games for 2.15 PPTUH

NAQT States March 2024 (IS-228)
Elias: 9/19/5 over 7 games for 2.03 PPTUH
Jacob: 14/23/1 over 7 games for 2.94 PPTUH

I don’t know what Jacob’s been on, but my goodness, is it working. None of this is to diminish Elias, who, to be clear, is still my pick for best player in the state. He’s a classic top-scorer-archetype strong generalist with good legit science knowledge. He has the fantastic in-game leadership skills you hope for from a senior captain, with great ability to conduct deliberations on bonuses and process and choose correctly from the answer candidates suggested by his teammates. And I’ve never seen anyone feast on any subcategory like Elias Leventhal feasts on computational math. His departure will leave an enormous hole. But after States, no one can doubt that Jacob has undergone an evolution, and it’s clear that he’s ready to step up and be a top scorer on a championship team. I mean, he literally just did it.

Next year, CVU A loses not just Elias, but also Collin Ravlin and Frankie Fidler, both very good players who have contributed plenty of early buzzes and hard bonus parts. Jacob’s teammates will presumably be some combination of Charles Redmond (4/13/6 for 1.44 PPTUH at States), Leah Rauch, Leo Elder, and Zoe Mui, who has also shown strong intangibles as a B-team captain. I’m sure veteran coach John Bennett will be looking for the pieces that best complement Jacob, and I’m looking forward to seeing how next year’s team carries on the championship tradition.

As I chatted with Mr. Bennett after the tournament, he shared his assessment of Hanover as being “one year away from being a juggernaut.” Hard to disagree. Things are clearly happening in Hanover, which has always been a sort of second center of gravity in the Vermont circuit, a counterbalance to the dominance of the big Burlington-area schools. Their current A-team lineup is all underclassmen, led by sophomores Ray Menkov (14/42/12 over 10 games for 2.85 PPTUH on SHOW-ME More) and Chris Chor (20/12/6 over 7 games for 2.73 PPTUH on IS-225A), supported by Martin Mosdal, Owen Welch, and Nelson Barabas, all promising young players. They seem highly engaged and committed: they’ve taken on the endeavor of house-writing the upcoming iteration of their annual Halloween tossups-only tournament, rather than running it on old and/or non-pyramidal questions like they have in the past. Unique among Vermont circuit teams, they’ve traveled out of state and played in Massachusetts tournaments against strong Boston-area competition, so they’re certainly accumulating live-fire reps faster than anyone else. Their willingness to seek out challenges like this suggests a high GTDIH and, in combination with their youth, bodes very well for their future. They didn’t attend the NAQT State Championship this year, and I won’t be surprised if it turns out that this was due to having elected instead to play the same set against a stronger field at some other site in the future. I think it’s more likely than not that they’ll be the best team on the Vermont circuit next year.

But quiz bowl isn’t just about what the two strongest programs in the state are doing. I had the privilege of seeing a lot of impressive buzzes and great play from teams that finished all over the final standings. Kids are working hard and learning things all over the state.

I had a conversation between rounds with one team that I’m not going to identify for reasons that will become obvious, and I learned that the four of them had driven themselves to the tournament site in a personal vehicle, on their own dime. Their annual school-funded club budget was $0. They came up with multiple of their own fundraiser ideas and tried to execute them, but their advisor cancelled all of them at the last minute for reasons the team doesn’t understand. And they’ve persisted through all of that without their enthusiasm for the game dimming at all.

I worry that this is actually the modal and maybe even the median set of circumstances for high school quiz bowl teams statewide and even nationwide. For every CVU or Hanover, there’s probably at least one team that just got sick of swimming against the tide and decided to go do robotics instead. I wonder how many kids are out there in America, trying to play this game we love with little to no or even negative institutional support, paying for it out of their own pockets, trying to come up with their own fundraising ideas, and being undermined and sabotaged by neglectful, apathetic, or even hostile coaches/advisors/administrators. I wonder how many teams started out just like this team I talked to, with passion and enthusiasm and ambition, but had just like 10% less resistance to punishing futility, and ended up with the wick snuffed because of the indifference of the people who should have been there to nurture the flame. Probably not zero, right? And that really sucks! Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have our lives enriched by this game should try not to lose sight of how much that sucks. There are kids out there who, if you talked to them for 30 seconds, would remind you so much of yourself when you were their age. They’re trying to make quiz bowl work, and they’re crashing into walls that they might not be able to scale on their own. Help them if you can.