The Quizbowl Resource Center

Since no one has started this thread yet, I would appreciate anyone currently coaching pyramidal QB in the state to help me out here by posting. I'm trying to compile a consensus list of top 8 teams in TN right now for a project, and I would appreciate the help from people in the know. Obviously, if you are an experienced player who knows what they are talking about, your input is also welcome. Feel free to DM me if that works for you.

Thanks!

Battle Ground Academy
Merrol Hyde
University School of Nashville

Those are probably 3 of the top 8

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Because of the general lack of interaction between different regions in the state, Tennessee is difficult to rank. Occasionally, Oak Ridge and McCallie make their way to Middle TN tournaments, but those are just about the only non-Middle TN schools that venture this way. West TN? Not a clue.

BGA and Merrol-Hyde should be at the top of the pack this year for Middle TN schools. USN and Hume-Fogg were strong last year, but I'm not sure what they have coming back. Murfreesboro Central Magnet, Cookeville, Ezell-Harding, and Portland are in the second tier of Middle TN teams.

Alright so I've finally gotten around to my preview for middle tn teams this year.

First, my school Battle Ground Academy. After winning the Middle Tennessee championships, we return everyone. First is me, the neglord who sometimes get history and humanities buzzes when I don't Self destruct http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... tail/#p1_9Next is Cameron, the science generalist whose ability to get clutch trash buzzes is no joke. (Seriously, he has won multiple games for us with his late game trash buzzes). Next is Henry Dambach a killer player in jazz and film who can also provide deep literature buzzes. Finally, we have Dominick Nesbitt, the world geo specialist.
Next is Merrol Hyde. I was going to say they are the most underrated team in Tennessee but based on how everyone is ranking them here I see that is not the case. They do lose 3/4 of their A-Team from a year ago but keep the most valuable member of that squad, Jonathan Caldwell. I think Jonathan got shadowed a lot by his teammates last year since they had 3 players who were good enough in history (probably Jonathan's best subject) to be history specialists on their own teams. It is why they were such a good history bowl team but also could be why Jonathan did not post the flashiest numbers last year. In addition to being a very good history player he also has a lot of generalist ability across the humanities canon as seen by his impressive numbers at humanities heavy tournaments such as Glasgow http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/37 ... ail/#p4_21He also has new promising young talent at his disposal such as Owen Flanagan and Alex Ponce to help fill in some of Jonathan's gaps. In summary, do not be surprised if Jonathan consistently puts up 100 ppg at Tennessee tournaments and Merrol Hyde makes a lot of deep playoff runs.
Hume Fogg loses their top scorer and generalist leader for the last three years in Aditya Srivastava. However they have a solid program that I think will make sure that Hume Fogg has yet another very good team for next year. They will rely heavily on Christopher Damon to make the leap from killer music/geography specialist to solid generalist while also relying on Elizabeth Love to back him up as a second scorer who assists him on topics such as lit.
Ezell- Harding brings everyone back and has a group of solid players but it is uncertain how many tournaments they will attend as they just underwent a coaching change.
USN loses top scorer Alex Morgan and solid contributor Barbara Xiong and it is uncertain who will make a leap to a generalist to fill their shoes. They have returning two very nice history specialists in Margaret Luffman and Elliot Clark There were actually two tournaments that USN attended without Alex last year and in both the team played pretty well scoring impressive victories over teams such as Glasgow http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/38 ... detail/#t0and Oak Ridge https://www.naqt.com/stats/team-perform ... _id=107888 I think if this team can find a generalist in their group of specialists they could be a serious threat at the top of Tennessee Quizbowl.
I have a hard time evaluating Cookeville because I don't know who is coming back. I know they lose very good history specialist/ solid generalist Alex Castro, but I don't anyone else's grades. If Sanjay comes back he should be very helpful to them and help fill some of the gaps left by Alex's departure. They will definitely be relying on Ethan George to become the history player for this team. I think they should be pretty solid.

Hey I’m Adi Sujithkumar, the captain and president of the Quiz Bowl team at Oak Ridge. I’ve never posted before but I can give a brief run down of quiz bowl in East TN. The two most active teams in the area are us and Farragut so I’ll talk about these two teams primarily.

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Oak Ridge

We are the most active team in East TN, and we are returning our entire team from HSNCT last year. However, we could only take 3 people to HSNCT since a lot of our members had prior commitments that conflicted with HSNCT. I’ll start with me. I’m a senior, and I mainly get history, geography, and sports tossups. However, on easier packets, I can help out with other subjects, such as literature and science. The next person who attended HSNCT for us is Wilder Dodson, who is also a senior this year. He is our trash specialist but he helps out a great deal with US history, geography, and random literature bonuses. The last member of our returning HSNCT team is George Wang, who is now a sophomore. He’s our literature, mythology, religion, and philosophy guy. Like the rest of us, he often helps out with other topics during bonuses. The last member of our A team is Candace Pang, a senior this year who did not attend HSNCT last year. She’s mainly our fine arts person, but she helps out a great deal with literature and US history bonuses.

Farragut

Farragut is the other “powerhouse” of East TN quizbowl. However, they have been attending fewer and fewer tournaments in recent years. They are led by senior Kevin Chen, who is incredible at history and visual fine arts. Other than him, I am not too familiar with the rest of the A team since I believe many of them graduated, such as their literature specialist Viktoria Ohstrom. Nevertheless, I know they have a good amount of talent to rebuild the team, such as Catherine Chen.

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Other than Oak Ridge and Farragut, there aren’t many active teams in East TN. Oak Ridge is hoping to change that. In fact, Union County High School and ORHS are hosting the Secret City Classic at Oak Ridge High School on October 21st, 2017 (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20226). We are also planning to host a history bowl (HB) event sometime in early 2018, but we have yet to coordinate with NHBB for a date for that HB event.

I might as well pitch in my fair share for the thread. This year our primary lit person (Viktoria Ohstrom) and a science person (Nalin Varma) have graduated to college, but we already have ample replacements or have been training them to recoup for those losses. Anyways...

Farragut: The primary team consists of Elliot Fang, Wyatt Smith, Katherine Chen, and me. Elliot is a junior who is a specialist in science and math, but he is also adept at literature; Katherine is a sophomore makes up the majority of the lit spectrum with Elliot, although her main focus is also history. She is probably going to be one of the power players for us and my "replacement" I guess once I head out of HS. Wyatt is a senior and is the main spearhead for math and science with Elliot; I am the history and visual arts specialist for our team. We also have one member we use interchangeably for A team and that is senior Sam Calvert, who is good at Christianity and auditory arts.

While it is true we have not been going to as many competitions as we had hoped for last year, this can be primarily chalked up to the school administrations being so hesitant on us going anywhere haha. After all, football and baseball bring in the recognition and money. We have won and placed high in a few comps and we decided to study up for HSNCT for the spring semester rather than have to deal with more bureaucratic loopholes and jargon no team should have to experience. Anyways sorry about the rambling, we plan to participate in quite a few competitions this year starting with Oak Ridge.

I guess as a final note, the more senior members of the club and I finally managed to convince our school to host a tournament on November 18th. Seeing as East TN needs all the quizbowl it can get, we also want to contribute along with Oak Ridge and L&N in this endeavor. Plus I sorta see it as one last hurrah and thanks for the memories and knowledge quizbowl has given the senior members. We'd all appreciate it if you decide to come and we'll try our best to make it top-notch and most importantly, reoccurring.

There is a lot of good work going on in Tennessee right now. It is just so difficult to unite the state due to sheer size. It is nearly 400 miles from Knoxville to Memphis, and that won't even get you all the way across the state.

Still, there are quite a few people trying to get things going, and it will happen.

We are actively working to get UT-Chattanooga rolling again so we can have a base of operations in SE Tennessee. Hopefully that will also get Chattanooga back in the picture for High School quiz bowl. We have a coach here, Colonel Hugh Enicks at Red Bank, who ran a good tournament last year and attracted several ROTC teams to play quiz bowl. Parker Jarnigan at Oak Ridge is working with some of us as well to get things going in the area. I think the future is bright.

NHBB will be holding six tournaments this year in Tennessee:

November 11 - Liberty Tech, Jackson (C Set)
December 2 - Heritage High, Ringgold, GA (C Set)
December 9 - Cumberland University, Lebanon (C Set)
January 20 - Lausanne Collegiate, Memphis (B Set)
January 27 - Oak Ridge High (B Set)
March 17 - Merrol Hyde, Hendersonville (A Set)

Is there going to be a state championship this year? I couldn't find it on the NAQT schedule.

dablasian wrote:Is there going to be a state championship this year? I couldn't find it on the NAQT schedule.

There will be, March 2-3 at Cumberland. It should be posted on naqt.com within the next week.

I'm definitely a little late to the post, but since no one has hopped on to update about West Tennessee, I thought I'd give a run-down.

First of all, we don't have many pyramidal tournaments over her in West TN; if we want to play in them, we normally have to drive out of state or at least several hours east. White Station (my school) does host at least one NAQT event every school year (which will be occurring on March 3 for 2017-2018), but it seems to me that most if not all other events in West TN are based on News Channel 3 Knowledge Bowl (non-pyramidal Academic Hallmarks deal, for those who aren't familiar). Some teams do drive down to Ole Miss once per semester, but that's only a handful.

At any rate I'd say that this year, we've seen White Station, Collierville, Houston, and Arlington dominating the circuit. This semester we really only had three events (not counting Ole Miss as only three or four Memphis schools headed down to Mississippi for that). The first was at Memphis University School; White Station took 1st, Houston 2nd, Collierville 3rd, Arlington 4th. The second was Hutchison; again White Station took 1st despite missing a member, Collierville 2nd, Houston 3rd, Collierville B 4th. The third was at Christian Brothers High; White Station was missing two A-team members and, despite defeating Collierville by a large margin in preliminaries, lost in the finals by ten points, leaving Collierville at 1st place, White Station 2nd, Arlington 3rd, and Evangelical Christian School 4th. Some schools which have traditionally made extremely strong showings (CBHS, MUS, Lausanne) haven't been present at many tournaments this year, although we never know what the second semester holds.

We are also making an effort to get a stronger middle school presence here in West TN. This is something I've talked about quite a bit with MUS Coach Clifft and WSMS Coach Uhrman, and Memphis saw its first middle school division in a while at the MUS tournament early this year, with White Station Middle snagging 1st, 2nd, and 4th places and MUS Lower School taking home 3rd. I've been trying to compile contact lists for middle schools in West TN, North MS, and East AR (as well as any others willing to make a bit of a longer drive) to attend the middle school division in our tournament March 3 and to encourage other schools to start hosting middle school events of their own. For the time being, though, the few middle school teams that are active are generally stuck driving 3 or 4 hours to play in one or two tournaments per year.

I won't pretend to be enough of an expert on all the West TN / Memphis teams to give a thorough analysis of them all because we simply haven't had enough events for that to happen. However, I can give a quick run-through of White Station's team. Our A team is composed of Connor (captain; senior; strong in geography, art history, astronomy, and earth science and good generalist), myself (junior; more of a generalist but stronger in math, music, and history), Gideon (sophomore; definitely a history specialist but good buzzes in science as well), and Grace (senior; strong in literature, biology, and chemistry). We have a handful of sophomores who are looking good for future years (Aryaman, Dominic, Ashley) and some talented freshmen as well (Gino, Bereket, a few others). We also have several members in all grades who aren't the most active but who participate enough to help us grow our squad, which is always a good thing.

That's about all I have for West Tennessee thus far this season. Here's to hoping we can build it up a little more!

Oak Ridge is considering hosting an NAQT tournament in early April on a Saturday. However, we want to see how much interest there is at the moment to gauge whether or not we should host one. If your team is interested, please let me know in some type of way (whether by replying or dm'ing me).

Coach of ORHS here...if it helps people decide, the following teams have responded to a "feeler" e-mail concerning a potential tournament date of 4/7 or 4/14 in Oak Ridge, TN

Interested

• Jefferson County
• Gatlinburg Pitmann
• Science Hill
• Sunbright
• Morristown West

not coming

• Harriman
• Cookeville

interest can be expressed via email, to me at [email protected], or messages to "dablasian" aka Adi, as he mentioned above

It might be worth reconsidering why there was a "state championship" tournament that included 0 teams from outside of Middle Tennessee held on the exact same day as 30+ TN teams competed at a tournament in Memphis and a few weeks after a dozen teams played in East TN. FWIW, West TN currently has more teams (3) registered for HSNCT than Middle TN (2).

Major props to the folks doing outreach in East TN this year--it's great to see more schools outside the major cities getting to tournaments and I hope that continues.

cchiego wrote:It might be worth reconsidering why there was a "state championship" tournament that included 0 teams from outside of Middle Tennessee held on the exact same day as 30+ TN teams competed at a tournament in Memphis and a few weeks after a dozen teams played in East TN. FWIW, West TN currently has more teams (3) registered for HSNCT than Middle TN (2).

Major props to the folks doing outreach in East TN this year--it's great to see more schools outside the major cities getting to tournaments and I hope that continues.

Oak Ridge tried to register for the TN state championship but for some reason our registration did not go through, which was extremely irritating since we submitted our registration form and fees twice. Also, TACA is not popular, and I don't understand why a team has to be a member of TACA to compete in the state championship (I may have this wrong, but that's what I had heard in the past. If this is wrong, then that's my bad).

Some of you might have already seen this, but Oak Ridge has started a GoFundMe campaign to help with the costs of sending two teams to HSNCT this year. We hope the quiz bowl community can help us out!

If anyone near Nashville needs an assistant coach or occasional moderator/volunteer of some kind starting in mid-2019, please get in contact with me

Not sure if this is the place to post it, but Oak Ridge is planning to host one tournament in the fall and possibly one in the spring next school year.