COVINGTON, Ga. - Eastside’s quiz bowl team appeared on WSB TV’s High-Q tournament this past weekend and put on a commanding 640-190 performance over Morrow high school that was close at the beginning but eventually saw Eastside pull away near the end.
Eastside has a history of excellence with Adams leading the way, and he believes this year’s team is a cut above the teams he has had in past years.
This is high praise from Adams as Eastside has won five of the last nine Georgia Academic Team Association’s state championships in their respective groups. He credits the specialization that certain members have this year on certain topics as a huge reason for their dominance.
In year’s past, Adams has had generalists on the quiz bowl team, and their wide range of knowledge has carried the team to state champions status. With a specialist, the Eastside team increases their chances of getting questions before their opponents.
This Eastside team does not have a single specialist, though. They have three, and they each hone in on three different categories that heavily appear in quiz bowl questions.
Adams laid out the landscape of a typical quiz bowl match, and in each match, there are four history, four science, four literature, and a few various fine arts and other area questions.
Those first three categories are covered by each of Eastside’s specialists, who can often answer questions in their specialized categories with the most minute detail being mentioned in the early stages of the question, which gives them a better chance of earning points.
“This is the best team ever, by far. Braxton Buff is our literature player, and that’s what he focuses on, Jet Dong is history and fine arts and Eathan Xu is science, and they are so complementary,” Adams said. “Quiz bowl questions are written, such that, at the beginning of the question, there will be clues about the answer that require much more in-depth knowledge. Generalists will not have as much in-depth knowledge because they are trying to cover a wider area.”
Alongside Buff, Dong and Xu at Eastside’s impressive victory over Morrow high school in the first round of High Q’s tournament was Warth Haymore, who Adams highlighted as having knowledge about modern society and being a great complement to these three players.
“The reason I chose Warth for television is because they often ask quirky, pop culture stuff, and he is the perfect dovetail for those three boys,” Adams said. “With those three boys, they often cover up our other player’s knowledge, but he is probably the one they cover up the least. For example, I was not surprised that he got the question that we are in the 116th Congress.”
Adams also highlighted Joyce Li as one of Eastside’s other best players, and she was the fourth member of the team that won the state championship last year.
Eastside currently has a 53-4 record in matchplay and sits ranked second in the state and 32nd in the Groger rankings for high school quiz bowl, which means another state championship may be on the horizon for this group.
They are also still in the thick of WSB’s High-Q tournament, which awards scholarship money to each of the finalists. The Eagles may face a tough foe in the Chamblee Charter Academy in the second round of the tournament and their next appearance on the quiz show, which will appear on television on Sunday, Feb. 15.
