Last year, science teacher Cameron Goodrich helped start up a scholars bowl team, a game show-like competition where a team of students answer a series of questions over a wide variety of academic topics. After their first year, Goodrich is happy with where the team is now.
“We’ve already grown the team since last year,” Goodrich said. “So we’re attracting more and more students, and you can definitely tell that they’re becoming more confident as we go to more of these tournaments.”
The team has been to seven tournaments since they began last year, including their most recent one on Jan. 16 at Kapaun, and they have two more remaining. Despite not placing at the Kapaun tournament, the team is optimistic and Goodrich believes that they are continuing to improve.
“We didn’t place in our most recent one, but we definitely made progress,” Goodrich said. “Our students were becoming a lot more confident and buzzing in and answering those questions quickly, because having correct answers is not always as important as doing it quickly too.”
“We’ve done good,” scholars bowl member Clay Magana (10) said. “We are a really, really fresh team, and so we’re getting down better ways to practice and just going to competitions and everything.”
Goodrich is hopeful for the future of scholars bowl. Although he eventually would like to have enough participants to create a JV and varsity team and has many other goals he’d like to accomplish.
“This year, it’d be really fun to place at regionals,” Goodrich said. “We’ll just kind of have to see how it goes beyond. I’d like to keep growing the team and then maybe even take our team to state one day.”
Goodrich encourages incoming students to come join the Scholars Bowl program if they’re looking for a fun school activity to participate in.
“I’d encourage them to just come down for a practice and just try it out,” Goodrich said. “It’s very low stakes and if they’re looking for some fun school activity, this is for them.”
