Threepeat victory for Lovell Knowledge Bowl team

Catching up from behind, it wasn’t until the end of the final round that Knowledge Bowl coach Bret George knew Lovell High School would win Big Horn Basin Knowledge Bowl.
The meet took place on December 6 starting bright and early at 9 a.m. at Greybull High School. George had hope that his team would win the whole day, but the victory came down to the wire.
LHS won by just three points, 130 to 127, over Burlington 1 during the grueling all-day event. The first round was the roughest round for the team because the students were not awake yet, George said. After the first round, George gave the students a pep talk, and they got down to business, faring better in the subsequent rounds.
“Well, they woke up, I’ll be honest with you. The first round, I don’t think their brains were processing things well,” he said.
Throughout the day, the Knowledge Bowl members acted as a unit, all essential to securing victory. For example, one teammate bought another teammate an energy drink from the gas station when seeing how sleepy the teammate was.
The top players from Wyoming Academic Challenge (WAC) were chosen for Knowledge Bowl. George took freshman Nate Cornia, sophomore Damian Wagner and juniors Davin Crosby, Jarrett Allen and Taggart Shumway.  The players were selected based on their performance throughout the WAC season, particularly the last meet on December 2 in Thermopolis.
Knowledge Bowl is similar to WAC, but it occurs just once a year, only involves teams from the Big Horn Basin instead of all of Wyoming and has a slightly different quiz format, George said.  The questions cover the same broad range of subjects that WAC does. Four players compete in each round, and there is one alternate who rotates out between rounds.
Knowledge Bowl consists of five rounds of 60 questions each, with four being verbal rounds and one round, the third round of the day, being a written knowledge test the team has 45 minutes to complete.
“And it’s a hard test. I mean, they’re doozies, and they get to collaborate together. Every team gets the same test, and everybody gets 45 minutes,” George said.
The written round is where the team really started to gain traction; it was when Lovell first took the lead. It was the team’s best round, which is impressive considering how difficult the test is, George said.  
The written round is the only round where players can work together and compare answers. In the verbal round, after one player buzzes in, teammates can only ask who has the better answer and choose a single player to answer the question, but they can’t compare notes.
While a few schools like Powell, Cody and Worland are larger than Lovell, most schools that participate in Knowledge Bowl are a similar size, George said. However, some smaller schools, like Burlington, which has less than 100 students, can be the most formidable.
Next year, Lovell will host Knowledge Bowl, but George is not sure the team will have a home field advantage. There are so many questions on so many topics that it neutralizes any home field advantage.  
It is not very often that a freshman competes in Knowledge Bowl, George said. He took the two underclassmen who are less experienced because he was impressed with their early WAC performances.  George has faith his team has a great shot at the championship next year, but he says he can’t say anything with certainty due to the level of competition.
“I would hope so. We’re not going to be graduating any of our students,” he said. “So we can bring a similar type of team back next year. When you have a three-point spread and that’s  out of 130 points, that’s a tight, tight match.”
The area that George hopes the team improves on for next year is literature. The questions are so specific that it is very difficult to guess a correct answer, he said. However, many other teams struggled with literature, as well, so Lovell is not alone in that deficit.
The win wasn’t the only victory of the day. George said that the kids had a great time at the meet and were excited to compete. But with each win, expectations are rising for Lovell to dominate the competition at Knowledge Bowl once again.