Placing first at a national level competition is a rare honor that not many people get to experience. However, Fossil Ridge High School’s Knowledge Bowl team managed to pull off a win, after one of the toughest seasons anyone has ever faced, in their first ever nationals.

Knowledge Bowl is a well known club at Fossil. But while the club is well known to us, there are only two other states in the U.S. that contain high schools that offer this club: Minnesota and Washington.

Because of the small community of Knowledge Bowl participants, all of the teams in the country were able to get together and organize the first official national Knowledge Bowl competition. The Fossil team also plans to attend a competition put on by NAQT, or National Academic Quiz Tournaments.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions still firmly in place, the teams had to get together on Discord, another type of direct communication platform. All of the national competition rounds were conducted using Discord.

The Knowledge Bowl competition consisted of two rounds, written and oral. The written round came first, in which groups of five were able to take one test together. The scores on the written test determined the groups for the oral rounds.

The five oral rounds of the competition had three teams in one room, where they would use a buzzer system to verbally answer the questions they were given. Each team’s performance determined the virtual rooms they would enter for the following rounds.

The final score from each of those rounds of competition are used in order to determine who did the best overall, and that team is the winner.

After a long season of practicing and putting in the work to make it to nationals, the team was relieved to finally achieve their goal. “I can’t think of people who deserve it more,” Ariel Hsu, a member of the Knowledge Bowl team, remarked.

The national level win for Fossil was an incredibly exciting accomplishment for the team. However the lack of interaction with teammates definitely left an aspect to be missed. Olivia Wang, a junior on Fossil’s Knowledge Bowl team, commented, “Being online obviously was a little different. I think if I was with my teammates, [there] would have been a lot more celebrating.”

Despite the underlying disappointment at the idea of celebrating alone, the win was still an amazing way for the team to end the season. “For our seniors, this is really the ideal last year of Knowledge Bowl,” Wang explained. “We worked really hard leading up to nationals.”

Throughout the toughness of this year, Fossil’s knowledge bowl team managed to pull off a win that will go down in Fossil history.

Update: Fossil’s Knowledge Bowl team received their nationals trophy together on May 11 in the front office.

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Jordan Brownhill

After meeting in the front office, the team watched their two trophies be unwrapped.