March 30, 2009

Contact:   John Syme

Quiz Bowl team members (l-r) Rob Cameron '10, Zach Bennett '11 and Zeke Webster '09 enjoy a light moment in a practice session.

With March Madness concluded, Davidson is turning toward academic competition—rather than athletics —in the coming week.

Two Davidson College Quiz Bowl teams head to the national championship in Dallas, Tex., on Friday and Saturday. And on Monday, Eric LaForest ’06 will appear as a contestant on the television game show Jeopardy!

LaForest cannot discuss his taped performance until after the broadcast, but Jeopardy! fans on campus will be cheering him on (7 p.m., April 6, NBC Channel 36 WCNC) in the C. Shaw Smith 900 Room, said William Brown ’70, director of the college union. Brown and Ashley Mamele, union program advisor, help organize Davidson’s annual intramural Quiz Bowl tournament with help from the Residence Life Office, which generates student enthusiasm for the effort through freshman hall programming.

“We usually get six to eight intramural teams a year through freshman halls,” said James Gibert ’79. Now director of planned giving for the college, Gibert went to the national College Bowl in 1979. The 2008-2009 season is Davidson’s first in the National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) competition, an organization similar to its predecessor, College Bowl.

Davidson is one of only four colleges and universities that will field two teams at this year’s Quiz Bowl tournament. The others are Yale, the University of Chicago, and Chipola Community College in Marianna, Fla. (There’s a separate community college competition.)

Team members are Zach Bennett ’11, Rob Cameron ‘10, Kendra Chapman ‘09, Spencer Cowan ’11, Francisco Fiallo ’09, Alex Kowaleski ’11, David Palko ’09, Scott Saldaña ’09, Joseph Sills ’12, and Zeke Webster ’09.

At an afternoon practice last week, the current crop of Quiz Bowl contestants, culled from the intramural teams, were honing their command of arcane subject matter and tightening their buzzer-response reflexes.

“I’ve always been interested in this kind of competition, because I’ve got a lot of trivial knowledge,” joked Scott Saldaña ’09.

“It makes me feel relatively normal,” chimed in Rob Cameron ’10.

Quiz Bowl historically has been male-dominated, noted Kendra Chapman ’09, the lone Davidson female student going to the national tournament this year.

Alex Kowaleski '11 digs deep into his memory to try to pull out an answer.

“I’m used to playing in the minority,” said Chapman, who has even written a poem that explored the gender dynamics of academic competitions. “There are stereotypes that go along with being a female Quiz Bowler like, I should know stuff about literature and art instead of math and science. Unfortunately, in my case, that’s true! But you stop caring about that when you can ring in faster than the guys about Faulkner or Kahlo.”

Quiz Bowl and similar competitions have a distinguished history at Davidson. Highlights of that history are on display now in an exhibit at the college’s E.H. Little Library, courtesy of the College Archive.

The first Davidson team to achieve intercollegiate success was the 1969 squad, coached by English Professor Charlie Lloyd. That team retired undefeated after a five-week run on the GE College Bowl TV program. Ten years later, the 1979 team, also coached by Lloyd and made up of Gibert and teammates Tom Ruby ’79, Tim Newcomb ’81, Ed Trumbull ’81, and alternate Sheri Gravett ’81, defeated Harvard on nationally syndicated television to win the College Bowl National Championship. That team traveled to England later the same year to play for the World Championship against Sidney Sussex College of Cambridge University.

In the last six years, Davidson’s College Bowl team has won the Association of College Unions International/College Bowl Region 5 tournament twice, earning the right to play for the College Bowl National Championship. Both of those teams ended their seasons in the “Elite Eight.” The 2004 team finished eighth and Rob Correll ’07 was named to the national tournament All-Star team. The 2006 team finished sixth in the nation, though Davidson was by far the smallest school competing and the only one without “University” in its name.

Davidson also has a strong tradition of producing Jeopardy! contestants, said Registrar and Professor of German and Humanities Hansford Epes ’62, who competed on the game show in 1991. Others who have graced that stage include Gravett, Michael Schill ’89, and Amy Jendrek ’08.

Tune in to this space next week to find out how things turned out at the national Quiz Bowl, as well as on Jeopardy!

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
  

Posted By: Bill Giduz