Student Council’s eighth annual trivia night took place on Nov. 9 and ended with a narrow victory for a team made up of juniors Vincent Lin, Andrew Sazykin and Weston Benner and senior Sreedathan Menon.
Naming themselves “Charlie’s Fortnite Squad,” the team earned a victory in the over two-hour event, which had them answering trivia questions about math, science, pop culture and more.
“[Winning] was actually really good because we beat the second place team, the WHAP teachers, by one point,” Lin said. “We calculated the exact score we needed to beat them and that was a lot more exciting than just wondering if we’d won.”
The squad snatched a victory from “The Diet of Cardinals,” a team of AP World History and HADV geography teachers, one of which was first-time competitor Justin Cothran. Despite his disappointment about the loss, Cothran said that he enjoyed competing.
“We feel robbed. We should’ve won, but it was good fun,” Cothran said. “I’m very competitive, so I usually don’t show my competitive side.”
While in previous years, trivia night has been organized and hosted by only the student council, this year’s trivia night was unique in that it was the first to be co-hosted by the Quiz Bowl club.
“It was really fun to get involved with Trivia Night,” Quiz Bowl president Patrick Shaw said. “I had participated in it the last two years and I really enjoyed it.”
As someone who had competed in the past, Shaw said that working with Quiz Bowl seemed like a “natural step” for the trivia night to take and enjoyed working with the student council to make the collaboration happen.
Trivia night also featured power-ups: abilities teams could use to mix up the game after getting a streak by correctly answering three questions in a row. These included making another team’s players do a plank for a couple of minutes, or calling on a member of the audience to help their team answer a question.
Shaw said that the power-ups “added flavor to the game” and engaged the audience, but opinions on them differed between the teams. Although Lin and his team found it enjoyable to interact with the spectators, the runner-up history teachers were not as fond of them.
“The power-ups were a distraction,” Cothran said. “I think that the game would be much faster paced if they didn’t have them.”
Despite this, Cothran found participating in the competition enjoyable and is willing to return next year.
“It was fun,” he said. “It’s nice to build school culture and to be a part of it.”
