The Scholar Bowl is coming back to St. Louis U. High after a year of no matches due to the Covid-19 pandemic with an impressive start. SLUH’s group is ready to come back with a punch and hopefully continue to win matches against other private schools in St. Louis.

The Scholar Bowl club competed in its first meet on Tuesday afternoon. The varsity team, consisting of seniors Eli Dernlan, Sam Orlando, and Jack Werremeyer and sophomore Ethan Herwick, showed off St. Louis U. High’s impressive academics by beating Cor Jesu 330-80. 

The JV team, with freshmen Mason Morris and Madhavan Anbukumar and sophomores Luke Stoff and Nolan Travers, won their first match with Roasti-Kain 350-20, another clean sweep. 

However, the JV team’s next match against Lutheran South was far more exciting, as SLUH won by just ten points.

“The JV team won 220-210, which was really exciting for the team because that is as close of a match as you could possibly have,” said Scholar Bowl moderator Theresa Corley. 

Scholar Bowl is a Jeopardy-like competition where students try to use prior knowledge and reasoning to figure out the answers to complex questions and earn points for their school’s team. They compete against other private schools in the area in four vs. four matches and earn points for their team through trivia-like questions.

Questions in a Scholar Bowl meet cover a vast range of material: math, science, history, geography, literature, music, art, and mythology related questions. However, these questions aren’t formatted like regular Q&A’s, but instead like a paragraph where the longer the paragraph goes on, the more hints and clues contestants get.

“The question might be, for example, ‘This author wrote this quote’ and they would give some obscure thing that the author wrote, then it would continue giving details of the author’s work, and at end of the question, it would say ‘For ten points, name the author whose most famous work is Moby Dick’ and the teams would buzz in to answer the question,” said Corley. 

Points in a Scholar Bowl are earned when the team buzzes in first and answers the question correctly. Each correct answer with a toss-up question is worth ten points, and then there are two shorter bonus questions, worth ten points each, that relate to the original question’s answer. This means that in a single round, a team can earn up to 30 points. 

Bonus questions can go to the other team if answered incorrectly, adding another layer of pressure to these matches. These bonus points are critical to winning the match. Bonus questions or questions where no team knows the correct answer to the toss-up increases tensions in the contest.

The Scholar Bowl competitions, with their many seemingly random questions, encourage students to prepare by studying a wide range of topics. Not only does this call for motivation, but also comprehension skills and memorization abilities over a multitude of topics. However, these areas of knowledge do not need to be memorized with every little detail.

“You don’t need to know that much about a specific topic, but you'll have this sort of surface level knowledge about it,” said Corley. “The goal is to not have a deep depth of knowledge, but rather a wide net of knowledge of each topic.”

SLUH’s Scholar Bowl club has been practicing for their meets during Activity Period, and has been going to meets with other schools every Tuesday since October 26th and is preparing the private school tournament on Saturday, November 30th in Sullivan, Missouri. 

The Scholar Bowl provides students with a great opportunity to learn about topics that they would not otherwise acquire knowledge about to help provide a unique experience to SLUH on an academic level.

“I think the Scholar Bowl really drives home the ‘learning all the time’ goal, by getting knowledge from lots of different sources and accumulating a little base of knowledge,” said freshman Mason Morris.