Jack Collins, Nate Webber, James Winikoff, and Emmet Lewiecki proudly display their RI State Varsity Bowl NHBB Champion plaque. Jack Collins also earned a medal for finishing third in the bee, the individual competition.
April 11, 2019 by Glenda Garland
Like any other team at Hingham High School, quiz bowl has its traditions. The team has qualified every year for WGBH’s High School Quiz Show — that’s ten years in a row. But one of its favorite traditions is going down to Crystal City, Virginia, right next door to the Pentagon, for the national tournament for NHBB, the National History Bowl and Bee.
Even though going down to NHBB nationals is a favorite tradition, the team hasn’t been able to go since this year’s seniors were freshmen. Other tournament formats like NAQT — National Academic Quiz Tournaments — have their nationals in May and June. But because Hingham doesn’t allow students to take field trips past April, for us, it’s NHBB or bust. Two years ago the team’s seniors preferred NAQT format, and chose not to focus on NHBB. Last year, the coach’s new class created a conflict with the dates of NHBB nationals.
Needless to say, this year’s seniors made going to NHBB nationals a real want. They wanted it badly enough to give up the second Saturday of their February break to road-trip down to Brown University and compete in an NHBB tournament. Competing in either an NAQT or NHBB tournament doesn’t resemble the matches you see on High School Quiz Show or Jeopardy. Instead, teams compete round-robin style against four to six teams in the morning, are re-bracketed and compete against another four to six teams in the afternoon before, hopefully, having a finals match. Through the day, students will often hear over 500 questions.
To qualify for nationals a team has to come out in the top quarter of teams competing. The Hingham team won the competition that cold February day, and are now the Rhode Island Varsity Bowl champions.
Nationals here we come.
NHBB Nationals will be April 26th - 28th. Seven of us are flying down — senior co-captains Jack Collins and James Winikoff, senior Nate Webber, junior Lucas Webber (yes, he and Nate are brothers), junior Emmet Lewiecki, freshman Zeke Ader, and coach Glenda Garland. We’ll see how we stack up against teams that also have NHBB nationals as a tradition and are lucky enough to have quiz bowl as a class — think Texas and Florida and some Massachusetts teams — as well as teams that are there for the first time, hoping to make their own tradition.
Along the way we’ll explore the National Mall and Smithsonian museums, and make some friends. The team sees a lot of familiar faces at most of the tournaments we compete in around Massachusetts. At the Rhode Island NHBB tournament, we saw a few. But we also made new friends. A boy from Connecticut competing as his own team, for instance, spent all the free time between rounds chatting with our team. He was good, too. We expect we’ll find him down in Washington, DC, meet some new folk, and learn a ton of trivia.
We’ll report back when we’re done. Until then, here’s a Washington, DC trivia question for you: what famous fictional character’s head is among the gargoyles adorning the National Cathedral?