HomeGrand County High School’s Quiz Bowl teams performed well in their final two tournaments of the season, bringing home two first-place trophies from San Juan High on April 15 and two second-place awards from Carbon High on April 9.
At the April 15 varsity tournament held in the SJHS auditorium in Blanding, Grand’s squad of Kamron Call, Nat Smith, Maren Larsen, and Wesley Rodda went 3-1 in pool play, their only loss coming to San Juan High’s “Blue” team. Then, the semifinals of the single-elimination championship round against Emery, Grand came from 30 points behind late in the game, answering the final two 15-point questions correctly to tie the score 120-120.
A key question at the end involved correctly naming the author of the famous frontier novel, “The Last of the Mohicans.” Smith correctly responded with “James Fenimore Cooper,” thereby sending the game into overtime.
The Red Devils then made a correct response on the first question of the sudden- death tiebreaker, setting up a rematch with San Juan Blue in the finals.
In the final game, Grand fell behind early on, but recovered late in the game to pull away with a 180-130 win and the championship.
In the junior varsity tournament held in a nearby classroom at San Juan High, Grand’s JV squad (Deanna Irvin, Delaney Manley, Cassidy Walker, and Tierra Hawks) went 4-1 overall in pool play, earning the first-place trophy outright, despite losing their last game by 10 points on the final question. Emery’s “Black” team came from behind to win that game 90-80, but Grand scored solid wins in its other four contests in becoming the only JV team to win four games that day.
The preceding week, on April 9 at Carbon High in Price, Grand’s teams finished second in both the varsity and JV tournaments. Competing for the Red Devils at that event were Rodda, Irvin, Call, and Reyce Knutson on the varsity team, plus Walker, Becca Farnsworth, Savannah Hurley, and Benni Shumway on the JV squad.
“Thank you all for a wonderful high school Quiz Bowl tournament season,” said J.J. Grant, director of the Southeast Education Service Center, which sponsored several Quiz Bowl events at both the high school level and the junior high level this spring. “Every school has outstanding students and they represented your school and district in an exemplary manner. You can all be proud of them,” Grant added in an e-mail sent to the participants’ coaches.