When they are at the hotel’s weight room, after dinner, the three VA athletes playing at the HSNCT are training, Pablo at the bench press machine, and the other two train elsewhere. One of the users comments on the T-shirt Pablo wears in the weight room. Property of Venomous Agendas Athletics.

“Venomous… Agendas? Is that some seven-by-seven football team?” the weight room user asks Pablo.

“No, there is no seven by seven in my area since I live in a rural area. It’s the school I play football for, it’s in southwest Louisiana…”

Damn… while everyone and their dogs in Louisiana in quiz bowl knows about VA by now, it’s obvious that this guy isn’t a quiz bowl fan, Pablo keeps doing bench press.

“My girlfriend is next to me”

“I play basketball for VA, and we both play quiz bowl at the HSNCT” Audrey comments.

“It must not be easy to juggle quiz bowl and sport! Hats off to you two then!”

“Thank you” Pablo returns to bench press.

Of course not. But step outside the worlds of mathletics or quiz bowl, and VA is just a school like any other. While VA is the most competitive high school in southwest Louisiana, some of our opponents play for even more competitive schools. I wouldn’t imagine how it would have been like playing for, like, Solon, Pablo seems triggered by the comments of that weight room user, albeit secretly.

When they return to their room later in the night, they come together and come back with Gerard. Whose performance went downhill so much that Cora managed to score about 10 times as much as he did.

“Gerard, as much as you feel pressure, there was someone in the weight room that made me realize that we are under pressure, too. Not only it’s not the same as you, but some of our quiz bowl opponents have it worse!” Pablo tries to explain to Gerard.

“True, VA is competitive, but you remind me of Heather as of last year!” Cora remarks to him.

“What do you mean, I remind you of Heather as a rising senior?” Gerard rolls his eyes.

“Heather wanted to transfer to Lacassine last year because she felt crushed academically back then. However, I believe one of the main reasons why Columbia offered her is because she got As in six APs rather than three, and Dartmouth told me that I needed to keep taking APs next year. I assume the same holds for you, Pablo, at Cornell?”

“Even with her hoops talent, I’m not even sure she would have gotten to play for Berkeley without these three extra APs! They cut off their last big commit because she wasn’t academically strong enough!” Cora comments on how she feels about Heather. “Then again, maybe I can play for Berkeley, too, if I was good enough on the wings! We’re not talking about me playing for Case Western anymore!”

“Cora, don’t tell me that Berkeley made an offer to you?” Audrey asks, rolling her eyes.

“No. While I know almost for sure that I, nay, we are stronger academically than whoever already got offered on the wings from Berkeley, I got an offer to play for UPenn”

I scored the same as Audrey on the ACT, a 35, Cora keeps to herself. Which is why “we”. But don’t underestimate our opponents!

“Cora, you seem to be implying that, while academics are secondary, it can be a decisive factor when deciding between players of roughly equal talent!” Gerard retorts. “And when you consider that we don’t hand out academic favors our sports opponents do, I’m sure any of you will blow your future college teammates out of the water in the classroom. Heck, even Heather likely will!”

“You really think Berkeley makes gender-balanced compromises for basketball players? Heather would be on the lower end of the regular student body at Berkeley, but girls’ hoops don’t bring in nearly as much revenue! I would be inclined to think compromises are going to be smaller for girls than for boys!” Audrey retorts. “But compromises nonetheless”

“And don’t forget about the Rhode Island Bloodbath! Even with her hoops talent, with her three point oh, Carrie could play for Rhode Island only because she had a stronger ACT score than three-quarters of the regular student body!” Cora yells in Gerard’s direction.

But it is then that the couple starts realizing that their collegiate insecurities are getting the better of them. Our football opponents don’t have nearly as brutal an academic schedule as ours, and pick their colleges based on their football, unlike us, who seem to use it as a vehicle to attempt attending the most prestigious college possible – in an academic sense – that we can afford.

“Try to imagine how it would feel to play for our big opponents, like, you know, Boston Latin, Thomas Jefferson Science and Tech… we would be playing our respective sports, quiz bowl and then some, such as more clubs, and maybe even stuff such as the math team! We would be stretched far thinner in extracurriculars, and we might not have been able to play our sports as well as we did! And Heather wouldn’t have gotten to play for Berkeley, even if she had the same grades and ACT score!” Pablo harangues the room’s occupants.

“Stop! Stop!” Gerard pleads with the three athletes about stopping the talk of academics in college sports.

Gerard then texts his parents at home. “Maybe I should transfer to Welsh…” he tells his parents, believing that maybe Welsh being less competitive than VA would help him.

“I guess, we should stop checking our email inboxes for any signs of offers from colleges…” Audrey sighs.

The following morning, with both squads assembled after breakfast, ready to play quiz bowl again, they are about to listen to Nadine once more.

“With the A-team being six and one, and the B-team being five and two, the playoffs are within range. However, we all need to play the next three or more games as a team because the HSNCT playoffs are not about individual performance!”

And individual performance is irrelevant if one puts quiz bowl achievements on a college résumé, but I think it’s premature for a lot of the players. Also, Audrey and Pablo seem to bank on using sports as a vehicle to go to college, as does Cora, so I think it would be premature to mention it to the underclassmen, Nadine ruminates, knowing Gerard and Lilina are pretty loaded on that count. So what counts to the freshmen on the B-team is the final standing only.

As they collect their cards, they brace themselves for three games, and Cora gets the rundown of what do finishing the prelims with a 6-4, 7-3 or 8-2 record mean for the playoffs: single-elimination, double-elimination or first-round bye respectively.

Now that they are on their way to play more games, the A-team is going to a small conference room in the basement of the hotel.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Will you forgive me for what I told the other three last night?” Pablo asks Audrey.

“Yes. They deserve to know the truth; anything less would disappoint me. Plus, we never really discussed college sports recruiting much with the other quiz bowlers, we mostly discussed it among athletes, and around them, we acted as though we were good enough not to have to rely on our sports”

“We both are” Pablo then, once again, kisses Audrey before getting seated for the game.

And, of course, the teams get seated for what either one hope would be their ticket for the winners’ bracket. The staff working the game is in position, and the buzzers are tested prior to the beginning of the game:

“This is round sixteen of the Sunday morning prelims of the 2031 NAQT High School National Championship Tournament. This game pits the twelve card against the seventeen card. From California, we have Archbishop Mitty A and from Louisiana, we have Venomous Agendas A. Best of luck to both teams, and here’s tossup one” the moderator starts the game. “In this novel, the titular character escapes prison while his future stepbrother dies in captivity”

Lilina buzzes in. “The Death of Artemio Cruz”

“Fifteen. For ten points each, answer these questions about Buddhism. In Buddhism, this event represents the end of the Noble Eightfold Path for a practitioner”

Pablo steps forward to answer. “Nirvana”

“This title is granted in Buddhism to people who achieve nirvana”

All I knew about nirvana was that it represented the end of a reincarnation cycle, and spiritual illumination, but no more than that, Pablo muses while signaling that he doesn’t know the answer. Audrey also draws a blank, so it falls on the other two girls to answer the bonus part.

“Arahant” Nadine answers.

“Arahants are regarded by different schools of Buddhism as possessing different levels of this attribute”

Once again, the VA players draw a blank. Not even Nadine seems willing to hazard an answer, so the clock ticks on the VAs. With less than one second to go, Audrey, who up to this point, often seemed to be a clutch player, supplies an attempt to an answer:

“Enlightenment”

“Perfection, that’s twenty for the bonus”

No one can always get it right all the time, but better get it wrong on a bonus than on a tossup, Audrey sighs after getting this bonus question wrong.

However, as with their last game, this game proves a tightly contested game, with both teams fighting tooth and nail for every point they can grab. So much that, with one tossup left to go, VA A is in the lead by a measly five points, and the clock is ticking on everyone, including the moderator.

“Final tossup: The high-performance variant of this chemical lab technique uses high-pressure pumps to push the mobile phase in a cylinder”

Damn it! We took AP Chemistry together, and never was any kind of high-performance lab technique used! Pablo ruminates, while the signal for the end of regulation time rings. With neither team buzzing in…

“Stationary phases of this method are separated by either their bed shapes or the physical state…” the moderator is interrupted.

However, since not even Pablo or Audrey could answer this question, they aren’t even in position to buzz in. The Monarchs’ (i.e. Archbishop Mitty’s) science player then buzzes in, hoping to score.

“Chromatography!”

“Fifteen!” the moderator rules.

“We skip the entire bonus”

“And that’s the game. Score?”

“Archbishop Mitty three hundred seventy, VA three hundred sixty” the scorekeeper says.

Shoot! Now we know how it feels to lose a game because of a buzzer-beater! Audrey and Cora have both been on both ends of this situation as basketball players, hopefully we get a somewhat easier opponent in the next game, Nadine ruminates, as VA A waits half an hour for their next game.

And VA B is also 6-2, having won its game and hence a playoff spot.

“Woohoo! We’re both into the playoffs!” Cora comes to meet with Audrey shortly after VA B’s game ended on a different floor of the hotel.

“Here’s to hoping we both win at least one more prelim game! After this tournament ends, we will have all summer to focus on basketball!” Audrey formulates her wishes.

“And me on football!” Pablo raises his voice.

My dad changed his tune about me playing college football after I got an offer from Cornell. He’s OK with making me go at, like, LSU or Tulane’s camps, Pablo ruminates upon receiving text messages about asking his permission to attend more collegiate camps from his dad.

Of course, before their next game, another cheesy line is then told to both squads before they get to their respective game rooms:

“We lost the previous game by a measly ten points. A buzzer-beater! Audrey and Cora know what I mean by a buzzer-beater. Stay focused, don’t hesitate to provoke opponents into buzzer races! And the winners’ bracket is ours to gain!” Nadine harangues the players.

“Venomous! Agendas!” Pablo shouts in the hallway.

While both teams win their respective ninth games, whose opponents are both schools with no history of playing VA, when their final game comes…

“Damn it! We are playing Hunter A!” Gerard screams in panic, wracked by his bad memories of last year’s game against them.

“Rather than to panic, Gerard, you should listen actively. I’m sure you know some-thing, or else you wouldn’t have played quiz bowl in the first place!” Warren tries to console Gerard for the umpteenth time.

Yet, it seems like luxury conference rooms are reserved for top teams this year, this late in the prelims. On top of that, both VA teams play their final prelim games in the same cluster of conference rooms.

So while VA A, playing against Early College at Guilford, seems to simply go through the motions and looks headed to win by a margin, while not too tight, doesn’t amount to a blowout, here VA B, is headed towards one of these all-too-common nail-biting tossup-bonus cycles. A repeat of that game last year. With VA B trailing by 30 points, everyone is on edge…

“Final tossup: The second movement from Beethoven’s seventh symphony is named after this tempo”

This clue makes everyone shudder. Of course, since the musical content of quiz bowl leaned much more heavily towards the works, artists and the currents than musical theory,

“This tempo originally implied a pace slightly faster than andante but is now slightly slower than allegro”

Why tell us about the evolution of the tempo? None of us are in band! The Hunter arts and literature player ruminates, unwilling to buzz in. Yet Gerard’s nerves make him feel like that Hawk (i.e. Hunter’s) player should enter a buzzer race against him. Which the Hawk wins, but only because Gerard was faking.

“Andantino!” the Hawk answers.

“Neg five” the moderator rules.

Because the power mark has been exhausted, they see fit to wait until the For ten points cue to buzz in.

“For ten points, denotes a moderately fast tempo in modern music”

Gerard then buzzes in for real, after not buzzing in at all today. “Allegretto!”

“Ten. Pencil and paper ready” the moderator orders the VA players.

Yes! Gerard finally got an answer correctly today! Cora keeps to herself, realizing that VA needs to answer 2 bonus parts correctly. The bonus begins in earnest:

“A baker wants to double the height of a cylindrical cake. For ten points each, how many times more flour does the baker need compared to the original recipe?”

“Two” Gerard answers.

“Given that the original recipe required x amount of whipping cream for a cake of radius r and height h, how much whipping cream does the baker need now? You have ten seconds!” The signal for the end of regulation time rings.

Let’s see: you only need whipping cream to cover the top and side. So we have x = πr(r+h), Gerard starts regaining clarity. And yet all 4 players, who all took Geometry, attempt to independently solve the problem in the time allotted. Once the time is up:

“Our answer is x times r plus two h over r plus h” Gerard answers the second question.

“Assuming strawberries are only used to top the cake, how many times more strawberries do the baker need compared to the original recipe?”

“One!” Gerard answers.

“Thirty for the bonus, and that’s the game. Score?” the mod turns to the scorekeeper.

“Hunter three hundred fifty-five, VA three hundred seventy!”

“Way to go, Gerard! You gave us a bye for the winners’ bracket!” Cora congratulates him.

“Yeah, I guess, I came in clutch” Gerard tries to play nice with Cora.

Am I good only for pencil-and-paper-ready types of questions? Not sure I’m worth keeping on the quiz bowl team anymore… Gerard starts moping, when he realizes that he didn’t score nearly as much on tossups this year compared to last year. Surely the rising sophomores, or Cora, can replace my usefulness in pencil-and-paper-ready questions…