The Crookston High School Knowledge Bowl team has had a lot of success this season. Two to three teams from Crookston have competed in every event this year, and a Crookston team has taken first each time. At the sub-region, the team of Scott Cordova, Ben Brantner, Ainsley Boucher, Emily Gillette, and Walker Winjum took first place and will now compete at regionals on March 11 in Thief River Falls.
Senior Ben Brantner said that experience can be valuable in recognizing a question before it’s complete with buzzing in quickly. “Sometimes I’m a little too quick my teammates tell me,” said Brantner. “One of the big things that come with experience is they sometimes bring back questions from old meets or are asking about similar things. Sometimes you can go in after a few words and guess what they are asking. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but for the most part, it usually helps us out quite a bit.”
Senior Scott Cordova said questions cover a wide range of topics. “Questions can vary among subjects a lot,” said Cordova. “So, it helps when different members of the team have different places of expertise you could say. They are better with history, science or grammar, literature questions.”
Cordova said practice focuses more on buzzing in your answers to get in a groove for meets. “I would say practice is more buzzing,” said Cordova. “We’re practicing how to buzz because knowledge is so general, so it’s pretty hard to learn in that way. It’s more keeping in a groove like matches.”
Both Brantner and Cordova said some of the toughest questions asked at meets deal with functions of the English Language, sentence structure, and grammar. Knowledge Bowl Advisor Katelyn Stegman, who also teaches English, agreed the English questions are hard to get. “My favorite type of question is when they give you an obscure poem and ask you what the last antecedent on the last adverbial phrase is,” said Stegman. “You have to know what the poem is, remember it, and then know what they are asking for too. Those English questions and I teach English, are super hard.”
Crookston advanced to state a year ago and is hoping to return this year. Cordova added he thought it was pretty impressive that Crookston often had two teams place at the competitions this year, a sign that there are a lot of smart kids in Crookston. “Even though we can only bring one team to state, I’d say our top two or even three teams performed very well,” said Cordova. “Even the second, I guess you could say B team, they would place or be close to placing, which is pretty impressive in the region, especially Crookston is a small-town. We have a lot of smart kids here.”
Brantner echoed Cordova adding that if Crookston were allowed to send two teams to state, he thought they probably could. “Yeah, it’s a pretty deep team,” said Brantner. “If we were allowed to send two teams forward and we split the people up on the top team into two different teams, we could probably send two teams to state. That just kind of goes with what Scottie was saying. We have a lot of good competitors. Even the ones that aren’t on the (top) team are very good too.”
