Greatest High School Quiz Bowl Players Ever

[echoes in the Othersea]

Much has been written on the best college quiz bowl players, but looking only at their performance in high school, who are the best quiz bowl players in history? I'd imagine some of the most successful college players would make this list, but also maybe some ones who converted slightly less well, or maybe even a High School superstar or two who didn't continue into college.

[Cheynem]

This isn't adding names to this list, but merely noting that when I ranked the 70 Greatest (Recent) College Players, large swaths of them, including many at the very top, did not play in high school or barely or had undistinguished HS careers (sometimes only in "bad" formats), including Jordan Brownstein and Eric Mukherjee. Even Matt Bollinger, who was an excellent HS player, was not regarded as a top line HS player until late in his HS career.

So, yes, I think the lists would be *very* different than greatest college player lists.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

this has occasionally been a cute point of discussion but imo it's not that fun to discuss people who peaked in hs since it often involves a lot of unhealthy study habits in people who are maybe even less well equipped for some testy situations than college aged players (who often also aren't great!)

[echoes in the Othersea]

this has occasionally been a cute point of discussion but imo it's not that fun to discuss people who peaked in hs since it often involves a lot of unhealthy study habits in people who are maybe even less well equipped for some testy situations than college aged players (who often also aren't great!)

I respect your opinion and I freely admit that I didn't think about this angle, but I don't think this should preclude all discussion of best HS players. I'm not asking who dropped off in college or didn't play or was better in HS than in college, and if you don't want to bring someone up, you don't have to.

To compare with College Basketball to the NBA (because reading "Greatest College basketball players" lists is what inspired me to ask this question), I would expect that some of the answers would be like Kareem Abdul Jabbar/Lew Alcindor: possibly the greatest college basketball player ever, but lost the GOAT title to players who were good earlier but really ramped up at the highest level (Jordan) or who never played college ball/here HS quiz bowl (LeBron). Does that make Kareem unsuccessful, or that he "peaked" in College Basketball?

And more broadly, is it really just "Good HS players who didn't do as well in college all had unhealthy study habits in HS"? I assume some would just go to colleges without quiz bowl teams, some would take up other things, and some just wouldn't be as good at the different game of College Quiz Bowl. Or maybe we're all chasing our tails and Andrew Yaphe ruled the HS circuit with TJ between 1991 and 1994.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

In the era before mine (I started playing high school in 2007), the consensus was that Jacob Mikanowski was the best player of what passed as "good" quizbowl, or at least the best player for whom attestable records were kept by reputable organizations. (Dude was a champion of all four of the first four PACE NSCs.) From shortly after that, I've heard similar about Jonathan Hess --now a "trivia" titan -- though I think his program offered fewer chances to escape the Chip Beall ecosystem.

Of course, that era's questions were unrecognizable by the late 2000s. (This may just be "when I was active" bias talking, but the earliest competition year in which a high school could play ~10 pyramidal tournaments with quality standards was probably 2008-9; even then, many top high schoolers felt the need to enter college fields in a manner that is now unnecessary and prohibited.) In that era, I'd venture (in rough chronological order) the names Shantanu Jha, Henry Gorman, Neil Gurram, Matt Bollinger, and yeah okay myself as people who stood one tier above the rest. In the era in which I staffed the HS game after that (to ~2015 or so), Adam Silverman, Max Schindler, Sameer Rai, and Eric Xu hit similar heights. The era was quite crowded with very strong teams on which one player routinely brought in 75+% of the team's points, but these people also led teams to serious championship contention their senior year (or at least into "can upset anyone in the field" / "still in contention well into Sunday" range) while doing that.

Their trajectories in college varied significantly (from multi-time champion to persona non grata at all NAQT events), and some people just a smidgen further down ended up reaching similar heights (Ike Jose and Tommy Casalaspi come to mind as people who were extremely good and extremely driven by high-difficulty questions from an early age). Of people who'd be in a "freeze frame" ending at HS graduation, but who didn't stick with it, I'd venture Anu(rag) Kashyap from Rancho Bernardo HS in SoCal as someone who was reaching superstar level before the MIT curriculum ate him. I'm glad to see that Buzzword has belatedly brought him back into our community's orbit.

I'll leave the thoughts on people more recent than that to people more recent than me.

Even Matt Bollinger, who was an excellent HS player, was not regarded as a top line HS player until late in his HS career.

Having been there for the before, the during (RIP to the Barnes and Noble in Silver Spring where a bunch of DC-area teens sat against the shelves reading packets to each other), and the after, I've still never seen a study binge as rapid or as successful as the one Matt B. undertook in the summer between his junior and senior year. He went from second or third scorer on a team that was only sometimes making playoffs at local tournaments to, at minimum, the 3rd best player in the country in the span of three months, and only went up from there.

Or maybe we're all chasing our tails and Andrew Yaphe ruled the HS circuit with TJ between 1991 and 1994.

My impression from people Even Older Than Me is that this is true and Yaphe was always game-dominatingly good, though as QBWiki puts it "a paucity of records from that time precludes further judgment." I've pinged a friend of mine who was active in that era, whom I hope can say more.

EDIT: fixed erroneous quote tag

[echoes in the Othersea]

Another very successful HS player I noticed while idly trawling through HSNCT results from past years is Kurtis Droge: In 2008 he was lead scorer at HSNCT, with a 19 point gap over number 2, a much larger gap than most HSNCT top scorers. He also was 4th highest scorer HSNCT in 2007, and 2nd highest scorer in 2006. His 2008 performance pretty much carried his team to 5th place.

However, in trying to find if anyone had been first scorer by a higher margin, I found a perhaps even more impressive run: Sam Blizzard, top scorer at the 2013, 2014, and 2015 HSNCTs, though he never brought his team all the way to a 5th place finish like Kurtis Droge did.

And it turns out that Kurtis Droge's 19 point gap over second place is at best the second highest margin recorded at HSNCT, because Alex Schmidt was top scorer at 2018 HSNCT by almost 34 points, leading a two man team with his brother to a 12th place finish.

So those are definitely three names worth adding to the discussion.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

The best players since where Matt's post ends (2016-present) were Arya Karthik, Clark Smith, and Hari Parameswaran.

Arya's Lambert team won the 2022 NSC with Arya leading the field in prelim PPG and being 2nd overall. More impressively than the ppg imo, they had 90 powers in the 16 non-finals games (and then 11 more against the other two best teams in a string of 3 wins..), while the next closest had 59, so basically 2 powers/game more. https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/7 ... dividuals/

Clark made it all the way to the finals before losing to an absolute juggernaut of a TJ team. Similarly led the field in PPG and powers by a large margin. Clark's supporting cast was much weaker than Arya's, and its possible Dublin Scioto wins the title with that kind of supporting cast, but that's very much a what-if game. https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/5 ... dividuals/

Hari's Beavercreek team won the 2019 HSNCT with Hari scoring a supermajority of the points. https://www.naqt.com/stats/tournament/t ... _id=155825. This is the only time this feat has been accomplished at HSNCT in the modern era, I believe. However, there were individual performances comparable to Hari's at this tournament from other top players that year (William Golden and Ethan Strombeck). I think this is why I would personally favor beginning this convo with Arya and Clark, who got to the championship while playing at a level completely above that of their peers. But I think its totally legitimate to include Hari here as well. William Golden made that year's NSC finals as well, and would be on my honorable mentions list for this time period along with Jakob Myers and maybe others.

[hokie168]

My impression from people Even Older Than Me is that this is true and Yaphe was always game-dominatingly good, though as QBWiki puts it "a paucity of records from that time precludes further judgment." I've pinged a friend of mine who was active in that era, whom I hope can say more.

Andrew Yaphe was certainly a game-dominating player from his sophomore year on (I don't know about his freshman year because I wasn't around to see it). Keeping in mind that there wasn't really a "national" circuit in the modern sense, the only player that I recall as being able to meet him on even terms was James Rogers. Both were players who automatically made their team a contender for national championships. As mentioned, results from that era are fragmentary at best, but I believe that one of the two won nearly every HS tournament in the mid-Atlantic (a strong circuit even then) in which they both played, and that Yaphe got the better of Rogers slightly more often than not. James Rogers went to Johns Hopkins and played some, but I think he became less active after his sophomore year. While he was still a very good college player, he wasn't at the same relative level he was in HS.

Questions aside, there were many common practices in that era that would be completely unacceptable today. I remember HS tournaments regularly only had three prelim games (over nine or ten rounds) leading to single-elimination playoffs for perhaps a third of the field. With the paucity of tournaments at the time, it was possible for a new player to attend everything they could and still play fewer than 15 games all year! When I entered grad school the fall of 2012, I was pretty sure that Tommy Casalaspi had played more games of qb in HS than I had in three years of HS and eight semesters in college. It makes me happy to think of how many playing opportunities are available for HS and even MS players these days.

[Stained Diviner]

Can somebody change the name of this thread to Greatest High School Quiz Bowl Players Ever Other Than Rohan Ganeshan?

[The Stately Rhododendron]

Sam Blizzard was a great solo player but i think at the time Max Schindler was the person to beat - he just had a really strong team behind him as well. Sameer Rai had an unbelievable amount of hype attached to him at the time as well.

[echoes in the Othersea]

Can somebody change the name of this thread to Greatest High School Quiz Bowl Players Ever Other Than Rohan Ganeshan?

Rohan has definitely established himself among the HS greats, but I don't necessarily think that makes him the consensus greatest.

Generally I think there clearly a lot of different ways of looking at this question, as shown by a lot of the posts here. HSNCT vs PACE, number of powers vs just ppg, and also large contribution to a winning team vs larger contribution to a not winning team. Rohan's margin over second place is second largest in HSNCT, after Alex Schmidt, but Rohan brought his (larger) team further up the standings, to second place vs Alex's 12th. Cross compare against Hari, who led to victory, but with a much smaller margin over the other top players. Then there's arguing for Arya Karthik along similar lines but using PACE results. Sam Blizzard has a longevity argument but seemed to do less well at PACE than HSNCT.

One pattern I'm noticing from the combination of posts is that the era Matt Jackson describes had a dense top layer of players, but later on things change to more one player standing out from the rest, like Arya Karthik and then Rohan Ganeshan.

[etotheipi]

Rohan has definitely established himself among the HS greats, but I don't necessarily think that makes him the consensus greatest.

In my mind, having done what he did as a junior (whereas Clark, Hari, me, etc. made similar runs only as seniors), Rohan is pretty clearly the best high school quizbowl player at high school quizbowl in a very, very long time.

Note the qualification: "best high school quizbowl player" could mean best at the high school game, or most competitive at three- or four-dot difficulties. Both, I think, are reasonable ways of adding specificity to the question - that is, those people who claim that high school quizbowlers should be judged simply by their performance at high school quizbowl are wrong, given the attitudes of most elite high schoolers toward college quizbowl these days, and their frequent participation in even three-dot tournaments (and also the existence of NASAT).

I don't think it's proper I share my thoughts here in this regard, but I believe these two criteria would create nontrivially different lists. To reiterate, however, the former list would at this point undoubtedly be crowned by Rohan.

Also, I don't think PPG margin is a very good metric, since PPG is team-dependent enough to be almost utterly useless in quantifying players. As a quick example, here are the prelims-PPG ranks of the IPNCT finalists at HSNCT: 1, 27, 41, 62, 72, 32, 172, 74, 18. This is not to say that IPNCT results are a perfect ordering of the best players in quizbowl - they are nowhere close, for somewhat obvious reasons - but they are decent, and the fact that there is such a disparity between them and PPG margin should probably invalidate the use of the latter in any serious comparison.

One pattern I'm noticing from the combination of posts is that the era Matt Jackson describes had a dense top layer of players, but later on things change to more one player standing out from the rest, like Arya Karthik and then Rohan Ganeshan.

My (not particularly informed) guess would be that this is (a) a natural consequence of the growth of the game and the general turn of questions to "academicism," and (b) a result of the general undervaluing of specialists in (esp. high school) quizbowl. The former not only obviates the need for every player with a certain level of dedication to become a game-dominating generalist (since many of these players have teammates with at least some dedication to the game as well), but also makes it far harder for a single player to do damage to teams of good specialists, especially at higher difficulties. Therefore, more and more players are channeled onto the path of becoming elite specialists, or at least not generalizing to every single category (I would be surprised if a significant number of the top high-schooler specialists of all time were not players active within the last five or so years: Geoffrey Chen, Justin Chen, a handful of current players), and are not rated so highly as they deserve to be by the community because of this (for innocuous reasons, to be clear: most prominently the diminishing returns involved in specialization, especially at high-school nationals).

[Adventure Temple Trail]

If we treat "skill as a three- or four-dot player while still in high school" as a metric something like "most able to scale to arbitrarily high difficulties," Tommy Casalaspi was obviously on a different plane than everyone else when it came to reading, writing, and buzzing on arbitrarily difficult Literature, to an extent that probably wasn't matched by any high schooler on any category until at least Geoffrey Chen on Science in 2019.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

If we treat "skill as a three- or four-dot player while still in high school" as a metric something like "most able to scale to arbitrarily high difficulties," Tommy Casalaspi was obviously on a different plane than everyone else when it came to reading, writing, and buzzing on arbitrarily difficult Literature, to an extent that probably wasn't matched by any high schooler on any category until at least Geoffrey Chen on Science in 2019.

For what it's worth I would include Jordan and Jakob in in this conversation as well.

Jordan, though he was certainly never involved in high school quizbowl to the extent that Tommy and Geoffrey were, had ridiculous depth in large parts of the history and lit canons. When we were running practices for a NASAT team that never materialized, Jordan was racking up first-lines in history, lit, and myth left and right. At the first Maryland practice I saw Jordan play at, he was first-lining tossups on Stanley Baldwin and got five or six tossups playing next to Chris Ray in multiple games.

Jakob put up this performance in high school, predominantly off the strength of their history, geo, and CE knowledge. 'Nuff said.

[AGoodMan]

If we treat "skill as a three- or four-dot player while still in high school" as a metric something like "most able to scale to arbitrarily high difficulties," Tommy Casalaspi was obviously on a different plane than everyone else when it came to reading, writing, and buzzing on arbitrarily difficult Literature, to an extent that probably wasn't matched by any high schooler on any category until at least Geoffrey Chen on Science in 2019.

For what it's worth I would include Jordan and Jakob in in this conversation as well.

Jordan, though he was certainly never involved in high school quizbowl to the extent that Tommy and Geoffrey were, had ridiculous depth in large parts of the history and lit canons. When we were running practices for a NASAT team that never materialized, Jordan was racking up first-lines in history, lit, and myth left and right. At the first Maryland practice I saw Jordan play at, he was first-lining tossups on Stanley Baldwin and got five or six tossups playing next to Chris Ray in multiple games.

Jakob put up this performance in high school, predominantly off the strength of their history, geo, and CE knowledge. 'Nuff said.

Yeah - Jakob Myers should absolutely be in contention. I'm surprised to see their name only come up just now.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

Rohan has definitely established himself among the HS greats, but I don't necessarily think that makes him the consensus greatest.

In my mind, having done what he did as a junior (whereas Clark, Hari, me, etc. made similar runs only as seniors), Rohan is pretty clearly the best high school quizbowl player at high school quizbowl in a very, very long time.

Will note that Clark got 6th at PACE 2017 as a junior even before his 2018 run, with field-leading stats that were pretty much identical to Jakob's that year. DCC cleared the field that year with no losses by winning their final game against Dublin Scioto, which came down to a tiebreaker.