My experience at PACE NSC 2019

[Arabidopsis failiana]

My name is Mark Bailey. In 2019, I attended PACE NSC in Reston, VA as a high school senior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, VA. I’ve been thinking about it and reflecting on the experience recently, and thought I ought to write about it before my memories become any more faded or warped. Hopefully, this post is more interesting than the latest MSNCT polls.

I’ll try (and possibly fail) to give some background about my quizbowl experience without letting this post become a narrative of my whole high school life. In the spring of my junior year, I wanted to go to play some quizbowl tournaments outside of the VHSL scrimmages and regional tournament that we had always limited ourself to. Our coach, Mr. Zahn, seemed enthusiastic about the idea but never actually did anything about it. So, I used this website, found some tournaments that I wanted to go to, recruited people from the team / my friends at school, and my parents drove us to the tournaments and paid for us to play. I went to two non-VHSL tournaments in the spring of 2018 and did fairly well. In my senior year, quizbowl was what really excited me. I had set the goal of winning the VHSL class 6 state championship, which was very ambitious and certainly not a guaranteed thing. We did ultimately win the championship. It was well-deserved—I think that we were the best team in class 6—but we I felt that the win was near-miraculous because the format worked out in our favor (we lost to Robinson in the regional and super-regional tournaments before beating them in the state tournament) and that we hadn’t had to play possibly the 2nd best team in the classification at all. This saga is probably worthy of its own post. I also played at IPNCT in April 2019, where I somehow finished T-5, which was a bit higher than I probably deserved.

I really wanted to play in one of the national tournaments (actually, I wanted to play in both, but I didn’t feel like asking for a ton of money from my parents / my teammates’ parents to go to Atlanta for HSNCT). This is just the way I think, but it made no sense to pay a thousand dollars for an entry fee, hotels, and air travel to go play 12 rounds of quizbowl and finish in 50th place when it only cost 70 bucks to drive to Richmond or Baltimore or wherever and get the same entertainment value there. But I did talk to my parents and tell them I wanted to go to NSC (conveniently located less than an hour away from home), and then I talked to Mr. Zahn about it too.

At one time, I had been really impressed by Mr. Zahn, who was in his 3rd year as scholastic bowl coach. But by this time, I was really frustrated with him and didn’t talk to him very much. Aside from never helping me with actually finding quizbowl tournaments to play (his attitude had been a “yeah, sounds cool, I’ll look into it,” and then never looking into it), he did not help us at all with practices. We had practices twice a week before school (because it was convenient for HIS schedule, not because that’s what we wanted—and this definitely did not help with convincing people to come check out the team) and he was basically always late. Sometimes we spent more time sitting in the hall waiting for him to come and unlock his classroom than actually in the classroom. And of course, he didn’t actually do anything at the practices; I had to do all the question reading. Towards the end of the year, we had to use a different teacher’s classroom when I wanted to start holding brief after-school practices. Mr. Zahn was also my AP Literature teacher and I had his class first period, so I saw him every day. I think he was okay as a teacher: he actually made us read stuff and write a ton of essays to practice for the AP exam. But he was very full of himself and wasted so much class time regaling us with stories about how cool he was in college. (Pot, meet kettle—I’m very full of myself too). He also wasted the time of people who actually came to practices by letting cool kids from his class who didn’t care about scholastic bowl at all play at our VHSL matches. But the most infuriating thing was that after we won the state championship, he got money from the school to buy a really expensive new buzzer set, even though we had a perfectly-fine buzzer set and had no need for another one. This disgusted me because my parents had literally spent hundreds of dollars paying for our team to play in quizbowl tournaments, and he spent all this money that he only got because of me, without even consulting me. Now, my parents could easily afford this expense, but this was so wrong. If it sounds like I am holding a grudge from high school that I should probably get over as an adult, yes, yes I am. Anyway, I talked to him and he basically said “I’ll see what I can do” about getting the school to pay for NSC. My understanding is that the school did pay for us to play at NSC, which just makes me madder, because if they would pay for that then why couldn’t the pay for all the other tournament that we went to? Maybe if Mr. Zahn had done his job and actually tried to help, they would have.

NSC was on June 8 and 9, one week before my high school graduation. I was doing “Senior Experience” which was supposed to be like a 3-week unpaid internship for seniors because nobody expected them to come to class after the AP exams anyway. My friend Marcus (my future college roommate) and I got to go work at the marina in Alexandria for 3 weeks. I don’t even really remember what we did there. I think we washed and waxed some small sailboats they used for summer camps. Because I didn’t have any school work to do for 3 weeks, I set some really lofty goals like reading 5 NSC packets a day and memorizing all the facts about all the notable Roman emperors and books of the New Testament and that kind of stuff that I didn’t follow through on. I spent more time playing Protobowl and read some packets but I never had the drive to really do serious study.

I also emailed TJHSST’s quizbowl team to see if we could scrimmage with their B or C team one day after school. I set up a date with William Wang, and on the day of the scrimmage I drove to TC and picked up my teammates. We drove to TJ, getting there just before 4 pm, and were amazed at how beautiful their school building was. I had assumed that they got out of school at the same time as us, 3:15, based on William’s email. But apparently, they actually got out at 4 pm? A police officer let us in the building and then the bell rang and the hallways were all flooded with kids. I asked a kid for directions to the classroom we were looking for, and he just stared at me and kept walking by, which was hilarious because it totally fit a stereotype about awkward TJ students. We found the classroom and it was pretty chaotic, like they hadn’t even known we were coming. We ended against just playing against some random freshman or maybe sophomores who were probably like D/E team level. There was some dispute over what question set to read because me and some of the TJ students were like “yeah I’ve heard these questions before” on the first couple of packets that were picked. The guy who was reading didn’t do a very good job and he didn’t listen to my suggestions about what packet to pick. I think we ended up playing questions from like EFT 2012 and they were not very good by modern standards. I particularly remember one bonus from this scrimmage that was like “have you heard of Italo Calvino? Here’s 30 points.” I kept score and we lost, which was really embarrassing. We left and all felt annoyed that we had wasted our time and that only immature freshmen and sophomores were involved with running the thing.

On the morning of the tournament, I was incredibly exhilarated and had barely slept. I barely slept before any of the quizbowl tournaments I went to high school because I was always so incredibly excited that I would wake myself up every hour or so to check the time. I recall that we picked up Townson from his grandma’s house and then drove to Reston. Our team of four was Kelly, a junior who was ostensibly our science player because she had taken AP chemistry in 10th grade, Townson, a junior who knew some random stuff, and Emnet, a sophomore who was ostensibly our myth player. And me, who knew lots of stuff from untold hours on Protobowl and osmosis and Wikipedia and at this point playing nearly a dozen quizbowl tournaments in the past year. At some point before our first round, Mr. Zahn gave a speech about how proud he was and the importance of teamwork and I just remember feeling sickened about the performativity of the whole thing in front of our parents after being so unhelpful for the past two years. I wore my T.C. Williams Cross Country t-shirt, which was my usual tournament attire. I thought it made sense because it showed school pride and also showed that I wasn’t a nerdy loser but that I actually did a sport (even if I wasn’t particularly good at it).

I’ll give a rundown of how the tournament actually went, based off of the stats and the packets. At this point, I don’t really remember a lot of specific questions or moments from the tournament. I used to have the ability to remember “oh, we had a tossup on this at tournament A and tournament C last year,” but that capacity has been lost for a few years now.

In the first round, against local team Montgomery Blair C, I was really nervous. We didn’t play super well, but pulled to a relatively comfortable lead against a team of 9th graders and then held on for a 300-280 win. I remember we were very impressed by Albert Ho, who we Kelly and I knew from the tournament we had attended at Blair earlier in the spring where he had been reading and scorekeeping by himself, which seemed crazy to us. We lost by a big margin to Ethan Strombeck’s Auburn team, then lost by 80 points to Hunter B featuring 10th grader Benjamin Chapman. The 4th game, against Great Valley of Pennsylvania, was the most aggravating loss of my entire quizbowl career. They were bad, we were much better, but somehow, they kept getting questions. During the match, they negged a tossup and we knew the answer but were waiting until the end. The moderator revealed the answer and had to read a replacement tossup. The replacement tossup was on Asclepius and I knew the answer at the end but I wasn’t confident on how to pronounce it and I was looking at Emnet to answer it. She buzzed in at the end with Apollo. We ended up losing by 20 points when we should have won/tied if not for the moderator’s error.

At this point, we were 1-3 and I was feeling very frustrated and my teammates had basically contributed nothing. We were facing a strong Ithaca team and we were up by a narrow margin at the half. We ended up winning by 80 points, which felt so good and I felt compensated for the embarrassing loss. After we upset Ithaca, they upset Auburn in the next round. We won our last 2 games to finish 4-3, which was about what I had expected in the morning. We had to play a half-packet tiebreaker, which I felt very nervous about because there was little room for error with only ten tossups. There was some delay as one of the three teams involved had left and had to be hunted down. We were up first against Chattahoochee B, who we had already defeated, and we won again, 170-90. I ate lunch at a sandwich place at the hotel and drank a soda. I remember talking to my mom during the lunch and I can’t recall if my teammates were even there or not. I ran into Ethan Strombeck in the bathroom and he complimented me for beating Ithaca which was very cool.

In the afternoon, we knew that the competition would be very fierce. In our first game, against Carnegie Vanguard from Texas, I was really intimidated by (and maybe a bit jealous of) the way their four players were aggressively collaborating on bonuses (talking over each other and “yeah, yeah”-ing each other—you quizbowl people know what I mean). I think I must have made some pessimistic comments during the match after they got out to an early lead, and the final score ended up being only a 60-point loss after I went 3/6. I remember Kelly telling me to not be so negative because “we could have beaten them,” which I appreciated. Next, we faced Johns Creek of Georgia. I recall that we were winning comfortably for most of the game, but then they somehow came back to tie it at 300-300 after tossup 20. This is the only overtime quizbowl game I can recall ever playing in. The tiebreaker tossup was on a Roman emperor, I immediately regretted not studying all the Roman emperors like I had planned to. The sum of my study effort had been to look at some timelines and watching some YouTube videos about Hadrian. I wondered if the tossup could be about Hadrian because the clues seemed kind of familiar. Then they dropped “villa at Tivoli” and I buzzed in with Hadrian because that was in the videos I had watched. It was very cool to redeem myself after letting victory slip away. In the next round, we had a comfortable 360-220 victory over Lisgar from Ontario, which was followed by a 260-360 loss against Saratoga of California. I’d be really interested to see the scoresheets from these games, because my memory is so limited and the stats show very little about the flow of the game, if there were negs, and so on. I only went 3/1 in this round; aside from the Auburn game, I answered at least 7 tossups in every other game.

The final playoff match was against Langley, and this game had a great personal significance to me. I felt Langley was one of our biggest rivals. We had gone 1-1 against them at Georgetown Winter and had beaten them at Georgetown Spring (albeit not their full A team) and the Blair tournament. I expected a showdown with them along with McLean and Robinson at the VHSL super-region tournament, only to arrive at the tournament to find that we would be facing Oakton, instead, who we beat handily. I heard secondhand that they didn’t move out of the region tournament because of a conflict with Science Bowl (or maybe it was a marching band thing?). I felt that the state title had an asterisk because we hadn’t played against Langley, who were probably better than Robinson and on par with McLean. Langley was really good, led by Dan Ni and already-really-good-at-literature freshman William Orr. I’m sure I saved this scoresheet and it’s at my parents’ house. We ended up winning, 340-240, with Kelly and Townson each contributing a tossup and the Langley players getting a bit frustrated with each other. I was exhilarated and thrilled to feel the legitimacy of our state championship to be vindicated (not that anyone had ever questioned it, it was just a personal thing).

After this last round, there was some question about whether we would have to play a tiebreaker game, and I waited around anxiously to find out. This is because I had a hot date and needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

My high school prom was also on June 8. I wasn’t planning on going because of NSC. I had been to a couple of school dances and they were moderately fun, but mostly I hadn’t had so many opportunities because I was too busy with other activities. In the beginning of May, I was at a track meet at TC when a girl, Heidi, asked if I wanted to go to prom with her as friends. I wasn’t enthusiastic about prom and I wanted to say no because I didn’t think it would be possible with the tournament. Then I thought that this is every high schooler’s dream to get asked to prom by a cute girl and I probably should try to do it if it was at all possible. I told her that I was going to be busy during the day but I could probably make it to the dance.

I’m a little fuzzy on all the details, but I’ll try to recount exactly how things went. I had dinner reservations at 6 pm at a nice restaurant in Old Town Alexandria because my dad had a gotten a gift card that he offered to me. We were barreling along 495 and it was already like 5:30 pm and I obviously had no chance of making it. I called and asked if we could come at 6:20 instead, and they were cool with it. My parents were like “You should have made it later because you’re not going to make that.” We got home and I changed my as quickly as possible, got back in the van, and drove to Heidi’s house. Somewhere in the shuffle, I took off my watch and couldn’t find it. I had worn the same cheap Timex watch for all of high school and it had been my companion every day for hundreds of track practices and school classes. I went through half a dozen Velcro bands because they wear out so fast. Despite a thorough search of the van and my room, I never found my watch and I’ve never worn a watch since that day. While we were driving back from the tournament, I had texted Heidi that I would be there at some overly-optimistic time and was already late. I also realized that I forgot her exact address and it was saved in my old phone that I had just replaced a week or so earlier. I drove to her apartment complex but I parked in front of the wrong building and then walked up the street until I saw her with her mom. Then she had to wobble back down to the van in her high heels. We drove to Old Town, which took forever because of traffic, and we were late for the dinner reservation. We finally got near the restaurant at like 6:40. Unsurprisingly, as anyone who has ever been to Old Town could have predicted, there was no parking anywhere near the restaurant. I had lived nearby all my life but, like any sensible person, had literally never driven down there but always been on my bike. We drove around for a few minutes until we found a lot that had a few empty spaces a few blocks away from the restaurant. Then I looked in my wallet and realized I had no cash, so we couldn’t park there (Heidi had no money at all). It was hugely embarrassing. I was like, “let’s find somewhere else to eat.” I drove with literally no idea of where I was going. I drove like 10 blocks and saw a restaurant and saw that there was street parking nearby. I parked. It was an Italian restaurant and we went inside. I was incredibly nervous and flustered by the whole situation. We ordered some food. Then, I went outside and called my dad to ask for help. I had literally just opened my first checking account a few weeks prior and gotten my first debit card, but I only had like $40 or $50 in my account. I asked him to transfer some money from his linked account at the same bank so I didn’t overdraw my account.

We ate dinner and then we went to the hotel where the dance was held (parking there was another $10). We were fashionably late. I remember riding the elevator with a guy and girl who I had literally never seen before who seemed incredibly grown up and feeling very child-like. Prom was very fun. I saw all my friends and we had a blast taking photos. Heidi and I did lots of very ungraceful dancing / holding hands and jumping up and down together. I think we left just after 11 pm because she had to be home by 11:30. She lived close to the hotel. I rolled down all the windows in the van and tried to find a cool song on the radio. I think we heard the end of “Don’t Stop Believin’” and then it seemed like every station was playing commercials and I was shuffling through all the channels. It was a very uncinematic moment. I dropped off Heidi and drove home. Of course, my mom was still up waiting for me. She asked if I danced at all. I was like “yeah, what else would I do there?” I took a shower and then I went to bed.

I probably only got like 6 hours of sleep (okay, that’s probably more sleep than many a quizbowler has played a tournament on, but it was very abnormal for me at that time). I was very tired and had a headache. Kelly or Emnet’s family picked up Townson instead of my family so I could have a few extra minutes to sleep in. In our first game, we defeated another local team, Centennial, by 370-240. It was a very solid performance. In the second game, against Wayzata B, we were down by 100 points at halftime, which is a very large deficit in the PACE format against a decent team. I remember thinking “how are they beating us? We should be getting these questions and beating them.” We completely dominated them in the second half. I believe we got 9 or possibly 8 tossups in the second half to win 330-270. It was such an exciting win, and I remember the other team being shocked and frustrated at the end. Finally, in our last game, we faced another local team, Richard Montgomery B. We turned in our most dominant performance of the entire tournament: I went 4/7, with Townson adding two tossups and Kelly getting one as well. We won, 460-150. It was an exhilarating way to end my quizbowl career at TC. I wished that we were able to play more rounds after getting such good momentum going. Emnet’s dad joked that I should play all my tournaments sleep-deprived. We took a picture as a team and Kelly gave me a hug. She played more tournaments with me and came to more practices than anyone.

We had to wait like two hours to get our buzzers back. I think I asked somebody at the tournament if we could get our buzzers back early, and he was very annoyed by that question. David Bass came to talk to me. He was really excited to see me and talk to me and seemed really weird while I was trying to be Joe Cool. Actually, David turned out to be way cooler than me. I went to watch a game between top bracket teams. Montgomery Blair (who I was well-acquainted with) was facing Ethan Strombeck’s Auburn team. I can’t recall if I watched the whole game or just the end. Auburn was winning and was ready to seal the game when Blair negged tossup 19, which asked who created the world wide web. Leif Verace answered with “Lee” which was rejected. Blair correctly answered tossup 20 and got a bonus about the Aztecs. They got the first two parts to tie the game. The last part asked about a “headdress made from hundreds of these objects once thought to belong to Montezuma.” Anson was like “feathers???” and Blair 30’d the bonus to win by 10 points. It was a thrilling and shocking finish between two incredibly talented teams.

TC finished in 37th place with a 10-5 record and a solid 17.29 PPB. The placement was roughly what I figured we deserved. Langley finished ahead of us in 32nd, but what mattered to me is that we beat them head-to-head. TJ A won the tournament, only losing the first game of an advantaged final to William Golden’s team. I went home and took a nap.

This was not my last high school quizbowl tournament. I went on to play at NASAT on a stacked but incredibly unbalanced Virginia team that I did manage to actually contribute to. It was really fun to hang out with three other guys who were really passionate about quizbowl.
Heidi and I decided we should become a couple. We fell in love in the summer of 2019 and stayed together in spite of distance and a lot of personal struggles for each of us. We broke up after about 4 years together. Prom was our first “date” and I’m glad I said yes instead of no and I have no regrets about how things happened.

A week after this, I graduated from high school. I got a 78 in 4th quarter AP Literature, which just barely left me at a 90 for a year. This A- was the only non-A I got in all of high school. Honestly, it was a gift from Mr. Zahn because I probably deserved like a 50 based on the actual amount of work I did in his class in the last quarter. I didn’t really care, and it didn’t really matter.

Heidi and I went back to TC in the fall of 2019 and I visited Mr. Zahn. I remember making some comment like “I forgot how bad the water pressure is in these bathrooms” and we probably chatted about college. I never told him how I felt and I think he’s still the scholastic bowl coach. I didn’t stay connected with any of my high school teammates. I do check the school’s page on the NAQT website from time to time; they sent a team to the 2022 HSNCT and finished 174th. The school has been renamed to Alexandria City High School.

I’ve been reflecting on these events a fair amount recently. NSC 2019 was probably the peak of my quizbowl career. I did get better as a specialist in college but definitely forgot a lot of stuff that made me a generalist at the level of scoring 100 PPG at NSC. Even though I loved quizbowl, and it was literally the thing in life that I was most passionate about, I never put in the effort to really be good beyond the low-intermediate college level. I did come into a newfound appreciation of anyone who played a quizbowl tournament with me in high school after I went from being the player carrying the team to the one who is doing his job if he gets 10 PPG. And as embarrassing as this is to admit in a public place, the tournament was probably the peak of my life, so far. Well, I guess this is growing up.

I recently read a young adult novel that a librarian recommended to me. It was very strange to read the experiences and emotions of high schoolers with the benefits of hindsight. The characters are so earnest and it struck me as very authentic to my own experiences in high school. I reflected on how much I and all my friends cared about things that in hindsight mattered so, so little. It was so important to me if I got a few points different on a test or if I ran a few seconds faster in a track race or if my friends met up to hang out without me. Hell, I spent so, so many hours at cross country and track practices and meets just be the 10th best runner on a weak team and haven’t even run since 6 months after graduating from high school. The pragmatic (or more correctly, cynical) version of me says that all those hours spent letting obscure facts fill up my brain and spending $750 to play 14 and a half games of quizbowl to finish in 37th place at a national tournament is a very irrational use of time and money, and that the result of this tournament in an obscure activity is really, well, trivial. But maybe this is just my apathy talking, and apathy hasn’t served me very well in the past few years.

[Arabidopsis failiana]

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June 9, 2023

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VHSL Scholastic Bowl state championship, February 2023

[DavidB256]

"... mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

[Amiable Vitriol]

I found this account moving and resonant with my own experiences playing this tournament. Thank you for sharing, and for the opportunity to reminisce!

[Abdon Ubidia]

That game against Auburn was one of the most exciting finishes to any game in my high school quizbowl career, and the 2019 NSC was probably my favorite high school tournament I played overall as well. Thanks for posting.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

This was also one of my favorite tournaments, and my last in high school; thanks for sharing!

I actually recall seeing your name in the stats for 2019 PACE NSC, because you were the person with by far the highest PPG whom I neither played against at that tournament nor had otherwise had any interactions with. I also have some memory of seeing that you played Hunter B. Four years later, I now finally know a little more about your experiences in high school quiz bowl.

[Bhagwan Shammbhagwan]

To be honest, I kind of memory-holed this tournament, but reading this post brought back some good memories. Really miss playing quiz bowl with my high school teammates.

[CabbageHugs]

in case it had to be said, this was a better read than any ms post