This year we - the quiz team - were able to go to World Quiz. Apparently they are trying out a new invitational here in Renton not that many streets from me to attract all the local churches in the area. Last time I went to World Quiz was about three years in Yakima. I really enjoyed that.

Since in World Quiz the age restriction is 19 max and I just so happened to be of the correct age to be eligible to participate, I decided to join in and romp around with the youngsters. Of course that was about a month ago before I just got swarmed and I had every intention (I’m really beginning to dislike the word “intend” and it’s various forms… No, the “it’s the thought that counts” mentality just doesn’t quite work) of memorizing the material that World Quiz would cover (the entirety of Galatians). Needless to say, I got rather hard pressed to complete that lofty goal and in the end only managed to commit a third of the material (Galatians 1 and 6) to memory and even then it wasn’t a mastery that I was at all comfortable with. However, on a sidenote, my brute force memorization of chapter 6 kinda encouraged me to finish the rest of our material with the team. But we’ll see how that goes.

However with World Quiz they are so lenient. So kind and so frickin awesome. World Quiz rules are so much simpler and kinder on the quizzer then our own. Evan, our head coach, suggested hosting an invitational like World Quiz with our rules but seriously I don’t think they would transition well at all and it just would be fun. We are extremely strict and there are a lot of rules. I’m not saying that one form is better then the other, just that it’s easier for us to transition to World Quiz style of quizzing then they would have to ours.

Anyways, as our church has a rather large team we fielded two full teams at World quiz. As they were rather concerned that some of the benched people wouldn’t have as much opportunity to quiz and because there was a team with only a couple people on it, they asked if there was anyone who wanted to quiz on another church’s team. I would’ve rather stayed and quizzed with my own teammates but as favor to Evan I went ahead with that and offered my services to the Gig Harbor team. Apparently they participate in the Nativity Quizzing league which has slightly different rules then World Quiz but still used the seat pads so they were familiar with that style of quizzing. Or at least more so then myself.

I fully expected to be on a team that excelled in this style of quizzing and that they would push us forward while I would feel awkward as I sat in for the ride. That was not the case. In fact -I- was the one who ended up driving our team. Even though I could only answer questions from a third of the material…

My love of quizzing has been revived once again. I guess it never really died. I really enjoyed my years as a quizzer. Though I got burned out by the officiating of the matches, I rather liked the competition and would have loved to have been able to make it to Nationals. Which I still firmly believe was very much so possible for us. If I hadn’t decided to devote my time and energies to college via Running Start, we would’ve made it. Even with my attentions focused elsewhere we had several close years. But I made the right decision to value a head start in my college education over bible quiz. Even for Nationals.

But I digress as I seem to be quite fond of doing.

After the initial round robin, we all made it to the “official” part of the meet: the elimination tournament. As my team wasn’t that strong, we started out at the bottom of the ranks. We managed to make it to the next tier and quizzed against the Renton team (my original team). It was a close match and the last question determined it. If I had been able to finish my question correctly, I would’ve pulled Gig Harbor ahead of New Life and pushed New Life out of the tournament and Gig Harbor would’ve been able to advance to the next tier of quizzing. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on which point of view one uses, I did fail for whatever reason and Gig Harbor ended it’s quizzing at… 9th place or something like that. New Life however continued on to and managed to take 3rd place out of the twenty teams that participated. Which was awesome.

One of our quizzers also managed to get 1st place individual in the novice reckoning of scores. I also managed to get a trophy as well: the “Most Inspirational Quizzer” award. That was like cherries on top of an ice cream sundae. It was pretty funny too. TT explicitly told me that it was not even remotely possible for me to acquire it the night before when I joked about trying to achieve it. I agreed with his remarks too but fate seemed to think different.

Apparently my home team thought that me helping out another church by loaning myself out was worthy of the award so they voted for me. A 10-12 person voting bloc out of 50ish total votes divided by 50ish candidates to vote for is a pretty solid bloc indeed. But they didn’t tell me about this so I was pleasantly surprised to find this out.

Once again World Quiz proves to be an awesome event.

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