This week’s broadcast was the last of the quarterfinals of the Scholastic Games radio quiz show on WEOL (AM930 and FM 100.3). Vermilion High School joins Elyria, Avon Lake and Amherst Steele as semifinalists after its 430 to 140 victory over a strong academic team from Midview High School in Grafton. Vermilion’s team consisted of Aubree Kennedy, team captain Reagan Massey, and Stephen Stetz, who won the program’s “Standout Scholar Award,” an honor presented each week to the student who contributed the most to his or her team, as determine by scorekeepers. It includes a $50 prize on each program. In this year’s first round of competitions, Kennedy won the award for the team. For the first time in the broadcast’s thirty-four years, each of the four semifinalist teams include two Standout winners.
Competing for Midview were Kalen Dougall, team captain Zachary Janus, and Reuben Greenly. Both Janus and Greenly are past “Standout Scholar” winners. The teams were well matched through the first three of five rounds of questions, then Vermilion clearly emerged. In the first round, or “Initial Round,” all answers began with the same letter, in this case “T,” ranging from Margaret Thatcher to the Taj Mahol. It ended with a 50 to 40 point lead for Midview, but the second, a challenging Current Events Round, brought a 70 to 60 advantage to Vermilion. Round three is the first in which the quicker team to buzz in gets to answer first. It featured a Theme of “words with the letter X in them” from xenophobia to Nixon to calyx (the only missed answer). Midview bounced back, going into Round Four with a 120 to 100 lead.
The fourth round almost always ends with a substantial lead for one of the teams, and this one was no exception. It consists of sequences of clues leading to each answer, An answer following only one clue can earn a team 50 points, with subsequent clues worth lesser amounts of 40, 30, 20 or 10 points. The first set described Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of the most recent Oscar-winning movie. The first clues dealt with his early life and education. Vermilion’s Kennedy scored on the third clue adding 30 points to the team’s score. Then Stetz scored on the next three, earning “Standout” status. It was 50 points from the first clue about the city of Houston, 40 from the second clue about the Northwest Passage, then another 50 identifying the island nation of Malta.
The last series of clues in Round Four described President Chester A. Arthur. A “hail Mary” fifty-point buzz from Midview named Ulysses S. Grant, eliminating the team and giving remaining clues to Vermilion. Stetz scored at the 30-point level raising his tally alone in that round to 170 points. The team entered the final round with a 300 to 120 point lead. The fifth round has the highest scoring potential but was the Vermilion team that continued to outscore its opponents. Its domination of that round resulted in the lopsided final score. As semifinals begin, Vermilion will compete on the next program, on Monday, May 6th.