We suck.
Wait, let me clarify that a little bit: The Amherst "As Schools Match Wits" Team (of which I am a member) sucked today at the Yale Competition.
Better?
Wait, there's still something missing. Let me try again: The Amherst "As Schools Match Wits" Team (of which I am a member) sucked today at the Yale competition because only three of the estimated ten members were present, forcing us to pay short against the other four player teams.
That sounds about right.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
In the beginning, the show "As Schools Match Wits" didn't exist and life was good. And then it did, and the problems began. The first problem: I joined my school's team. Mr. Jacob was the coach at the time, a very laid back English teacher with a lot of knowledge but little discipline. He was doing fine keeping the "TV team" (the team of four players that would go on the show that year) in line, but couldn't even wrangle up four players for the "Training Team." It was a bust.
One of the dissapointed Junior Wits joined the club I was in, the news show whatever. Gabe and I were assigned to report on the ABC walk. So, through the weeks of shooting and editing (all 3 of 'em) he tried to convince me to become the fourth and final member of the training team. Eventually, I told him I'd join if it'd shut him up.
All this happened last year. We went to the Holyoke Catholic HS trivia meet; The TV team won it all, we got the eleventh place trophy(An Origami Crane I made sitting in a box Gabe's Mom made, all from the program). We went to Concord Carlisle, where we got our butts whooped by the runner up team from Holyoke Catholic. We all looked forward to the future and Summer.
Two days before the beginning of the next school year, Cindy informed me I had been voulenteered to give a little promo speach to the freshmen, trying to get them to join. I thought this was a pretty good idea, since all of the people on the TV team the year before had graduated, and I was the only senior. A few hours later, I was informed that Mr. Jacob had gone awol over the summer. He'd moved to New York or Pennsylvania to start up an internet company, leaving the Twits coachless. Suddenly, I was the closest thing we had to an advisor.
Gabe and I spent the next 2 weeks pestering Scott (the principal, I'm the only student "allowed" to call him Scott) to hurry up and decide on who our next advisor would be, since he wouldn't let us handle it ourselves (control freak). Eventually he decided on Mrs. Weinberg.
I love Mrs. Weinberg, but she did something stupid. Upon hearing that we only had one senior, she recruited two of the seniors tutoring for her for the team. What's so stupid about that? you may ask. Easy, only 4 people could go on the show, and both seniors were practically promised a slot. However, Gabe and Anda had both commited immense amounts of time and deserved slots on the show more than I did. Mrs. Weinberg, of course, had final say, but she thought it would be ok if we fought amongst ourselves first.
And what a fight it was.
We were watching an old video and I asked Gabe to speak with me in the hall. I just wanted to get everyone's oppinions on the mess in a more confidencial manner so I could talk to Mrs. Weinberg and we could do a little bit of head wracking. Well, then Anda came out to talk to both of us. By the time we got back in there, the other two seniors were pissed off. The more athletic of the two immediately started yelling at us for being conspiring against them, and then Anda started yelling at her for assuming that she should get a slot just because she's a senior and then things got ugly. I did what I could to get what I was thinking out there, and the oppinions of the ones who didn't want to fight. Eventually, though, Mrs. Weinberg chose: Me, Gabe, and the two seniors.
Did I mention the other two seniors were smart? They are. So smart, in fact, that they were taking classes at UMass. Right after school. We couldn't meet as a team more than twice before our television performance.
My mom, among many dozens of other things, used to voulenteer at the local pubic TV station. Some of my earliest memories are of the station and the equipment, so naturally going to a nice station was pretty exciting for me. It didn't really matter that Gabe had forgotten about a dentist appointment he had that afternoon preventing us from meeting one last time before competing. It didn't really matter that we found out as they began to film that the team we were competing against was the 2 time champions. It didn't really hurt until we lost: 300 to 65.
There were two other people from the previous year, John, another Junior, and Alicia, a sophomore. Will, another sophomore, we recruited while waiting on Goldman's decision, and Davy, Ray's friend, joined for no real reason. With that said, it should have been easy to bring 2 teams to the Holyoke Catholic trivia meet. Forget that, I was well on my way to recruiting the extra people for a third team! How stupidly optimistic of me. We brought 2 teams. The actual separation of the 8 people into 2 teams didn't happen until we got there. The 2 seniors, Gabe, and Alicia made up team A, while Me, John, Will and Anda were Team B.
Team A got into the finals. Team B sucked.
In keeping with tradition, Concord Carlisle invited us to their little match. We said we'd go. Senior #1 dropped out on monday, leaving her brother out as well. Senior #2 dropped out on wednesday. Mrs. Weinberg waits until Friday to tell me we're not going. Saturday I sit at home and wonder what we could have been doing then.
And then we were invited to the competition at Yale. I was so excited to be going, after all, that's the only way I'm ever going to get into Yale. So, four people (me, Gabe, Will, and the little brother) voulenteered to go. It would have been more, but Anda had to go orienteering, and Alicia had something and the seniors had work. John by this point had quit and I hadn't spoken to him for three months. Well, little brother dropped out and we had to scrounge for another player. Wait, no I had to go scrounge for another player. And no one could come. So we went anyway.
The questions were SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO hard. I mean, there was stuff from physics classes at the sophomore college level. But there were some we knew really well. The success stories:
"This character changes the television chanel by shooting peanuts out of his nose..."
ME:"Mr. Bean!"
"Put these three sections of the urinal tract in order (list)"
Me: "Ok, wanna put them in reverse order?"
Gabe: "Sure"
"Actually, that's right"
It's the battle for the bottom. The last tossup. We're down by 20 points. Unless we get the tossup and at least one bonus, we lose. It's an old sci fi hero. They buzz in first and guess Buck Rodgers. It's our last chance, so I buzz in and guess Flash Gordon. It's right. We still don't know the bonus questions, though, so we lose anyway.
The larger picture, though, is that we lost. It was a round robin tournament, and we played every team, and lost to every team. Most of them were within 10 points, too, so if we'd had one more person, we probbly wouldn't have been dead last.
Ok, I'm done.
