After a recent loss, Scholars Bowl is working hard on improvements for future competitions.

“[It was] definitely one of the worst meets I’ve been to, still fun though,” junior Styopa Zharkov said.

The varsity team traveled to Seaman last Thursday for a meet expecting to take home the prize but ended up with an unexpected loss.

“On average, the team usually achieves second or third at every meet, so this one was disappointing by comparison,” senior Greg Chikan said.

Manhattan High Scholars Bowl went 6-3 and unfortunately did not advance out of pool play. Although they did lose, there were still significant things that the team did well on.

“For the rounds we won, we won hard,” Chikan said.

Looking back at this meet, the team said they would like to improve on certain aspects. One thing that was noticed was that there tends to be a high amount of overconfident students. This caused some of the members to buzz in too early or answer incorrectly without any communication from the other team members.

“To be honest, I am a fairly egotistical, overconfident person, and as such, I have a hard time believing that any of my answers could be wrong,” Chikan said. “As a result, I ended up buzzing in too early too many times, thinking that I could come up with an answer in my head in the three seconds I’m allowed to respond after I buzz in.”

Other things the team wants to improve on are the math questions and learning on how to slow down a bit to make sure the answer is correct.

“We shouldn’t rush on the math questions,” Zharkov said. “This kills us.”

With all of these improvements the team plans to make, they are still committed to the goals they want to accomplish in the future.

“Even though our team is a bit weaker this year, our ultimate goal is still the shiny State Scholars Bowl plaque,” Chikan said. “Besides winning, the goal of our team is to expand the knowledge of every individual as much as possible, because knowledge is good, and knowledge makes a person whole.”