Gearing up for their second meet of the season, the Manhattan High Scholars Bowl team headed to Emporia for the Emporia Invitational last Monday. The competition consisted of some larger schools and stronger teams than the meet in Salina.

“It was a little bit different in the fact that we see different schools down there because they drew from Wichita,” Scholars Bowl coach Ted Dawdy said. “There were some Wichita schools that came up to Emporia and Lawrence Free State and some Topeka schools, they came down so we got to see some Wichita competition that we don’t usually see because that’s a long way to travel. And there was lot more [schools including] Wichita Independent which is a very high functioning team, Wichita East, you know, [and] Lawrence Free State, so we saw some competition we don’t usually see around the area.”

The competition was set up in a round robin play with the MHS team ultimately placing second overall.

“There were two different pools, 20 teams and [half the teams] were in a pool of 10,” Tim Ekart, Assistant Scholars Bowl Coach, said. “And so we played every team at least once and out of that they took the two best teams from each pool into a semifinal and then a final.”

Ekart explained how the MHS Scholars Bowl team did at Emporia.

“At Emporia, we went eight and one in pool play. We played some larger school districts, Independent school and Wichita East and St. James Academy and we lost to Independent School in pool play.”

The MHS Scholars Bowl team made it through the semifinals, beating both Wichita East schools and then proceeded to the finals where they lost to Hayden.

Two team players, senior Sterling Edgar and junior Owen Li, both felt the team could have done better but weren’t necessarily disappointed with the results.

“So what we’ve been doing is we’ve been practicing on Mondays and Tuesdays [and] this tournament was a Monday so we could’ve been out of practice too because it’s been almost a whole week since then,” Edgar said.

As for highlights in the competition, Edgar and Li both had noteworthy things to say.

“There was one math question we had to do three times over because they kept giving the wrong solutions on the answer key,” Li said.

For Edgar, missing a question on Ray Bradbury wasn’t the brightest moment of the team’s performance.

“Our team has a tradition where we take Ray Bradbury as our patron author for Scholars Bowl and we make constant jokes about Ray Bradbury so it was a really low point in the tournament when we missed a Ray Bradbury question,” Edgar said.

Next Tuesday, the team will be heading to Chapman for their next meet.