After two straight weeks of failing to place first, the Varsity Manhattan High Scholars Bowl team succeeded with high fives all around after taking first at Seaman. At the meet, there were two pools of 10 teams each and MHS went 8 and 1 in pool play. The team went on to lose to Hayden by 20 points in pool play seating them in second before heading into the semifinals. In the semifinals, MHS played against Washburn Rural, one of the teams that had beat them at the last meet.

“So in the semifinal, we faced Washburn Rural and we jumped off to a really quick start against them and scored the first 40 points in the round,” Assistant Scholars Bowl Coach Tim Ekart said. “They rebounded rather quickly during the math portion … really kinda smoked us on the math portion to be honest which is unusual; usually we do pretty good in that. But they had an interrupt towards the end and we were able to pick up a few more questions and final score against Washburn Rural was Manhattan, 70, and Washburn Rural, 55. So we bumped them off which was super exciting.”

After winning against Washburn Rural, the MHS team faced Hayden, yet another team that had had beaten them at the previous meet and had a reputation of being challenging competition.

“Hayden had knocked off Silver Lake to make it to the finals so we faced Hayden again and, yeah, it was our round,” Ekart said. “The questions were just things that we knew and were in our favor and we again started off on fire and ended up beating Hayden 70 to 40 and took the first place.”

Scholars Bowl team member and senior Sterling Edgar was ecstatic about the win.  

“It was really cool because we worked really hard to beat them in the past,” Edgar said.

Team member and junior Owen Li agreed.

“[It felt] good,” Li said.

One of the reasons why the team performed so well at the meet was because, for the first time this season, they weren’t short-handed.

“This time we had a nice well-rounded team. [We had] Sterling [Edgar], Josh [Schwartz], Stephanie Fu, Arnav Das, Owen Li [and] Ben Stonebraker,” Ekart said.

Overall, the team felt they each contributed greatly to the team’s big victory.

“There was no one who wasn’t at their best,” Edgar said. “Everyone was an exceptional teammate who did their absolute best. There wasn’t a single weak link. We all shared different areas and different subjects and every teammate was able to dominate some subject.”

On Tuesday, the J.V. Manhattan High Scholars Bowl team went to Salina where they were first in pool play with a 7 and 0 record. However, the team ended up losing by one question to Salina Central.

Last Saturday, the Varsity Scholars Bowl team competed in Topeka to see if they would qualify for the televised game of Quest.

“Washburn Rural tied with our score of 1490 but then we won the tiebreaker so we had the best score in 6A and the third best score overall,” Scholars Bowl Coach Ted Dawdy said.

The team is set to go on Quest which will tape in late January and air in March on KTWU.