Scholars Bowl started off the new year with two Varsity meets last Thursday instead of just one.

“Splitting into two teams can make things tougher,” Scholars Bowl Coach Ted Dawdy said. “We split the teams fairly evenly so there wasn’t a strong team and a weak team. It was nice to see different combinations of kids and see how they work together.”

The two meets took place at Cair Paravel and Southeast Saline. Manhattan High placed first at Southeast Saline and third at Cair Paravel.

“We were a very strong team last night and didn’t have any strong competition that challenged us too tremendously,” Assistant Scholars Bowl Coach Tim Ekart said.  

At Southeast Saline, MHS beat Washington County in the final round 50-20. Both MHS teams faced small schools mostly made up of 3A and 2A schools. Senior Sterling Edgar, who competed in the Southeast Saline meet, felt it was a little odd competing with people he had never met.

“The meet I went to was [at] a really small school that I had never heard of and all the other schools there were schools that I had never heard of before, so that was different,” Edgar said. “Usually, like, we compete against the same teams and we’re pretty friendly with some of the teams that we see every single meet. We know them by name and we mess with them. But these were all people I had never met before so that was kind of weird. We didn’t see, like, any of the Topeka schools [and] we always compete against Topeka or Lawrence schools but we didn’t see any of those this time.”

Overall, both teams performed well, placing in both meets.

“I was just very impressed with our team,” Ekart said. “I thought they had a strong showing, Sterling probably led the way, but everyone made contributions and that’s what really makes Manhattan High’s Scholar Bowl teams solid is that we just have a depth of participants that were able to contribute.”