Making school history as the first Oakville High School student to ever earn this distinction, senior Scott Janson was named to Team Missouri by the Missouri Quiz Bowl Alliance. In June, he and the rest of Team Missouri, made up of nine other high school students from across the state, will head to Virginia to compete at the National All-Star Academic Tournament.
“It is such an incredible opportunity and I’m so grateful,” Janson said. “Oakville Quiz Bowl has had some very, very good players throughout the years, and to be recognized on the state level by the committee is such an honor. It validates all the hard work that I put into it and proves that it was all worth it. Even if I thought it was worth it regardless, it gives some concrete, tangible evidence to that.”
Janson has been involved with Quiz Bowl at OHS since his freshman year. Finding the concept interesting, he went to his first meeting four years ago and has “just been having fun with it ever since.”
For those unfamiliar, Quiz Bowl — also known as Scholar Bowl or Academic Bowl — is a team-based competition focused on academic trivia. It is often compared to “Jeopardy!,” though unlike the popular TV game show, Quiz Bowl is played on teams, with competitions typically played between two teams of four players. Teams are permitted additional players as long as only four compete at a time and the others act as alternates; this will be the case at the National All-Star Academic Tournament, as five players were chosen for both the A Team — which Janson will play on — and the B Team.
Quiz Bowl, most commonly, is played in a toss-up/bonus format, with question topics ranging from core subjects — such as literature, science and history — to geography, current events, fine arts and philosophy. Things like mythology, religion, social science and pop culture are also common.
“Toss-ups are about a paragraph long. There’s harder clues at the beginning, and the clues will get more wellknown as it goes on. Anyone on your team can buzz in and answer — if you get it right, your team gets the points. If you get it wrong, your team can’t answer for the rest of the question. If your team gets the toss-up, then you get three bonus questions, which are three short related questions about a similar topic — not related to the toss-up necessarily, but related to each other,” Janson explained.
Janson personally gravitates towards the fine arts, a specialty that helped to get him on the state team according to Kristin Pierce, the Quiz Bowl coach at OHS.
“It started with nobody on our team really being particularly good in fine arts, so we needed somebody to cover it. In studying a lot of things in general, I picked up fine arts. It’s something I enjoy learning about, so I went more and more in-depth,” Janson said. “I’m taking AP art history at school … the course content overlaps so much.”
His interest in fine arts has even propelled him to choose music education as his college major. Janson will attend the Univeristy of Missouri-Columbia in the fall, and because of Quiz Bowl, he is considering an additional degree in art history. He also hopes to continue his involvement with Quiz Bowl as well, as Mizzou has a college-level team. In the meantime, he has his last high school Quiz Bowl season to finish up before representing Missouri in front of the nation.
“Quiz Bowl is such a special part of my high school experience. I’ve gotten so many friends and deepened so many relationships. You get as much as you put into it, so anybody can find value in it and enjoy it. I think it is such a high quality activity for high schoolers. I’m an advocate that anybody can be good at and enjoy Quiz Bowl. It just means so much to me and I want to see it continue to grow. There’s such a good community surrounding it,” Janson said.
