With its championship win at Ole Miss Brain Brawl, the quiz bowl team from Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus proved themselves worthy to play on a national stage.
The team will represent their school on Friday in a 148-team national competition: National Academic Quiz Tournaments’ Small School National Championship Tournament.
Quiz bowl is a competitive, academic, interscholastic activity for teams of four students. Quiz bowl teams use buzzers to answer questions about science, math, history, literature, mythology, geography, social science, current events sports, and popular culture. The matches feature a blend of individual competition and team collaboration, since no individual player is likely to be an expert in all subject areas. Participation in quiz bowl both reinforces lessons from the classroom and encourages players to develop new intellectual interests.
This will be the first time MSMS has attended the Small School National Championship Tournament. In 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2020 they qualified but were not able to attend.
The SSNCT is the only quiz bowl national championship pitting small schools against each other. It has one division containing non-selective public schools with 500 or fewer students in their top three grades, and another division for other schools with 350 or fewer students in their top three grades.
The team will consist of Olivia Cochran, Andrew Dowdy, Walter Giesen, and Jonathan Stancill and be coached by Andy Snyder.
Tournament results will be updated throughout the three days of competition at naqt.com/go/stats/16001 so everyone can follow along and see how the team does.
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