The buzzer sounds, indicating East’s Categories team as the third place winners of this year’s local Categories competition between all Blue Valley and Shawnee Mission schools. Students high five and fist bump each other as the final score is announced. 31-22. Thirty one, breaking as the top score for any team from the season.
The six person Categories team representing East traveled to Indian Creek Technology Center yesterday to play in their last match of their season, the consolation game that determined third and fourth place. The Categories season consists of four matches running from November to March. One point is awarded per question, however, there are two point questions in between the two rounds. The whole match occurs in about a half hour. Last week, playing one man down, the team lost to Blue Valley High School with a score of 24-19. Nate Southwick, the sponsor of Categories, advised his students to be less cautious and to just go for it.
“Well we are actually changing our strategy for this one,” Southwick told his team before the match. “We are going to play a little more recklessly. Last game we held back a little too much and the other team was just a lot faster than us on questions that we knew, so that was really disappointing. We really put in a good showing last week even though we were playing one man down.”
After their first round, the recklessness seemed to be paying off with the score 15-12. Playing recklessly meant that the team would buzz in earlier and buzz in even if they were only 50 percent instead of 70 percent sure. Senior Hannah Bautz says that the confidence and technique of buzzing in takes practice.“The hardest part of categories is the buzzing in,” Bautz said. “Just because with the timing you only have five seconds, and you don’t want to buzz in if you don’t know it but then you don’t want to have a good guess and not buzz in and then miss the question. You’re also on TV which makes it more nerve-wracking because if you mess up its embarrassing.”
The categories team practices on Thursdays in room 407 with Southwick. They cover everything from current events, to artists, to geography and more. With such a wide array of subjects the team finds it best to divide the knowledge between teammates.
“Each person has a subject where they know more about it,” Bautz said. “Because you have to know little details about things, and not everyone knows details about every subject, it helps to have just one subject to focus on.”
Because the matches are televised and produced by the district, costs and resources limit each team to be able to only participates in 4 matches. Southwick hopes to organize informal matches next year in order to give kids more practice. He also hopes to heavily recruit since the current team is made up of mostly seniors.
“I’m [recruiting] in my classes,” Southwick said. “Anybody interested in trivia, if I ever see anybody on Sporkle or any of those other trivia sites, I always asked them if their interested. Word of mouth is our biggest thing. But next year, we are going to have to get some more people because we need at least three more people.”
This year’s Categories team ended the season with a 2-2 record but team members are proud of their third place finish. This match and all of the preceding matches will be shown on local channel 18 Monday and Friday at 1:30 p.m. and on channel 2 Wednesday at 2:20 p.m. The matches can also be found on the Shawnee Mission School District website after April 15.
After two years on the team, Bautz says her time has been fun and her knowledge of trivia has increased.
“I can tell the difference between last year and this year,” Bautz said. “Just in how much trivia I know. I’ll know questions this year because we worked on them in practice last year or I’ll hear something someone talking about something and I’ll be like ‘hey I heard that in a categories.”
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