Categories Team Wins Regionals

Bright yellow stage lights shined down on the students competing against each other from SM East and BV West. After 30 minutes of trivia questions, East was announced the regional champions of Categories, beating Blue Valley West by one question with a final score of 22-21.

Categories is a game where two teams of 11 high schoolers in the KC area go head to head, answering trivia questions.

East’s team consists of seniors Denny Rice, Andrew Moore, Ellie Van Gorden, Taylor Revare, Rae Thiemann, Ned Curfman, Mary Beth Eddy, Harrison Quick, juniors Stuart Hanson, Nick Gregg and Skylar Rochelle.

After winning all four of their meets during the fall season and the semi-finals match, the East team qualified for the championship. The final match took place on Monday, Feb. 5, at the Indian Creek Technology Center.

From the beginning of school year in August up until the beginning of March, the Categories team has been working towards winning the championship.

The team has had practices every Monday for an hour in Mr. Southwick’s physics classroom. These practices consist of trivia questions from a large range of categories, anywhere from literature to current events.

For more than two decades, each Categories match has been aired on the the Public Access TV channel. This way members of the community can watch and keep up with how schools are doing.

Senior Denny Rice has been a member of the team for the past two years and participated in the championship match.

“Since it’s trivia it’s so hard to prepare for since it could be literally anything,” Rice said. “[The team will succeed] as long as you get people who have a variety of strengths, [because] not everyone knows the same thing.”

According to Rice the countless questions answered on Monday afternoons in Southwick’s room have paid off by becoming the first team at East to have an undefeated season resulting in a record of 6-0.

Now that the seasons over, the team is looking to reboot their team next year since they are losing seven seniors. Meanwhile all returning members carry hopes of bringing another Categories championship trophy back to East.