Wiz Kids Too Go To State

WAITSBURG - They may not perform their "sport" in front of a hometown crowd. They may not generate "edge-of-your-seat" excitement just before the clock runs out. They may not get a rousing sendoff when they leave town as would-be champions later this month. They may not even leave in a yellow bus.

But all that aside, this team from Waitsburg High School is also going to the state "playoffs" in Spokane to test their academic knowhow against other competitors from around the state.

The 2011 Knowledge Bowl team placed second in Tuesday's prequalifying meet after DeSales, known as the perennial 800-pound gorilla at the table. Dayton High School placed third.

"Waitsburg is a goodquality team," said Doug Yenney, science teacher and Knowledge Bowl coach for the Dayton High School team that included senior Patrick Trainor, junior Carter Currin, and freshmen Clint Rickords and Kale Sunderland.

"They deserve to go," said Yenney, sounding every bit like a sportsmanlike coach on the sideline of a basketball championship game after conceding to a worthy opponent. "They took care of us today. It was a fight for second place between DeSales and Waitsburg."

The "they" include seniors Nick Carpenter, captain, and Austin Beasley as the team's "starters," and senior Jeneffer Lyden, junior Fletcher Baker, sophomore Tucker Alleman and freshman Zac Brown.

It's the third time Waitsburg heads for Spokane. Teams went in 2006 and in 2010, though they never placed in the top eight.

"Hopefully, we'll do a lot better than last year," said Beasley, who's been seen on the basketball court as a nonstarter in those playoffs but prefers to be a starter from the academic bench.

Tuesday's 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. competition started with a 60-questions written test, followed by three sessions of 60 oral questions each, after which Beasley was ready to be off to basketball practice and fire off some less brain-draining hoops.

"That's 240 questions that are all over the map," Waitsburg coach Brad Green said, explaining how stamina is measured quite differently in the mental sport he mentors. "It's hard to keep your mind awake and stay focused that long."

It's perhaps even harder to prepare for the quizzes, though the team practices every Friday using old questions from previous competitions and looking for themes in this year's questions.

The officials putting together the lengthy, multifacetted probes are taking a liking to such subjects as sound waves in the field of science, Robert Frost's poetry in the field of literature, plate tectonics in the field of geology, clauses in the field of language/grammar, and interior polygon angles in math.

Interior what?

As in other sports, seniors have an advantage from their lengthier exposure to high school materials and experience from previous meets. Beasley, for instance, has been doing the Knowledge Bowl thing for four years now.

The season starts in October, includes six competitive meets and culminates at state in March.

"Sometimes, the questions are so hard, we make up silly answers as a joke because nobody knows the answer," he said.

Other times, the answers pop right into the head of the team-elected "math specialist." Take the following question: What is 8 to the 3/10th power? The answer: 2, of course. It took Beasley fewer than 10 seconds to think of the answer. He had 15 to come up with it. The author of this story pondered it for most of the afternoon.

No, still nothing. Though the question: "What Mexican artist painted murals in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, San Francisco, Detroit and New York City?" was easy. Diego Rivera. Everybody knows that!

Carpenter reportedly tapped quite far below the surface for the question: "Instead of teeth, many whales have rows of flat, flexible plates with frayed edges that they use to filter food from seawater. Made from the protein, keratin, this material is calledhellip;"

He thought back to a visit he once made to a whale museum as a youth and quickly came up for air: baleen.

Here's one for the history buffs: What was the acronym for the army corps of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force that fought in the Battle of Gallipoli and was formed of New Zealanders and Australians? Answer: ANZAC.

You'd either have to have served Down Under, been around at the time, know who from where fought in World War I or seen the well-known movie called "Gallipoli," starring Mel Gibson AND paid attention to the dialogue over Gibson's memorable run through the trenches under a hail of machine-gun fire and mortar rounds.

Try this one on for appetite: Urania, a uranium concentrate powder, is also known as what kind of cake? Answer: Yellowcake. Yum.

Green has collected a decade and a half worth of old Knowledge Bowl questions to quiz the 16 members of his team. This is not mandatory study hall for the competitors.

When the participants, seated around the table together as a team, get one, they quickly confer to check who, if anyone, knows the answer before slapping the buzzer within the allotted quarter of a minute.

"You learn a lot," said Dayton's Trainor, who is on his school's Knowledge Bowl team for the first time this year. "The only way to prepare is to read, read, read. But when you get the answer, it's exciting. You go, 'Yeah.'"

Yenney said the Dayton team is strong in science and math but needs to add specialists in literature and language. His mental "athletes" were doing better with each competition Tuesday, sending a message to the other teams that the Bulldogs were serious competitors.

"At least we let them know we were here," he said.

Green said Waitsburg's team is right on track, thanks to a district that strikes a balance between athletics and academics.

"We have a good (evenly balanced) culture here," he said. "It encourages the best of the scholars to not be ashamed of their intelligence. Too often, academics get underplayed."