The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

I ' m 99.9% sure that there's an article about the local Knowledge Bowl teams somewhere in the paper you're holding. Before you continue with reading this week's column, please search out that article and read it. It will help you understand the jargon.

Is it there? If not, feel free to slap me silly the next time we bump into each other. Did you read it? Good.

This week, I thought I'd give you an inside view of Waitsburg's Knowledge Bowl team. We're not nearly as serious as one would be led to believe.

For example, two of our members toted ukuleles to our last meet. You read that right, folks: Ukuleles. Someone else brought a guitar, and the coach took along a mandolin. The team jammed on the bus rides up and back as well as between oral rounds at the meet itself. (I'll have to remember to bring my own ukulele next time.)

Music and Knowledge Bowl are irrevocably in- tertwined. Most WHS stu- dents in Knowledge Bowl (which is often abbreviated as 'Know Bowl' or simply 'KB') are, or once were, in the WHS band. Sev- eral of us members have attempted to compose songs about Knowledge Bowl, and one particularly ambitious guy devised a plan to bring Beethoven back from the dead to write a whole symphony about the sport. For the rest of that season, I greeted him with "Hey, EJ, how's Beethoven's zombie coming along?"

Poor EJ never did manage to reincarnate any musical masters. Our team, however, was especially competitive that year. We placed second in the regional tournament, which qualified us to com- pete at the state level. On the car ride to the championship, the team decided on a nickname for each member. Some of those nicknames have stuck. (Our gallant team captain, Evelyn the Sparkle Fairy, copes surpris- ingly well with this fact.)

Naturally, the team has to pay for its own meals when it goes to meets. During the regular season, everyone pays for their own meal indi- vidually. But once the team gets to the state level, we celebrate by having dinner at a nice restaurant. This, of course, costs money, which means that the Knowledge Bowl team does several fundraisers a year, includ- ing manning the concession stand at the 2012 season's home football game against Tri-City Prep.

It was raining that night, so the band couldn't play, and there were no student vocalists in the sparse crowd. According to the WIAA, though, all games have to open with "The Star-Span- gled Banner". What's a band/chorus director (who, at that point, had neither a band nor a chorus) to do?

Simple. Mr. Green, who teaches all the music classes at WHS, is also the Knowl- edge Bowl coach. So on that windy, rainy night, the National Anthem was sung byhellip;the Knowledge Bowl team! We didn't do half bad, either.

There are so many other stories I could tell you - stories that usually revolve around a single phrase. I would love to tell you all about Room 4, medieval Fletchers, my 'lucky gal- axy', 'Fort Salt', yazzara- tions, the Sparta Incident, and profiling 'the Guy'. However, I'm running out of column space.

That's it for this week, folks. I'll be sure to give you an update (and maybe even a whole column) on the results of the upcoming regional Knowledge Bowl tournament.