Tomorrow I will begin my final year of high school. Speaking of next year without the benefit of hindsight bias, there's a lot to think but not much substantive to say. Nonetheless, when I finish this year, and maybe years and decades in the future, perhaps it's still important enough to remember these moments and the countless (mis)adventures leading here clearer than ever. This post may seem a bit aimless, and that's because it is. However, with enough flailing around a point maybe something helpful can arise.
The Start
Middle school quizbowl was by far the highlight of those years. I joined the team because I was promised by the coach "join and you will fit right in." In Mrs. Susan Keitel's infinite wisdom, she was right. I had my teammates and a club and an activity that I was interested in. All the reading of Atlases in Barnes and Noble and time watching Horrible Histories on Youtube (before they were taken down) were put into such rewarding use and propelled me to study with my team more and more in a constant feedback loop. Team River Dell bonded over pizza and Jeopardy! every Friday afternoon preparing for tournaments and went to nationals twice. In all honesty I don't even remember much from middle school besides my team. The team was a big a part of me just as I was part of the team.
I came into high school not knowing if I'd do quizbowl ever again. The two most notable things Bergen Tech lacked were windows and quizbowl teams. Math, physics, research and engineering were always tempting prospects, and after leaving my team behind it seemed smart to focus on something new. Starting a new team without knowing anyone is a very daunting task, but so was leaving quizbowl behind in favor of pursuing another smaller interest more heavily without knowing if I'd even like it as much as I thought I did at the time.
In retrospect, either way I would've started something new. While I feel inclined to say that I made the right choice in deciding to found a quizbowl team with Alex and ended up pursuing much in STEM anyways, survivorship bias is a thing. The important distinction isn't so much which choice was right but that the right call would have always been to keep an open mind. If founding a quizbowl team wasn't right for me I could fall back to math and if math wasn't right for me I could fall back to quizbowl. This isn't to say that the choice doesn't matter though and just do both lul. Mentality wise, keeping firm priorities in what I valued was a huge reason in why stuff mostly worked out for me.
The Team
Alex is why Team Teterboro existed at all. In Chinese school, I knew one person who went to the same school as me and it was Alex. When I asked if he wanted to join a quizbowl team, he agreed, and from there turning back had consequences beyond just me. Even if Alex didn't put up 8 powers a game and double our ppb and bring us to the forefront of national excellence, he was always there (or had a mostly good reason for not being there). It was also Alex who did so much in getting teammates during our crucial first year, on top of being just a fun person to hang out with and making the team atmosphere so much happier. Only recently have I realized the true importance of every member on the team, which is far more than just the points and win loss record. Only after getting Alex to join did I gain the confidence to recruit more and more people to my team until our dynamic quartet with Raymond and Rohit was assembled in my sophomore year.
"Perhaps only young people...can endure the bittersweetness, the willingness to give up days and nights [of an ascetic lifestyle]. Who can still, after repeated rigid practice, go all out. Only this new age of youth can give up their entire personal life, and throw themselves completely into a team. Only in this way can they ignore the pain, the worry, the pressure and even their personal reputation, in order to strive for victory."
https://medium.com/@crylast/climb-countless-mountains-to-stand-at-the-top-of-the-world-a87e4dcf1cfc\
I remember reading this quote for the first time. As a brazen freshmen coming off the back of already competing at MSNCT twice, I was ready to go to HSNCT again. The goal of winning the whole thing eventually didn't even seem that farfetched. If I just got teammates, got them to study, then made myself read through dozens of questions every day for weeks on end... If I could just work harder, I could do it. This outlook was certainly incredibly naive, but there's something appealing about it to me still, even if I eventually figured that it was neither realistic nor what I valued most from this game. As a freshmen desperate to prove myself to the world, that I could found a succesful team, this seemed like such a straight forward way of making it happen. We didn't come close to making nationals my freshmen year.
It's easy to look back now and say "wow past me was super dumb," yet this attitude is what drives innovation forward. To live the lifestyle of an ascetic, throwing away everything to the side and saying "this is what I want to do, everything else be damned" is a commendable outlook, no matter how foolish. At the end of the day, seeing how I once felt the same way makes me realize just how much this team has always meant to me. I might not risk my grades squeezing in an extra half hour of protobowl in class, but I now I wouldn't think twice about skipping lunch to subsidize tournaments for my teammates.
Whenever there is time, like when I'm walking home from the bus stop or waiting to fall asleep, I like to reminisce on what it is that keeps me playing this game, and what I still want to accomplish. For me one of the first things that comes to mind is the team that I've founded: the pride I have in everything that we've accomplished together, and the memories of all the funny moments during games and conversations we've had on the ride home. I wish to have another year with them. I am lucky enough to be privileged for this to be among by first priorities, but still I dream of a day when our team can reunite at last.
Young people often tend to seem like fools and dreamers, but aren't these people so full of hope exactly what we need more of?
The Tournaments
How do you choose your first tournament to go to? Obviously you choose the reputable novice tournament, or just let your coach/captain decide for you. My first tournament was Bardbowl because they offered a new team discount. At the time my boundless intellect told me that my team wouldn't qualify as novice since I had already gone to middle school nationals. In hindsight with two different people had triple digit ppg and murdering new team's hopes and dreams competing there anyways, maybe it worked out that I hadn't gone anyways and crushed my morale. At the tournament, we did well enough for some teams to remark we "had potential" being freshmen and sophomores and also being the only new team there (apparently not many new teams exist or are as cheap as we were).
I don't know why I'm pointing this out honestly. My main point is just go to the novice tournament if you can. The tournament directors know better by now to not allow people that would obviously ruin the competition. If you don't know if you should play just email them. Be on the look out on the forums for tournament announcements!
My next tournament was at Princeton High School, and there the coach of the Livingston Team convinced me to sign up for their tournament. A cynic will tell you that obviously they wanted my money, but I believed that claims of us getting much better experience playing harder sets (so far I'd only played IS-A sets) and teams would do us good. At first I thought that it was a bad idea for us to go to the tournament since we might've just lost a lot of games, but that's always been a bad way of thinking about things. We went and the tournament was fun. I went to Prison Bowl too. Many losses, but no regrets.
The Writer
The Bronx Zoo has a 6.5 acre Congo Gorilla Exhibit. Since it was relatively close to the Zoo entrance, going through the trail into the dense underbrush and seeing the powerful apes enjoying their jungle oasis in the midst of a vast concrete desert was always one of the first things I did during my many visits there. Perhaps it was no surprise that upon hearing "guerilla" anything I'd default to thinking "gorilla" instead. Nonetheless I wrote my first questions about gorillas after hearing that "guerilla tournaments" existed.
Somehow this became what I was known best for, at least in the online community (there is a public discord server for high school quizbowl that you can find pretty easily through searching on forums/googling). Thinking about it now, I'm very lucky that the first questions I wrote and read publicly were about funny topics and not so much serious ones. I was (and you can argue am as well) not a very talented question writer, and there's no doubt that criticism would have dissuaded me from writing any more.
In all honesty writing any more than 5 questions was a huge stroke of luck that I feel extremely fortunate to have happened. This was what gave me some sense of identity in a vast ocean of quizbowl players across the country who were all equally or greater at the game and each category than I was. The continuous process of learning who we are is one of the most important parts of life, and keeps us feeling human.
I don't think the takeaway here should be to just hope to be lucky in finding something that you're really passionate about and find your calling in life, if such a thing even truly exists for everyone. Reading more, doing more all expose you to so many more possibilities and greatly increase your chances of being "lucky." Sometimes it takes a lot of thinking and a stroke of genius to say "gorillas and quizbowl, but together," sometimes the idea just presents itself through seemingly pure randomness. It's a game of probability: the more you think, the more likely you'll get that epiphany. The more you try to explore a complete picture of basically any activity or subject, the more likely that you'll figure out what it is specifically that interests you most to devote all of your time in.
Some people may say it's truly impossible to tell what you biggest passion in life is. In truth, I'm terrified of the day that I write my last quizbowl question and this part of my life is gone forever. Nonetheless, it's who I am now, and has definitely morphed my appreciation for both quizbowl and some of my other hobbies that I get to spotlight. The writer, the mathetimatician, the engineer...they are not identities, they are forces acting on something much greater and more interesting.
In retrospect, you can possibly argue that it was obvious to me that gorilla packet or something similar was bound to be created by me. It was the love of learning and sharing cool new knowledge about random subjects with my teammates even back in middle school. Having visited the zoo and aquarium and watching so many wildlife shows, questions about animals in quizbowl of course were my favorite. Writing questions about animals and reading them to the network of friends I had built through years of playing this game is a very logical progression to take. However, rarely is it helpful to think of enjoyable hobbies as destinations on a map. Who knows what else you'll discover about yourself while finding your route through life?
Even if it's a helpful way of introducing myself and my hobbies quickly to someone else, it's suboptimal to describe myself as "the writer." Boxes are helpful but always so limiting and restrictive. A writer alone has nothing to write about but writing after all, and it would be a tragedy for the reader to take in such a dull world that lacks the multifaceted passions of the human.
The Future
Once upon a time I was the young freshmen standing at the top of a hill, at maximum potential (energy), with others at the time telling me why I should come down. Put the potential into action, plus running down is so much fun. Now I'm at the bottom, the only senior on my team with freshmen and sophomores. Today I'm the one telling people to come on down to the valley with me, and how to fall and tumble with grace and climb up more hills if ever they want to see what possibilities are out there and find where to run down to next. It would give me a lot of satisfaction if in some way I've done enough to replicate the triggers of growth and self actualization from the upperclassmen before me on me to my teammates and those who look up at me in the same way. As it stands though, I have plenty more hills and valleys to explore in the montane ecosystem of life and what lies ahead.
Looking from the past towards the future is like trying to look through a one way mirror. Clear as day looking back, but looking forward, with so much unknown, imagining things remaining relatively the same is the most comforting. When making assumptions on senior year or going into college in the past, I've always imagined doing everything as the same person, with the same ideals, values, and haircut. Will the future version of myself read this thinking that this article was well written? Obviously not. Will they think it was a good idea, and that I offered good insights? Hopefully. Will they be happy about what I've decided to do with my life and where I set my goals and how that has shaped me, or do they wished I had realized the hills surrounding me right now perhaps aren't so mundane to be passed nonchalantly right now? Only one person knows and they can't tell me right now.
Man reading the coronavirus post from months ago was entertaining.
I have no idea how quizbowl this year will pan out nor do I intend to make speculations right now. I have writing projects and ideas for more articles for the website that may show up sooner or later. Committing to myself has been a great tool, to others maybe not so much. I hope that I can continue playing quizbowl this year, and share more of the questions I've written. More quizbowl gives me more content to write about after all which is always really fun. I hope I can spend more time with my team. Regardless, I don't think there's too much else of value to say right now about what lies ahead except I think next year will be good. Cheers to next year everyone, I hope to meet you all then.
