First thing: Stop reading and just watch it.
Before you go any further, I'm asking you to watch the episode first, only taking into account you're watching an episode of a program of competition. Do it without any preconceptions of how you expect teams to do in this, and let yourself get caught up in the flow of the match. If you read this before you've seen it, you're giving short shrift to the team, and the effort they put into this competition. I used to use the phrase, "You can cook the meal, but you can't make them hungry." I'd like you to remember that every practice the team showed they were hungry. And that is all we can ever ask of them.
To recap for people coming to this without the previous 197 newsletters: KD Quiz is a television program that brings together 81 teams from Western Pennsylvania, and sometimes Ohio and West Virginia. Three teams play a match, two are eliminated and the winner goes to the next round. When COVID struck the format changed to allow the matches to be played over Zoom. The format changed again with this the 25th season, and the writers providing the questions changed. This is the 12th episode to be recorded, and only the first eight of this season have been aired. In the eight weeks prior to the match, I have tried to observe patterns in the material to give Seton LaSalle's team knowledge of what could be coming up in their match, and what to know to be able to answer those questions. The team is three sophomores who have been practicing as a team since November of their freshman year.
The biggest nerves I had during the taping was that moment when we had to connect the Zoom call. It failed the first time, and then we found we were five minutes early to the meeting. After taking my picture behind the team, I settled in offstage and began to chart the match. I needed something to do with my hands, and that helped me to keep my body still.
Round 1: Categories Round: The Categories are People, Places and Things.
Because we drew the third slot, Seton doesn't really get a choice, but the advantage here is that we have all the time of the second team's round to figure out what could be asked. Of course in this case knowing that it's People is kind of vague, but not quite as vague as Things.
Note that this is the either the generic naming of categories I expected at the end of a shipment, or it's a very clever way to title a generic set of categories. If I were to associate these with previously appearing category rounds, People would match up with "Famous People" from episode 6, Places with "Countries by Shapes" in episode 5, and Things was revealed to be Things that Start with B, a letter category like others we've seen. My hypothesis about this being shipped in sets of 6 rounds was holding, and so every 6th round being a little bit of odds and ends might hold.
Somerset swept through their set, because they knew their geography and were spotted an initial letter, which the first attempt at this subject didn't do. Since they didn't know that places meant "countries by outline" that's fine to include it, or it could have been a realization that the subject might be more difficult to players that aren't regular players of Worldle.
Purchase Line got through their Things starting with B with 4/5 for 100.
When Seton LaSalle's turn came, I would have been happy with four out of five. Leonardo and Frida Kahlo had been part of the Self-Portrait gallery I had forwarded to them after self-portraits appeared in Episode 4, but I wasn't expecting Lily to absolutely crush the rest of the category. Sometimes editing of the show trims the timing of events and people's performance look more impressive from that. When you see it on air, they didn't have to trim that a bit.
Semi-fun fact in the scheme of things: the section of the show where the coaches are revealed happens when they're actually confirming the zoom call is working, before the match. So if I look more winded or weird in my two-second television debut, it's because I had just moved the smart blackboard about two feet forward so the team would be larger in the shot. We probably should have moved the tables another two feet closer.
This was actually my first appearance on broadcast television, so people have some evidence I’m not some kind of advisory quizbowl cryptid. The reason I wore my band parent jacket, making me look like "really couldn't care less-Bill Belichick," was I didn't have any other Seton-emblazoned items, and I needed a pocket to shove a hand towel. I didn't trust myself to stay quiet during taping, and during most of the rounds, I had my left hand occupied with charting, and my right hand covering my mouth with a purple UPMC cooling towel.
Round 2: Knowledge Check
During the break, I did remind them that by going third each question they were going to get would reflect things in the other teams' questions. But I will admit a small panic when I realized that the order was flipping midway through Purchase Line's run. I felt a little bad on Somerset's Tartan/plaid question since that was a long adjudication, and I knew how to prevent that from happening (drop the word “plaid” into that question, so you don't have a more correct answer you're shooting for but can't prompt for.)
The Taj Mahal question hit into the landmarks study guide that I had compiled for the team after charting round 1, but Klimt was outside the range of what I had given them for paintings, though they would have crushed the other two team's art questions.
In retrospect, the questions from the James Webb Space Telescope images should have been something I should have thought of. The first images being from late 2022 meant they'd be news-prominent when the writer was putting together the first sets, and they're a comparatively easy way to include a science question in a picture round with public domain images. I'm just glad it didn't cost the team.
The art technique question I cursed myself out for giving them the wrong book study suggestion. Nothing in *The Annotated Mona Lisa* came up that we hadn't covered from other sources, but I recognized the image of cross-hatching as the same picture used in *From Abacus to Zeus.*
Still at the end of two, they were tied for the lead at 145. That's really all you can hope for.
Round 3: Lightning Round
Welp.
Literature, and specifically titles.
The number one thing I was worried about in the pre-mortem. (https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-196-the-pre-mortem-and-the-countermeasures)
I would note at this point, for research I did look up the recent record of each of our opponents as soon as we knew who they were. Purchase Line is from out in Indiana County and performed well in their league last year, and from charting last year's matches, I remembered they had won one match the previous year. I didn't have the recording, so I didn't know if last year's team were all seniors. If they were, and the team had rolled over, they might be closer to us in experience than expectation. However from seeing results, I knew Somerset had already won their league in November, and won it very handily. Our best hope was actually that they would be a very balanced team in their league, and that the drop from four (or possibly even five) players to three would create unexpected holes.
And once that category was announced, I thought "Oh, so _this_ is how we die."
Then the round began. When Somerset managed to convert only one of the first three, I realized these question were firing too high. And with them taking long titles and not answering them quickly, I realized we weren't in a literature category, we were in another vocabulary category. As I mentioned in the pre-mortem, rounds like that vocabulary round compress the value of the 60-second round. I reminded them what I said about the vocabulary round in practice, "if you don't have it fast, pass it on a round like this, there's no penalty."
At the end of that round, I had the thought as Seton LaSalle was ahead by ten points, "Oh, so *this* is how *we all* die."
Catie, upon hearing the scores, looked at me offstage with great surprise. Removing my towel gag from my mouth, I just said. "You're ahead, keep going." This of course made her laugh, and point out to the team how I was keeping myself from jumping out of my seat. Silly coach. I think at that moment, they all stopped being nervous about this, and saw that they could do this. I went back to charting the game. Sometimes silly coach isn't so silly.
The two notes I made of this round were that the titles asked about reflected the age of the curriculum the writer was immersed in, and probably the age of the writer. But they also reflected the writer's familiarity with the collegiate circuit canon of a particular era. Barbara Tuchman and John Le Carre I suspect are not major players in either high school curricula or collegiate canon any more, but they do sound like questions I'd add as stretch items to a high school study guide, after a lot of other things before them. This whole round was written in the long tail of titles to keep the canonical hits available later.
In the short break that would have been for commercials on air, and for checking all the answers here, the host and the producer both noted how hard they thought this set was relative to the previous rounds, but they were impressed how well all three teams were doing with it. I made a note that the questions may have been tuned by the producers a little. Initials had been added to People and Places, and Things were tied to a letter to limit the possible answers. This is a lesson to be relearned from something I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter, you want to have them practice on the highest difficulty that represents questions they will actually face in competition. That way, when they add initials to the pictures or other extra clues your team is ready to use those additions to confirm their answers, or come up with a new hypothesis on the fly.
Round 4: Math Time
Trig, the course all three of them will have next year in 11th grade, killed us, just as I figured was possible. Simple as that. In the break, they realized SOH-CAH-TOA could help them there, but too late, and now we were down 30 instead of up 10. I tried to patch the wrong thing, and lost the bet I had made in writing the simulated game. (https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-196-the-pre-mortem-and-the-countermeasures)
Round 5: More or Less
If there's any trace of me on the tape aside from feebly waving during the introductions, it should be me mistakenly telling them from offstage after Somerset missed Ulysses, "YOU’RE NOT DEAD! YOU NEED FORTY!" It's not going to be there, we had to be muted for Purchase Line's set. They of course needed fifty to win.
I note if Seton had gotten either of the other team's questions, we'd have converted something a lot faster. Ulysses had been a short mention during the discussion of the Odyssey in 9th grade literature that Mrs. Parker had drilled into them, and Tchaikovsky was the one Russian composer we went over the day before. Either of those would have closed the game. If I had gotten pulling questions from the end of the World Almanac of the USA (https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-121-the-world-almanac-of-the), or at least to the N's, Nebraska could have closed the game.
So there we were, tied at 205. Exactly where I hoped they'd get, at least over 200, where in 6 of the previous 9 matches only the top team reached 200. And exactly where I never wanted them to be, in a situation we had not prepared them for.
The thing about a tie is that it's truly a team effort. If you get smoked, someone might have really been contributing but were just overwhelmed. A dominant victory could be achieved without someone feeling that they contributed. But ties,... Ties are everybody's contribution, plus and minus. Everybody plays a role in a tie, even those off stage who sparred with you in practice, the teachers who taught you that one thing you remembered and the coaches that forgot to teach you that one extra thing. Everything you did got you there, and everything they did got them to the same spot. There was a little luck of the draw to get us to this place, and now we'd need a little luck to get out.
The Tiebreaker
The tiebreaker rules had been sent when we were scheduled for the taping on Columbus Day that had been postponed. This is how I knew the rules had been thought out, having the tiebreaker planned from the beginning. I don't remember whether those rules were sent for this taping, or if our previous communication was sufficient. Before they could even get the tiebreaker question from the producer’s office to the host, I had given the team the rules, and the advice to only go on 30 if you're certain. I don’t think I ever explained the tiebreaker to them before, except to describe it as like More or Less, but I had hammered the risk-reward of More or Less in all scenarios in every practice.
I was not expecting anything that followed. Having not seen a single grammar question in two seasons of episodes, I had not given them any advice on grammar questions. Things were over before I had time to panic. I had not expected Elizabeth to go for the kill that fast, much less getting it in with agreement from her teammates but there it was. At a certain point, you have to rely on the teachers who taught them before, and since the team were all more certain than their coaches, we bow to their superior subject knowledge and breathe a sigh of relief.
After the taping, I sent in the broadcast waivers we had signed, sent a good game message to our opponents, and took photos of the team. Then Mrs Parker and I walked over to the principal’s office to make sure the people who would need to hear about this achievement would hear about this achievement. We had already planned out a celebration for the next practice, and we needed to make sure the school would know about it so that we could also recruit new players onto the team. Even in the wave of good feeling after something like this, we still need to build for the next competition. On the way home, Catie called all the relatives she could to alert them that the team she wanted to start had done something extraordinary. And I felt my mainspring finally unwind for the first time in months.
I confess that at the end of the previous day's practice, I had internally given them a 40% chance of winning. A better than average chance in a three-team match, but still not the expected result you want, and pretty hard to announce to the world at large without having the wrong thing thought about it. Exceeding expectations is dull sounding but absolutely wonderful effort by everyone. In one move, they've achieved their first match win, and satisfied our goals for the original plan for 2024-25, a win on television. Not bad. Not bad at all.
There’s still work to do, new patterns the writers are going to develop, smaller holes in the team’s knowledge we need to make smaller still, and study guides to generate. I owe the producers feedback I promised them after our initial communications. But these can wait for this night. On to the playoffs.