Congrats to the Brainiacs!
Valencia College’s Brain Bowl squads recently returned from Chicago, where they joined 22 other teams playing in the National Academic Quiz tournaments (NAQT) Community College Championship.
Valencia’s Brain Bowl players are divided in two teams: the Red team and the Black team – and both teams finished in the top 10!
This year, the Red team finished in third place, with a 9-2 record, earning a trip to the NAQT Intercollegiate Tournament on April 9-12, where they’ll play against four-year colleges and universities from around the country.
The Black team finished 8-3 overall, winning the middle bracket and taking 9th place overall out of the 24 teams which qualified for the CCCT.
Valencia’s Clete Reinberger was the top overall scorer (out of 104 students total) at the tournament. He was joined on the Red team by Isabella Da Costa, Heloisa Carneiro, and Kai Devane.
The Black team members are Greg Suarez (#23 overall scorer), Jason Neff, Keira Mackinnon, Samantha Norman, and Reyna Martinez.
Bonus question: Did you know that …Valencia College’s Brain Bowl team has a storied history in college quiz bowl competition? Over the years, Valencia’s team has won 8 state titles and 9 national community college titles. And they’ve finished in the top 3 17 times in the 26 years that NAQT has crowned a community college champion.
“This year, what was exciting was seeing that we were as good as any team there,” said Clete, captain of the Red team.
And while Valencia didn’t win the top prize, captured by their longtime in-state rival, Chipola College, the Valencia squad’s games against first-place Chipola and second-place Murray State were so close that both games were decided by the final question.
Last year, Valencia’s Red team also won third place in the community college championships, but this year, the teams came out hot, right from the beginning of the tournament, said Brain Bowl coach Chris Borglum.
“By the time we finished the first day, I started to change my expectations,” he said. “I talked to Clete that day and he agreed. I went into the tournament thinking that it would be challenging for us, because Chipola and Murray State – which finished 1 and 2 last year — were back at full strength, returning all their players, I was very much hoping for 3rd place, which is a podium spot, just like the Olympics.”
Yet this year’s Valencia Red team put together some terrific performances during the tournament and came very close to a second-place finish. Clete said the team’s members this year gelled, in part because of the addition of Kai Devane, an honors student and president of the Valencia College history club.
“He completed our team,” said Clete. “We didn’t have any gaps. He’s a history buff and that’s an area where we needed help. I’m a generalist, but history isn’t my strength.”
Kai, 24, joined the Brain Bowl team at the suggestion of his honors adviser, Kera Coyer. “History has been my sole obsession since I was eight, when I saw ‘Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ “ he says. In the long run, Kai wants to become a college history professor, but for now, he’d like to get his name in Valencia College Brain Bowl history.
“I’d love to have my name etched in that history,” Kai says. “Everyone wants to deliver a Super Bowl to their city. And we want to bring a championship back to Valencia.”
In Chicago, Kai quickly recognized that the Valencia Red team was performing above expectations. Against champion Chipola, he says, “That was probably the best game of Quiz Bowl I’ve played in my life. We’ve never come close to beating them and it came down to the last question.”
Players on the Black squad also brought their A games to the Chicago tournament. Samantha Norman, a dual enrollment student from Wekiva High School who plays on the Black squad, said the team felt competitive at the outset.
Samantha, who plans to study entomology, is the team’s art history specialist. (Entomology doesn’t come up much in Quiz Bowl questions, so she opted to learn more about art history.)
Yet the highlight of the tournament might have been the trip itself. In Chicago, Samantha spent some of her free time visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was thrilled to see “Nighthawks,” the famous Edward Hopper painting, in person. And she spent much of her time hanging out with her Brain Bowl friends.
“Playing is a lot of fun, especially spending time with the team because they’re all really great people,” she says.
And for any students interested in joining the team, she suggests joining a few practice sessions. And don’t let the fast pace and tough topics intimidate you, she says. “At my first practice, I didn’t really know anything,” she says. “But I really felt like it could do it. I knew I could get better if I just kept practicing.”