GW’s Academic Competition Club’s recent performance propelled the squad to an invitation to the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament in April.
The Division II squad of the Academic Competition Club, GW’s trivia club, earned second place in the National Academic Quiz Tournaments’ mid-Atlantic sectional competition Feb. 12 in Charlottesville, Va. The Division I team finished sixth.
The second-place finish for the Division II team, made up of freshmen and sophomores, was enough for an invitation to the NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, which will be held April 7 and 8 in Boston.
Edmund Schluessel, the group’s Pontifex Maximus, said teams from all over the place will compete in the tournament in Boston.
This (quiz bowl) is a very widespread phenomenon, he said.
Schluessel explained that his unusual title was one of Emperor Augustus of Rome’s two titles. Another officer in the group goes by the other title, Tribune of the People, he said.
Freshmen Aaron Schroeder and Andrew Wiseman were the top scorers for GW in the sectional tournament, according to an e-mail from Schluessel.
On Sunday, a Georgetown team defeated the second-place team of Boston University graduate students, 265 to 245, at the GW-hosted Beltway Bandits trivia bowl. Fourteen teams from around the East coast competed. The tournament tested what is known as trash knowledge, which consists of pop culture questions in categories ranging from sports and literature to The Truly Weird and Geekiness.
The GW Academic Competition Club consists of about 10 members, and the tournaments have no set entry number for teams. Schluessel said the GW trivia team is ranked in the upper 20s among the 500 teams on the national quiz bowl circuit. It is a nationally renowned, nationally ranked team, he said.
The team was founded in 1987 and participates in four leagues, Schluessel said. This year, he said, we’re more active than we have been in the past because of a high number of incoming members. The club will take part in about 12 tournaments before the season is over, he said.
Recalling a question that a teammate answered in the sectional tournament about a Czech word, Schluessel said, I don’t know where he got that out of. That’s the kind of knowledge that this tests for-esoteric facts.
Schluessel said the club practices twice a week, on Wednesdays in the Academic Center and on Sundays in the Marvin Center.
-Tim Donnelly contributed to this report.
