Emma Philbrook: Student Life

The Waitsburg High School Knowledge Bowl team placed ninth at state this year.

Last year, we were young- er, less prepared, had poorer team communication, and lacked the snazzy coordinat- ing T-shirts that the Booster Club gave us for the 2013 trip to State. But we managed to place fifth that year.

Yes, I'm upset about the drop in ranking. But I'm also relieved that we even man- aged to bring home a plaque.

I was shaking as our team walked into Arlington High School last Saturday morning. Having placed first in Regionals, our team would be competing with other first- place teams all morning. The second-place teams would compete against themselves in a similar manner. At the end of the morning, the top nine overall scorers in the whole league would advance to a semifinal round, splitting into three groups of three. Teams that won in their semifinal rooms went on to compete for first, second, and third places. Teams that placed second competed for fourth, fifth, and sixth, and so on.

My teammates, on the other hand, were unnaturally confident of our success. Af- ter all, they pointed out, we were older this year. Smarter. More prepared. We'd had a fabulous regular season, win- ning our first two meets and placing well at all the rest. Plus, we had coordinating T-shirts.

After the written round, I calmed down a bit. I got nervous again as the first oral round began, but I gradually began to relax. Our team was scoring points at a relatively steady rate, and we never fin- ished last in our room. By the end of the fourth round, I was completely calm, confident of advancing.

After the fourth oral round (yes, there are four oral rounds at State), our team filtered downstairs to look at the scores. Pieces of white butcher paper were taped to the wall. On each sheet was a grid showing the scores in each bracket.

Our league's brackets were all but filled out. There were three teams still com- peting, but enough of the other scores were in that we could start assessing our odds.

I glanced at the final scores. Waitsburg had scored higher than eight teams out of the 18 in our league. We needed to beat one more team out of the three still competing to make it to the semifinals.

Finally, they filled in the scores. We had tied with the team from Davenport for ninth place.

Meara Baker, a girl on our team, suddenly squealed.

"Oh my goodness," she squeaked, "ties are broken by the written round scores, and we beat them by one point on the written round!"

I yelped and embraced her. Then I ran up a flight of stairs to find our captain, who was getting a drink of water, and told him the good news just as the event coordina- tor asked the Waitsburg and Davenport teams to report to the scoring table.

"Your teams are tied for ninth place," she told us af- ter we made our way to her. "You will need to compete in a tiebreaker round to break the tie."

"What?" asked Meara. "It says ties are broken by writ- ten round scores - "

"Not if it's an important tie like this," said the coordi- nator. "Sorry."

(To be continuedhellip;)