2005 NAQT West Sectional Championship Tournament

Many of you know that I'm a member of UCD's College Bowl All-Star team, which is kind of like five good guys combining their powers to form a super good guy, in much the same way that Voltron Force combines their vehicles to form Lion Voltron. Except we don't have to wear skin-tight bodysuits, much to the relief of, well, everyone.

Our biggest event of the year is the Regional Tournament. In preparation for this, we drove 400 miles down to the 2005 NAQT West Sectional Championship Tournament held at USC. NAQT is a quiz format that's much harder (though slower-paced) than College Bowl. And generally, we don't do great at these sorts of tournaments, as long-time readers may remember. Nonetheless, the trips themselves are pretty fun, and I'll try to chronicle some of the more interesting stories from this past trip, including the surprising tournament results. I doubt this will interest most of you, since it's one of those "you had to be there" entries.

If you'd rather just see pictures, check out the photo set on flickr.

The Cast of Characters

Just so you know who everyone is:

John - Our illustrious captain who knows, well, everything. Three-year All-Stars veteran.

Ruwan - Second-year All-Star. Resident expert on biology, chemical compounds, Shania Twain, and everything VH1. He's Canadian, but we usually don't hold that against him.

Justin - First-year All-Star, who's a third-year with senior standing. His expertise lies in psychology, philosophy, and Arena Football. And the XFL. And Roller Hockey. And the WWE. And BASEketball.

Rishi - First-year All-Star. He's pretty cool and really amiable. He also seems to know a lot about a lot of things.

Aliotsy - Yours truly. I know way too much about Star Wars and tend to over-think computer science questions. And I also know about silly WB shows like 7^th Heaven, evidently.

Gabe - One of my best buds since the 10^th grade or so. He graduated last spring from UCLA, and has a nice one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. He let the five of us crash there, and even showed us around Westwood.

The Rest Stop

John's parents were gracious enough to allow us to use their van for the trip, and John himself drove us to our first rest stop at Harris Ranch. While we filled up the tank, the team went to get goodies from the gas station. As I was waiting in the checkout line with a Red Bull (I'd be driving the 200-odd remaining miles to LA), Ruwan relayed overhearing the following from John—

"This beef jerky looks good, but five dollars? What a ri—ooooooo, gummy worms!"

Aggies in Westwood

Gabe took us to Chili's in Westwood for dinner, where I enjoyed an excellent country-fried steak. While we were eating, a guy walked past us wearing a UCD hoodie. Although I don't know his name, I recognized him from around campus. What are the odds of running into another Aggie in some random Chili's in Westwood on a non-holiday?

Nyquil

I had not been feeling too great the week of the trip. My immune system had been doing a formidable job of fighting off the cold for the better part of three weeks or so, and I did what I could to supplement it eating and drinking a lot of soup and citrusy stuff. All I had to show for this was a cough that really sounded worse than it really was. The day of the trip, though, my head was feeling kind of heavy and "foggy," if that makes sense. Also, even though you don't have any elevation gain until you hit the Grapevine, most of the drive my ears were popping.

I'm not a big fan of taking medication unless I really need to, but I figured enough was enough. Ruwan, who was sick, had brought some Nyquil down, and offered me some. I was a little apprehensive, but downed a full dose.

Wow. I don't know what they put in Nyquil, but it works—and fast. I'd only ingested half of the capful, and I could literally feel the "fog" lift from my head—starting from the bottom and working it's way up.

Brutal honesty

Overheard during the pre-tournament meeting:

"You don't go to Quiz Bowl tournaments to meet attractive people."

Rishism #1

Rishi, as I've mentioned before, is a very amiable guy, and even kinda soft-spoken. Don't let the mild-mannered demeanour fool you though—he proved to be an awesome player in his first tournament, often surprising the rest of his teammates.

I was sitting next to him prior to a match, when the other team started complaining about the buzzer system we were using—a buzzer system that our team had donated for the tournament's use.

"I hate these buzzers," one of them said, for no particular reason.

Now I'm kind of indifferent when it comes to buzzers, and didn't have any feelings either way for ours. Rishi, however, turned to me, eyes aflame.

"Did they just diss our buzzer system?" He asked, his voice quiet and icy-cold.

"Uh…yeah."

"We're not taking that. We'll kick their butts."

"Huh?"

"They dissed our buzzer system. We better kick their butts."

"Ok…"

For the record, we won.

Can we do this?

We were entered in Division II for the tournament. Looking at the field of ten teams beforehand, we felt we had a pretty good shot at doing well, and maybe winning it all (at least, I did). The tournament director mentioned that the winner in each division would go to the National Championships at Tulane University in New Orleans, and I thought that sounded like a pretty cool trip.

It didn't totally dawn on me that we actually had a shot at taking that trip until we were 5-0. I'm certain the others were starting to consider the possibility, but no one mentioned it: we wanted to focus on the present, the next team we had to beat, the next question we had to get.

For the most part, we were playing really well. I think that many of our past tournament records are misleading—on a 5-7 day, two or three of those losses tend to be very narrow ones. On this particular day, we were winning our close games and occasionally rallying from fairly large deficits at halftime. I was impressed at how well we kept our cool—particularly Rishi, who was playing in his first tournament.

We finished the initial round-robin tournament at 9-0. There was a reseeding meeting to separate the teams into upper and lower brackets. Walking out of the meeting, I overheard the following.

"Who are we playing first?"

"Davis."

"Davis! They're gonna kill us!"

I have to admit, it felt good being one of the big dogs for once.

We went 3-2 after the reseeding, losing two very close matches to Stanford and UCSD. Nonetheless, our record was still good enough to win it all. So yes:

The UCD College Bowl All-Stars are the 2005 NAQT West Sectional Champions!!!

I had Queen's song "We Are the Champions" stuck in my head for the next five days or so. :)

Red Robin and Google

There's a Red Robin at the Harris Ranch rest stop, and we were hoping to get there for dinner on our way back—we felt like celebrating winning the tournament with something a bit nicer than In 'N Out. On the way up, though, I realized with a little mental math that we'd get there right around 10pm. Would they still be open? We had no idea what the name of the city was, or any contact information.

This is where technology stepped in. I called my brother at home, 300 miles away, and asked him to Google "Red Robin." Their official website had a listing of restaurants by city, he reported, but we had no idea what city our particular restaurant was in. So we then had my brother Google "Harris Ranch," and he thereby go the name of the city (Cualinga, CA), and a phone number for our restaurant. It's amazing to think that just over 10 years ago, that sort of information transfer would be almost unimaginable.

Rishism #2

Red Robin said they'd be open until 10pm, but they'd let us in any time prior to that. We arrived at 9:53pm, only to be informed that the restaurant was closed.

Furious, soft-spoken Rishi insisted that we should all do something to the restaurant that I won't repeat in polite company. We dissuaded him, and went to Denny's for a filling, but sub-standard alternative.