Jump into Jeopardy – Academic Team jolts into new season

The field is a place for the athletes, the math bowl is a place for the mathematicians, Science National Honors Society is a place for the scientists – but what about those students who are good at every subject, and amazing under a time crunch?  What about those students that are great at Jeopardy and other trivia games? Well, there’s a place for them too – Academic Team.
Academic Team meets once a week, on Thursdays, in Mr.  Blake’s room (D307).  Julia Foster is the president, and students from any grade can join.  Blake, the head of the team, describes academic team as “…an academic version of Jeopardy, basically general knowledge a high school student should know.”
Their practices are run just like the competitions to allow the members to experience the best possible training.  Foster says that “…we have books of questions, and we have buzzers, so Herr Blake will ask us the questions and we buzz in to answer them.  We get a point every time we answer and whoever has the most points by the end… wins for the day.”
Blake first got involved with Academic Team his first year teaching at North Harford.  He says that there are about 15 students in the club, and there are both returning members and new members that have joined this year.  There are no requirements to participate on the team.  In order to get involved, students just have to show up to a practice.
At competitions, Blake explains that there are usually three or four teams consisting of four contestants per team.  Each team has a buzzer system to determine who gets to answer a question first. Although different competitions have different formats, that is the general idea.  There are only about three to four competitions per year, and at the end of the year the team always appears on the television show It’s Academic.
The Academic Team had their first competition on Saturday, November 14 at 8:30 in the morning.  They competed at Bel Air High School against Fallston High School, Bel Air High School, Edgewood High School, and Aberdeen High School.  Some other private schools also attended the event. It was their first competition of the 2017-2018 school year.
The questions can be from a wide variety of subjects, including history, religion, politics, literature, and mathematics. An example question from the National Academic Quiz Tournaments is: “This U.S. state contains the endemic petroleum fly, whose larvae develop in crude oil. Unusual tufa salt formations dot the surface of this stateʹs Mono Lake. The chaparral biome thrives in the Mediterranean climate of this stateʹs coastline. A drought contributed to the 2016 Soberanes wildfire in its coastal Big Sur region.” Know the answer? It’s California.