Greater Pennsylvania Quiz Bowl

Our pre-season poll is now up!

Pre-Season Poll, 2020-2021 Friends, This quizbowl season will be the strangest, wackiest we can remember, as we’ve been sent online by the ongoing health crisis. This does not mean, however, that we will stop ranking, …

Last but certainly not least, we’re also excited to welcome Will Yaeger as a new GPQB contributor!
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Will is a freshman pursuing an interdisciplinary degree in engineering and humanities at Lehigh University, where he hopes to start a quizbowl team this year. He played quizbowl for four years at Hempfield High School, where he captained the 2019 team that won the Pennsylvania State Academic Competition, finished T-12 at HSNCT, and was voted unanimous #1 in the GPQB End-of-Season Poll. As a senior, Will was GPQB’s 2019 Player of the Year. He is a question writer for PACE and has contributed to a handful of housewritten sets.

Please welcome Danny Turillo to the GPQB team!
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Danny is a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh studying political science, economics, and Italian. He is currently the Tournament Director for Pitt’s quizbowl program, having previously served as the president of his team at Boardman High School in Youngstown, Ohio. While at Boardman, he worked to promote pyramidal quizbowl by directing tournaments, revitalizing the History Bee and Bowl team, and starting a summer quizbowl program for local students. In addition to staffing events in the Pittsburgh circuit, Danny is a writer for Ohio Academic Competition and various local leagues.

Jackie Wu has worked with GPQB since 2017 and helps to run our social media!
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Jackie is a junior majoring in business administration and history at Carnegie Mellon University, where she served as president and TD of the quizbowl club last year and contributes to outreach efforts in the Pittsburgh area. As captain of Downingtown East High School in Exton from 2016 through 2018, she increased the team’s participation in pyramidal quizbowl, worked to bring better practices to the local competition in southeast PA, directed three tournaments, and won PACE’s Benjamin Cooper Young Ambassador Award.

Ryan Bilger has been a GPQB contributor since 2015 and is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
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Ryan started playing pyramidal quizbowl as a high school senior, after two years of playing solely a local format in the Lehigh Valley. As team captain, he led Emmaus High School to two pyramidal tournament victories in the 2014-15 school year, and finished as the 6th highest individual scorer in the preliminary rounds at the 2015 HSNCT. He graduated from Gettysburg College in 2019 after founding and leading their quizbowl team for four seasons, and is currently pursuing a masters at West Virginia University.

Get to know the GPQB team for the upcoming year! First up is Ben Herman, who co-founded the site with Chris Chiego in 2014 and started our annual awards tradition.
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Ben began his quizbowl career playing for Henderson High School in West Chester. While he only played a few pyramidal events in high school, his Henderson team won the 2011 Pennsylvania State Championship tournament. He went on to play four years of quizbowl at the University of Delaware. He has staffed or directed dozens of quizbowl events across Pennsylvania and Delaware over the past several years, and has officiated over 700 quizbowl matches. He is currently a PhD student in history at Penn State University, where he is studying the 17th century British Empire.

Working on college apps over the summer? We have a new post up on how you can effectively talk about quizbowl skills in essays, interviews, and more!

How to Highlight Quizbowl on College Apps I’ve heard a lot of people in the quizbowl community ask how to effectively talk about quizbowl on college applications. While I’m not an expert at the admissions process, quizbowl was a major part…

Last Saturday, 13 teams gathered for the first-ever Pennsylvania Charity Tournament, a tossups-only online event using the BHSAT XXIX set. Proceeds were donated to the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, PA. Thank you to Eddie Fuhrer (Kiski Area ‘21) for TDing!

Online Pennsylvania Charity Tournament Wrap-Up (6/27/20) While a small consolation for the COVID-related loss of the 2020 nationals season, Pennsylvania’s quizbowlers were not ready to quit quite yet. They gathered for one final event online, PACT,…

Congrats to Ashish Kumbhardare of Penn State for winning the 2020 Benjamin Cooper Young Ambassador Award!

PACE is pleased to present the 2020 Benjamin Cooper Academic Ambassador Award to Chris Johnson, the coach of Itawamba High School in Fulton, Mississippi, for his admirable work expanding high school quizbowl in the area, both through outreach to local schools to create and develop new teams, and through hosting high quality, pyramidal events and encouraging other local hosts to do the same.

PACE is pleased to present the 2020 Benjamin Cooper Young Ambassador Award to Ashish Kumbhardare of Penn State University for his outstanding outreach and logistics work in Central Pennsylvania, which has included directing high quality events at Penn State, assisting with logistics of other local tournaments, and recruiting and advising new teams.

While this similarity is coincidental, both of our award winners this year have done outstanding work in areas that are more rural and traditionally less active in quizbowl. PACE applauds their efforts, and we hope that they will stand as exemplars to the community in demonstrating the great potential of students and teams from all backgrounds.

Due to the cancellation of the 2020 National Scholastic Championship, the 2020 Cooper Awards will be presented in person, along with the 2021 Cooper Awards, at the Opening Meeting of the 2021 NSC. In the meantime, PACE will be sharing a few words from our 2020 award winners here as well as on Instagram () and Twitter () in the coming weeks.

[Pictured: PACE member and current Vice President of Outreach David Reinstein with 2018 Young Ambassador Kady Hsu.]

Congratulations to Shan Hogan of Carver High School of Engineering and Science for winning Coach of the Year for 2019-2020. Shan has an enthusiasm for quizbowl which is infectious. Her many students at Carver and everyone else around the circuit recognize her chutzpah and mettle as she shares that passion and mentors her students. This year, Carver qualified for HSNCT, which is a big feat for a school that has less resources than many of their competitors. In addition, this award is in recognition of Shan’s exemplary tournament direction of the Philadelphia City Championship.
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Each April, GPQB gives out an annual coach of the year award in recognition for hard work and contributions to the quizbowl community. A list of past recipients can be found on our website.

Congratulations to AZ Faiz of Manheim Township High School for winning JV Player of the Year for 2019-2020. AZ broke out in his sophomore season to become one of Pennsylvania’s top literature and fine arts players, scoring in bundles. Not since Alex Schmidt have we seen a player as well developed and confident at his age, and AZ’s rapid improvement has contributed to some major wins over nationally ranked programs.
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Each April, GPQB selects a JV Player of the Year based on a combination of tournament performance, ability to answer questions in several academic categories, leadership, and good citizenship within the quizbowl community. Students are eligible to win the JV Player of the Year Award if they are currently enrolled in the 9th or 10th grade, and they may not win this award more than once in their playing career.

Congratulations to Will Steger of Manheim Township High School for winning Player of the Year for 2019-2020. This award recognizes his strong skills on the buzzer, particularly in the category of history, but perhaps even more importantly, his leadership skills. His diligence and discipline at practice, studying outside practice, and on tournament day have inspired his teammates and fellow competitors to in turn improve themselves and learn more. In this respect, Will represents what Pennsylvania quizbowl is all about: knowledge with character.
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Each April, GPQB selects an overall Player of the Year based on a combination of tournament performance, ability to answer questions in several academic categories, leadership, and good citizenship within the quizbowl community. Students may not win this award more than once in their playing career.