GMHS Scholars in State Finals

Last Spring Falls Church's George Mason High School dominated the Bull Run District sports world, garnering state championships in boys soccer, girls soccer and tennis. But even as the players received their deserved praise, another team was generally ignored, despite having tallied state championships two of the past three years.

That team is George Mason’s Scholastic Bowl crew, which competes in academic competitions against all the other schools in the Bull Run District. This season marks the Mason team’s sixth straight District championship, the fifth time in the past six years they have won Regionals, and the possibility of winning the Virginia Class A state championship for the third time in four years.

Coach Jamie Scharff is in his sixth year teaching at the school and coaching the bowl team. Prior to coming to George Mason, Scharff coached the "It’s Academic" team at Suitland High School in Maryland for 10 years. When he came to George Mason he decided to continue coaching with the new challenge of the Scholastic Bowl, a competition that was only in its second year.

Despite having a slightly different format than "It’s Academic," there are enough similarities between the competitions for Scharff to be in his element. His 10 years of experience gave him a great sense of the kind of information his team needs to know, and how best to teach it.

But he also said that Scholastic Bowl in many ways is a better indicator of academic achievement than "It’s Academic." The reason, he said, is that, while It’s Academic requires speed, the level of difficulty is lower than Scholastic Bowl. As a result, a team that is particularly good on the buzzer often wins over a team that doesn’t react as fast, but actually knows more.

Scharff said that the Scholastic Bowl prevents this with tougher questions and a format that rewards thought as well as reaction time. The competitions are always between two teams, and split up into three rounds. The first round is made up of 15 questions that the two teams have to buzz in to answer. The questions, which cover a broad range of subjects, like math, literature and history, have to be answered by the same person who buzzes in, without any help from his teammates, a difference from the "It’s Academic" format.

The second round is less speed based, as each team is given a set of 10 questions which it has 10 seconds each to solve as a group. The questions tend to be harder in this round but also allow greater team work and time for discussion.

The third and final round is the same as the first round, a buzz-in contest over 15 questions. For each question right a team earns 10 points, but buzzing in before a question is finished and then getting the question wrong costs a team five points. Although the game measures scholarly knowledge, Scharff knows that there is more to doing well than just knowing things. Winning requires a combination of knowledge, confidence, and teamwork.

In many ways, Scharff coaches his team just like a sports team. He substitutes certain players in for the different rounds, playing to their various skills. He has a core group of three, made up of Captain Alex Douglas, senior Dan McDonald, and sophomore Margaret Lipman, who play in all three rounds. Then he cycles in Bjorn Westergard and Peter Davis in rounds one and three, because they respond well instinctively, and senior Casey Smirniotopoulos in round two because she is better at difficult questions requiring more time.

Scharff also divides up certain fact sets among the players. He always makes sure that one of the people playing knows all the presidents of the United States by date and number, and another, all the world’s capitals, because they tend to be part of many questions.

The reason this works is because the questions are pyramid structured. The first part of the question is usually an obscure fact, and then the points get easier, until ending with a fact like a date or a more generally known point. Often the final point will be something like the number of a president or a capital.

One of the most impressive parts of team’s consistency has been the ability to perform well year-in year-out, despite graduating players each year.

This year is especially impressive, as they continue to win after graduating six of their best performers from last year. The losses meant that going into this season, none of the people that would have to lead the team had ever performed in an actual match. Scharff said that from the beginning of the season, he expected it would be a rebuilding year. In the first meet of the season, Mason lost two of its first three games. It was the first time they had lost a regular season game in over two seasons, a regular season winning streak of 42 games.

But the loss was not a sign of things to come. Douglas, who had missed the first three games, returned to the line-up and they never looked back, finishing the regular season 9-3, then rolling through the district and regional tournaments undefeated. This weekend, going into the State Tournament with a 16-3 record, the Mustangs are, once again, in position for another state championship.

“I thought it would be a rebuilding year,” Scharff said. “No matter how they do, they’ve already surpassed expectations.”

In fact the team is more than just getting by. In the regional tournament it breezed through, blowing away every team it faced. While most games are usually decided by less than 30 points, Mason never won a single game by less than 130 points, and never scored less than 210. Still, Scharff sees winning as secondary to enjoying the process. “It’s the ideal teaching situation. They want me to teach them new stuff,” he said. “It’s play. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been so good.”

Douglas agreed. He has always been good at remembering bits of information, a talent he says is due to his enjoyment of trivia. “You have to learn it because you’re excited by it,” he said. “If you try to force yourself you just get bored.”

Lipman pointed out, though, that while many people consider it useless, learning a wide variety of facts is important. “It’s not really trivial. It’s knowing more about the world around you,” she said.

As for this weekend, Scharff is hesitant to make any predictions. “We’ll find out when we get there,” he said. Like any sports contest, even the best teams can lose to another on any given day, depending on the questions and how the players react.

In the end, it comes down to confidence. Sometimes if a person buzzes quickly and answers wrong early on in the game, they become more hesitant to buzz in, and that can cost the game when it gets close.

As a result, Scharff’s biggest concern isn’t facts and figures, it’s just making sure that the team that steamrolled its way through the regional tournament knows it has the smarts to win it all.