A sport of the mind — College Bowl recruits students for an academic competition

Students will gather for a different kind of sport Thursday night — a sport of the mind.

The College Bowl will take place Jan. 26 and Jan. 27 in the Crest Room of the Idaho Commons to test students’ trivia knowledge.

The College Bowl is an organized collaboration between Campus Recreation and the Department of Student Involvement.

Butch Fealy, associate director of competitive and recreational sports, helped organize the College Bowl for nearly the last 10 years. He said his experience has made organizing it easy.

“After doing it for nine years together, it’s a fairly smooth process,” Fealy said.

He said most of the setup is actually in the background work. It only takes a couple hours on the day of the competition to set up the buzzers and rooms.

While Fealy is a veteran, this year is Lynsie Clott’s first working on the College Bowl.

“We are an additional resource for getting more students to apply as a team for College Bowl, we publicize and promote and do a lot of the background coordinating,” said Clott, the student involvement coordinator.

Clott said the biggest challenge so far has been recruiting volunteers for the day of the tournament. For the day of the main tournament, roughly 20 volunteers are needed, she said.

Fealy said student participation has increased from when they first started. Over the years, he said participation has varied, but increased in recent competitions.

“Anywhere from 10 teams (participate), to one of our larger ones with 24 teams. Those are teams of four to five people that participate,” Fealy said.

Based on the popularity of trivia that year, involvement ebbs and flows, he said.

“Knowing the popularity around town … I’m anticipating this year’s to be on par for an above average tournament,” Fealy said.

Last year, sophomore Bret Kindall and his team participated in the tournament. He said the competition brought members of his fraternity Alpha Gamma Rho together for a good time. Kindall said through the College Bowl he learned a lot about the people he lived with.

“It was just cool to see the different weird facts people knew,” Kindall said.

Kindall said he already signed up to participate again this year. Last year, his team didn’t make the finals, but this year he said his team has a better idea of how the tournament works.

“I wouldn’t say there’s any way to prepare for it that well. We’re just going to have fun,” he said.

Fealy said the ideal College Bowl “super-team” would have someone from every discipline.

“You need someone definitely with a good literature background, big into reading the classics, a history buff, a science and math buff and a wild card,” he said. “That friend that just surprises you out of the blue.”

Even then, Fealy said some of the questions are just extremely difficult.

“There were some questions I thought that no person without the internet would ever know,” Kindall said.

But Fealy said this is exactly what makes the competition fun.

“The competition’s fun because there’s going to be some questions out there that nobody knows and they just laugh about it,” he said.

Carly Scott can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @Idaho_Scotty

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