Less than two months after forming a Quiz Bowl team, the sixth-grade A team qualified for the 2027 National Championship after winning first place at the Carnegie Vanguard Invitational on Oct. 24.
“The top three teams were tied for first place, so they all qualified for nationals, but we were the best of the three teams by a tiebreaker,” team sponsor Mark Johnson said.
Quizbowl is an academic game in which two teams compete by answering questions from different areas of knowledge such as history, literature, science, pop culture, fine arts, current events, and sports. Once the players know the answer to a question, they press the buzzer with the help of the clues in the question.
“So when you buzz in, the question immediately stops,” sixth grader Natalie Silvius said. “So you could be like, oh my gosh, I know this! It’s like pure adrenaline. It’s like you buzz in and you get really nervous. And then when they call on you and you answer, it feels so good if you get it correct.”
The team formed in September after sixth grader Arzhan Reddy talked to German teacher Mark Johnson about starting a Quiz Bowl team. Although Johnson had coached a nationally ranked team at Heights High School, he had not thought of starting one at Pin Oak until learning about Reddy’s interest in the competition.
“The director of the local circuit reached out to me and said, ’hey, you have this kid at Pin Oak who wants to play Quiz Bowl,“ Johnson said. ”And I was like, ‘okay, well, there’s a sign from above that I needed to start a team.’”
The qualifying team consists of Arzhan Reddy, ChenHua Cui, Kabir Agarwal, and Natalie Silvius. Although students answer questions individually, they each bring their own strengths to the team.
“Kabir is our lit player,” Johnson said. ”He focuses on literature like novels, characters, authors, poetry, plays, Shakespeare. And then we have ChenHua Cui, who is our science player. They’re all pretty good at math. Arzhan is amazing at geography. And geography is really important at middle school, Quizbowl. So, he dominates a lot of other players in geography and history. The fourth is Natalie Silvius and she also does history and fine arts.”
The team competed in their first tournament Sept. 26 at Cinco Ranch High School, finishing fifth out of 18 teams. The students had been practicing together for about two weeks before the competition, and several players were competing in Quiz Bowl for the first time.
At their second tournament on Oct. 10 at Lycée International de Houston, the team again finished fifth, this time out of 13 teams.
“Our biggest challenges are probably facing elite private schools like St. John’s or T.H. Rogers,” Cui said. “They’re basically geniuses, and they know everything we know, but they know more.”
The team’s qualifying win came at its third tournament, the Carnegie Vanguard Invitational. Johson said teams in the top 15% of any tournament qualify for nationals.
“At the start, I was very nervous, and the other teams were very intimidating, but when we got farther in, we were more confident, and that’s how we got into nationals and state,” Cui said.
Although the team qualified for the national championship, scheduled for May 7-9 in Chicago, the team has not yet decided whether they will attend.
“It’s amazing these four sixth graders qualified for nationals this early in the season,” Johnson said. ”I hope other kids qualify as well, and I look forward to seeing who ends up going at the end of the year.”
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