Aggies test their trivia skills
Several Aggies competed Thursday in the Taggart Student Center by putting their trivia knowledge to the test as ASUSU hosted the College Bowl tournament.
The game was open to clubs and organizations to form four-person teams, with seven total teams competing. The Newman Center won first place, taking home $500 for their club and iPod shuffles for each team member that were donated by the USU Bookstore. A team representing the journalism and communications department came in second, winning gift certificates to ColdStone Creamery.
College Bowl is a trivia-style game where teams go head-to-head answering questions that can come from anything – from science to history, from geography to cartoons. Players score points by answering questions and the team with the highest total points wins the match.
Academic Senate President Michelle Lundberg was in charge of Thursday’s match. “We planned the game during Diversity Week to encourage more clubs and students to get together to have some fun,” said Lundberg, a senior in law and constitutional studies.
According to Angela Busselberg, the academic senate public relations and program chair, USU hasn’t played the College Bowl game since 2001. She said that made it tough to know how to run the tournament without someone to ask for ideas, so they had to start from scratch. “Since there wasn’t tournament last year, we were able to start with fresh ideas and design it the way we wanted,” Busselberg said.
Ian Whipple, a senior in molecular biology, played on one of two teams the Science Council put together and enjoyed playing in the tournament despite feeling like most of the questions were about literature, not about science, or what he calls “the real stuff.”
Jedd Rasmussen, a senior in biochemistry, said, “It was fun to be in an activity that the whole campus can be involved with.” His team also represented the Science Council and he and his team wanted to win the money to help them put on an activity the science department will hold.
The College Bowl tournament is held on three levels, starting first at the school level, like Thursdsay’s game, then to regional level when teams from other schools will compete together, and finally at a national level. This year’s regional tournament will be held at the University of Utah in February. According to Lundberg, USU sent a team to nationals in 1985.
Just one controversy arose at the match concerning an official College Bowl rule that says a team can only have one graduate student. The winning team had three, which some thought gave the second-place JCOM team a chance to take first, but Lundberg said the rule doesn’t apply at a college level.
The team that USU sends to regionals can only have one graduate student on the team. She also said all the team members have to have played in a tournament before. The team that will be sent to regionals will be made up of players from the other six teams to meet the requirements established by College Bowl officials.
Lundberg felt that the overall outcome of the tournament went well. She hopes that the College Bowl game will be played in the years to come.