Brows heavy with sweat, tension so thick you can cut it with a knife, opposing teams flashing intimidating glances at each other, then a buzzer sounds...a voice rumbles..."XENOPHON!".....
"Correct!" "The power goes to UCF". What you just read wasnt a description of the 4th quarter of a UCF football game with one of the players having a Tourette's moment, this was a slice of what it was like for me as a member of the Seminole State/UCF BrainBowl team for '09-'10 (By the way, for anyone curious, Xenophon was a Greek historian who was associated with Socrates.) This was an actual question!, to give an idea of the challenge that is Brain Bowl.
You may be wondering, "What the hell is BrainBowl?" In short, it's like "Jeopardy", except much, much harder, old people don't build their evenings around watching it, and it doesn't have a sometimes annoying host who likes to correct contestants in his "perfect" Canadian diction. Less facetiously, it is an intercollegiate competition which pits schools, both state colleges and 4 year universities, in competition with each other where questions are asked on a broad range of topics, from History, Literature, Physics, Biology, Politics, Higher Mathematics, and so on. Points are awarded, scores are assessed, and those who score high enough get to move on to regional matches, state matches all the way to the Nationals. I had the fortune of being on the team that made it all the way to the NAQT Nationals, which was held in Chicago, Illinois. Like most journeys, this one began simply enough, a flyer I found taped to the wall......
When I first started in school, I admit I was a bit too shy to join any clubs or organizations, so I felt as if I missed out on a part of the "college experience", now that social awkwardness isn't as crippling as it used to be, I was hell-bent on getting involved in things at SSC and UCF. Fate intervened one day as I was walking to my Anthropology class, and on the wall taped next to the door was a flyer for Brain Bowl. The wheels began to turn, and I decided to check it out. It was a humble enough affair, Jeri (our coach) Kat, Tom, and Rojay (fellow team members) were in this tiny room in the very back of the library. My first reaction was a "HA! so I see BrainBowl isn't much of a priority around here!" Leave it to me to find a club that no one had ANY interest in, much less the school itself. So much for my first effort to get involved!.
But I decided to keep going to the practices, and started to really get into the spirit of "it"; the pouring over of questions, the learning of some pretty obscure factoids, and the promise of our first competition, which wasn't too long after I stumbled into that little room with the "deer in the headlights" look on my face!. Another plus was that I made 4 new friends, each a very different personality, each gifted in their own way.
I admit that at first, the competitive edge wasn't quite there for me, but I can get pretty competitive, and as we were winning matches and becoming more of a team, to use a somewhat politically incorrect term, I felt I had a "dog in this fight". Competitions held at Valencia Communty College left us within the top 5 ranked teams in the state, a feat the school had not achieved in quite a long time, so the stakes were getting higher. The Regional finals were held at Seminole State and we won 1st in the region! Yet we still had 2 competitions left to face, one in Cocoa Beach at Brevard Community College and in Marianna, Florida (a place somewhere near Pierson, i think ;)) The big question in our collective minds at the end of competition in Marianna was, Would we get invited to the Nationals? This was something never achieved before by Seminole, we weren't completely satisfied with our performance there.....but by the skin of our cerebellums, the answer was a whispered,YES! Chicago here we come!
All expenses paid vacations don't roll around too often, and frankly we were quite surprised that the school decided to pay for the whole shebang; the flights, the hotel, spending money for the trip, drunken nights at Chicago's best strip clubs (just kidding on that last one). So this trip by all of us was viewed as more of a fun weekend getaway, considering now we were facing off against the likes of Harvard, Yale, Brown, you get the picture. It was more about finding some authentic Chicago style pizza and playing the role of tourists. Of course, leave it to me to throw on my skates, go on my own little adventure, and end up skating by the beach (Chicago does have a pretty nice beach right on Lake Michigan), finding a little hole in the wall joint with delicious Pakistani/Indian food where I felt I was back in the Middle East, and doing some skate moves and impressing the shady characters in some of the grimier neighborhoods along the "L". Can't help it though, whenever I 'm somewhere new, the skates are never too far from me. Can't take me anywhere..........Oh yeah, did I mention we went to the Art Institute of Chicago, with one of the most impressive art collections in the US?
As for the competition, we did win 3 out of 10 matches, admittedly 3 more than we expected to win! So I think we were all pretty satisfied. After all, even though we made it all the way to the Nationals it really was the journey there that made it worth while, and hey, the school did give us several paid vacations, plus scholarship money to boot! Not a bad start for someone who felt he "missed the boat" before. There's always a second chance, if you allow it to happen. A quote that I try keep in mind is one by Thomas Jefferson, "I find the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have" Simple, but powerful. Words that ring true now more than ever .So I wonder what adventure awaits me around the next turn?........
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