Photo courtesy of Hoover Scholars Bowl team
The Hoover High School Scholars Bowl A Team placed 13 in the National Academic Quiz Tournaments' national championship tournament in Atlanta on Sunday, May 26, 2024. From left are coach Anthony Hamley, Isaac McCollum, Stephen McCollum, captain Krish Nathan, Jakub Hel and coach Tim Caine.
The Hoover High School Scholars Bowl team this past weekend had its top team place 13th in the National Academic Quiz Tournaments’ national championship in Atlanta from among 320 teams.
This follows Hoover’s sixth straight 7A state championship in Scholars Bowl in April.
Anthony Hamley, who coaches the team along with Tim Caine, said Hoover’s A Team was led by freshman Krish Nathan and also included three seniors — Jakub Hel, Isaac McCollum and Stephen McCollum.
The foursome actually was pretty inexperienced but worked hard and delivered, Hamley said.
“They’ve been kind of bringing their game all year, and it finally came together,” he said. “They just played out of their minds.”
The A Team won eight of their 10 matches in the preliminary round and came out of the preliminaries ranked in second place, Hamley said. The two teams to whom they lost in the playoffs ended up coming in fifth and eighth nationally, and one of the teams that beat them in the preliminaries ended up fourth in the nation, he said.
One of the highlights of this year’s tournament was three victories over Detroit Catholic Central High School, which won the tournament two to three years ago and last year put Hoover out of the tournament, Hamley said.
Nathan, though a freshman, is Hoover’s A Team captain and placed third nationally for the Rising Star award for freshmen.
“He is a wonderful player and an incredibly hard worker,” Hamley said. “He motivates the other players to work hard, but they don’t require a lot of motivation. It’s probably the hardest working team I’ve had the pleasure of coaching. This team just studies all the time and works and prepares all the time, and it showed.”
The Scholars Bowl teams, sometimes known as quiz bowl teams, have to answers questions about subjects such as history, geography, literature, fine arts, science, math, religion, mythology, philosophy and sports. There’s also a pop culture category, but “we are terrible at that,” Hamley said. “It’s almost a joke how bad we are at the pop culture category. In fact, we call that category ‘trash.’”
For many beginning teams, the pop culture category may be the only category in which they do well, but “for us, it’s just not ever an option.”
Hoover’s B Team — made up of Sonny Bracamontes, Michael Carey, Keith De La Rosa, Aiden Dombrosky and Miley Henton — went 5-5 in the preliminary round and missed the playoffs by one question.
The only other Alabama team to make the top 50 was a team from the Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering, a private school from Huntsville, and that team placed 49th.
In the 7A state championship tournament for Alabama in April, Hoover continued its winning streak, with an A Team made up of Nathan, Hel, both McCollums, Dombrosky and De La Rosa. Spain Park High School came in second in the state 7A tournament.
Editor's note: This story was corrected at 12:01 a.m. on May 29 to correct the last name spellings for Isaac and Stephen McCollum.
