JERRY CITY — It came down to the final question once again, and Eastwood came out on top, once again.
Eastwood Middle School won the 2020 Northwest Ohio Quiz Bowl Tournament for grades 7-8 Monday, beating
Bowling Green Christian Academy by four points. This is the second time these two teams have met for the
championship, and the second time Eastwood has won.
The final score of Monday’s championship match was Eastwood 86, Bowling Green Christian Academy 82,
Last year, Eastwood won by two points, 64-62.
On Monday, BGCA led Eastwood after the first round, 34-26, but was outscored 14-34 in the second round to
trail by 12 points. Despite scoring 34 points in the third round, the team couldn’t catch up with
Eastwood, who scored 26 in the final round.
Eastwood’s Avery Patchet said she was still hyperventilating 10 minutes after the match was over.
“It feels really good,” she said about the win.
Eastwood Coach Ken Perkins said he had three students who were on last year’s winning team, including
Patchet and Haley Sponaugle.
The team entered the tournament with a 5-2 record.
“It’s just really exciting to win,” Perkins said. “We came in this year losing two matches, to Lake and
Bowling Green Christian Academy. So we had to play both of them (today) to win the championship.
“We thought it would be close.”
“It’s pretty great,” Sponaugle said about being a repeat champion. “We had a lot of talent last year and
I was nervous because we lost a lot of that, but everyone stepped up to the plate this year.”
Patchet explained the team had each player focus on two topics.
Her topics were musicals and random facts, “just little tidbits.”
Sponaugle’s topic was American history. Political topics are not her thing, and she missed the question
about a Cuban Communist leader.
She recognized an excerpt from “The Giver,” and having previously read that book, she got the question
right.
She said she and her parents go through quiz books on long car rides.
Sponaugle also was given the Lynette Butler award for her contributions to quiz bowl.
Team members are nominated by their coaches.
In announcing the award, tournament coordinator Katie Smith said Sponaugle always enthusiastically
congratulates members of both teams after a match, and has never missed a practice or a match in the
last two years.
Teams battled over questions on musicals and composers, geography, history, art, current events and math.
BGCA Coach Christine Humphries said she had confidence in her team going into the final match. They had
easily beaten their opponents in the quarter-final and semi-final rounds.
“I thought we were going to walk away with it,” she admitted and laughed.
Her team entered the tournament 5-1, having lost to Gibsonburg.
The team was led by Liana Cooley, who is “a star player,” Humphries said.
Cooley said she reads a lot as part of her practice, “so I get a lot from books.”
It’s hard to study for quiz bowl, but her best topics are English and math.
She also knew Alexander Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury.
As an eighth grader, this is her final year in quiz bowl, and she said she will miss “how we can get
things wrong and be silly and it doesn’t have any penalty on us.”
It is a single elimination tournament, and each team faced each other once through the season, explained
Smith. Each match consists of three rounds and each round has 25 questions. Teams get four points for a
correct answer; a team that answers correctly on redirect gets two points.
She called it “brain athletics, and it’s fun to see the kids succeed at something that’s not on the
court, not athletic, but academic, and they love it.”
In the quarter-final round, Eastwood defeated Otsego (2-5), 114-60; BGCA beat North Baltimore (1-7),
130-54; with a tie-breaker needed, Elmwood (4-3) defeated Gibsonburg (3-4), 78-76; and Lake (5-1) beat
Woodmore (2-5), 124-32.
In the semi-final round, BGCA beat Elmwood 138-34 and Eastwood defeated Lake, 78-56.
Members of the winning team included Patchet, Sponaugle, Josh Beard, Belle Hayes, Maggie Ramsey, Jimmy
Russell, Eric Sander and Eli Smith.
Members of the BGCA team included Cooley, Eliza Ferris, Jesiah Foreman, Max Cobb, Elizabeth Reger, Logan
Tezak, Tim Atkinson, Daniel Ridenour, Sydney Magrum and John Fyfe.
(This is a corrected version of the story originally posted.)
