10 Days of Thankfulness

The summer before my freshman year of high school I decided to try out for the drill team. Even though I was pretty much a nerd, I secretly envied the drill team girls. My tryout experience was pretty much like something out of Beverly Hills 90210. For some reason I decided to try out for "banners"--the girls who marched in front with the metal signs spelling out my high school's name. There weren't very many spots, so this was the most competitive section of the drill team, but I didn't realize that before I got involved. I lasted for only two days in the tryouts; the other girls laughed at me, wouldn't give me a practice banner, and basically made my life miserable. I went home, cried, and decided that I was just a nerd and that was never going to change.

Thankfully I soon found a way to use my nerd cred. I'm not even sure how I heard about the Knowledge Bowl team, but it was a perfect fit. I loved Jeopardy! and the only physical skills I needed were fast fingers on the buzzer. I was on my school's Knowledge Bowl team for three years, as well as the Geography Bowl team. When I moved to a new school for my senior year I was sad to find out that they didn't offer any sort of trivia team.

Then I got to BYU, and since I was such a nerd I went to the early orientation for the Honors program. One of the things they did was a demonstration from the university's College Bowl trivia team, so I decided to try out. When I got to the tryouts I started to feel very, very intimidated. I went ahead and took the written test, but left before the results were in. I was a brand-new freshman and felt so lost in there with everyone else. By the time I got back to my dorm room, my phone was ringing. The guy on the phone said that I had scored high enough on the test to qualify for the next level of tryouts. I can't remember if the second half of tryouts were that same day or the next; I think it was in a few days. Either way, I managed to make it on the team.

I spent three years on BYU's College Bowl team and it really was one of the highlights of my time at school. I often felt intimidated because there were few other girls and most of the guys were returned missionaries and older than me. All the same, I loved travelling to competitions and hanging out and all the fun we had. Today on Ken's blog he was writing about his recent trip to a competition in England and he had this paragraph:

"Luckily, there wasn’t much need to go out of the hotel. The Europeans like their trivia in big aversion-therapy-style doses, with quiz contests of various kinds starting every morning and extending past midnight every night. It reminded me of the quiz bowl tournaments we used to go to in college, where you could play for two days straight, play until you were physically sick from it, play in a Denny’s booth into the wee hours every morning, and in the car or plane on the way home, someone would still say, hey, I have some packets from last year’s Iowa State tournament if anyone wants to run through ‘em…"

I laughed out loud, especially because most of his readers just won't get this kind of obsession with trivia. We really would finish the official tournament, grab a bite to eat, then stay up all night playing "Trash Bowl" with questions about pop culture. I can't even really describe what kind of weird obsession kept me so devoted for three years. I spent a lot of my weekends away at Berkeley or Stanford, crammed into a little basement room hunched over a buzzer trying to remember The Russian Five. And I loved it. Even despite the fact that I like to be the best and I usually was only somewhat mediocre compared to rest of the team. Most of the time I was on the B team, except the year we sent one team to Nationals in DC and I ended up going. The best part of that trip was that it was right around my birthday so my parents got to take me out to eat and come up and watch (my mom took this picture; it was in 1998).

BYU actually cut the College Bowl team after my sophomore year. They didn't want to fund it anymore; it's certainly not as flashy as football and we generally didn't have any kind of audience at all. They forgot to collect the key to the equipment closet so we kept practicing and drove ourselves to tournaments for the next year. I left on a mission after my junior year and by the time I got back the core members of the team had graduated and moved on. At least I have my memories. Besides learning a lot of trivia, I learned some vital life lessons. Like you should always bring your own towel, because single guys' apartments usually only have two towels in the bathroom and that gets pretty gross after three other people have showered before you. Or sleeping in the front seat of someone's car to save money on a hotel is a really crappy way to spend the night. So is sleeping in an airport lobby. And five-dollar prime rib in Reno will make you sick if you eat it at midnight. I am really grateful for the time I was able to spend on the College Bowl team and all the good friends I made there.

**PS: If you are in these pictures and don't want to be on the internet, let me know

**PPS: We just changed the kids' blog to private. If you want to read it, email me please.