The Paw Print

By Raina Suri

If you’ve been paying attention to your email, you would know that Payton’s scholastic owl team had a fantastic win over the weekend of Oct. 5, with the A Team coming in No. 1 and the B team in No. 13. Payton’s school’s A Team is made up of Elena Whitford ‘27, Kieran Blake ‘26, Grant Liu ‘28 and Connolly Nugent ‘26, while the B Team is Ben Hesser ‘27, Siddharth Krishnan ‘28, Aaron Zhang ‘27, Hector Rodriguez ‘26 and Simra Kuchay ‘28.

Scholastic bowl is an academic competition in which teams of four or five students compete to see who can answer the most trivia questions, which cover many different subjects. The competition is said to build teamwork, promote confidence in students’ knowledge and encourage learning. Throughout the day, students advance from preliminaries to playoffs until the team with the best record wins.

Regarding the competition, Kuchay ‘28 said, “I got into scholastic bowl because it’s a place where prior knowledge and love of random learning comes in handy. But, as you actively prepare for Scholastic Bowl specifically, it isn’t a total free-for-all, and you have to acquaint yourself with the structure of the game, which is really, really cool.”

The most recent tournament was a regional competition held at Hinsdale Central, a suburban high school that is about a half hour drive away from Payton. The scholastic bowl A Team swept this competition with a record of 8-1. Our B team followed with a 7-2 record.

Additionally, Elena Whitford and Kieran Blake of the A Team were named to the competition’s All-Tournament Team, meaning they were picked to be honored for their individual contributions to the team.