Feb. 3, 2024 was Season 15 of GBH’s High School Quiz Show’s premier, which featured Lexington High School and 15 other high school teams.They were competing for the title of High School Quiz Show State Champion.
LHS has participated in the show for many years and has won the competition twice. However, this year marked the first time that English teacher Joshua Olivier-Mason and interim principal Andrew Baker coached the team together, with Olivier-Mason as head coach.
Unlike typical subject-focused academic competitions, High School Quiz Show assesses students on a wide array of topics.
“It’s a lot about personal knowledge, and it’s not stuff that you can easily study for. We really didn’t find it necessary to split up the topics because [the judges] could ask about literally anything,” Elias Tamer, a senior member of the team, said.
The competition is also televised, providing participants with a unique set of challenges.
“It can be really nerve-wracking because it’s a live taping. You can be really good practicing, but then you get nervous in front of the cameras and when everything happens,” Baker said.
This year’s High School Quiz Show welcomed a new host, Joe Hanson.
“In the early rounds or in some of the later rounds, you can buzz in at certain times if you can predict the speed of a person’s question, so we’d practiced with Billy Costa, and we had the new host, but it wasn’t a big problem. We just hadn’t gotten used to that person asking the questions,” Baker said.
High School Quiz Show relies heavily on teamwork and strategy. Team members had an especially close bond this year, prompting better communication during the competition.
“We worked together really, really well throughout the competition in order to answer the questions, because a lot of the time, there’s going to be questions where one person might not necessarily know the answer or might be kind of iffy on the answer. But when you get two people cross-checking each other, that’s when you get a solid answer. And that’s when you get points,” Aditya Rao, a senior and member of the team, said.
Prior competition experience was also helpful as team members who had competed in previous years had insight into potential topics that could show up during the competition, such as contemporary history.
“There’s often famous people who have died in the past year, and we’ll often get questions like that, and so we talked about a number of famous deaths in 2022, or 23. And I swear, they all came up and we got them, which was very exciting,” Olivier-Mason said.
Regarding the future, the team would like to see more school spirit at tapings and hopes that the High School Quiz Show will continue to be an enjoyable experience for the LHS community.
“I hope LHS continues to do well. I hope new students join the team, and it continues to be a fun activity for future classes,” Tamer said.
