Wow! What a Season!!!
Congratulations 7th and 8th Grade Knowledge Bowl DVL Winners!
This year has been a fun filled year for Knowledge Bowl. It seems as soon as it started it was over. Knowledge Bowl has the shortest season of all the DVL competitions. I would like to thank all of the wonderful staff, administrators, parents and students for making this a great year. Without all of your help it would not be possible for us to have such a successful season.
Before we even started thinking about having practice, the students wanting to join asked if we could have team shirts. So at the beginning of the school year we started fundraising by running concession stands for the High School’s home Volleyball games and the Sub-state Volleyball game. The students found it was a lot of hard work. They never imagined that it would take so much time to get everything organized and ready for a concession stand. Their hard work paid off though, we raised enough money to purchase Polo shirts for the entire team this year.
For our first meet we were so proud to walk into the school, attired in our new Polo shirts, looking like a team. Everyone complemented us on how nice and confident we looked. I believe when we walked into the first meet at Pleasant Ridge we were a little bit intimidating to some of the other teams. We have twenty-two team members this year, which includes our manager.
This is the first year our team has had a manager and he has been a great help. Setting up the buzzers for practice and keeping stats at all the practices and meets. He also will at times get in for a round or two during practice. Being a bit shy he would rather sit on the sideline and watch the team compete.
The seventh grade team soon found out that we needed to be very quick on the buzzers loosing our first round to Troy by 30 points. After the round was over they realized that it wasn’t much different than competing against the eighth grade team in practice and that they would have to be fast on the buzzers to be able to defeat the other teams. The next round went much better for them, winning against Pleasant Ridge 45 to 30.
The eighth grade team felt very confident after winning their first round against Troy 90 to 0. The eighth graders had a lot to live up to after taking First Place at DVL last year. Our one worry was Everest. One of last year’s winning DVL team members had moved and was now attending Everest, and we knew we would be facing him this year. Fortunately our worries dissipated when we defeated Everest 50 to 40.
Going into the DVL tournament the Seventh Grade record was 14 and 2 and the Eighth Grade was 15 and 1. The Eighth Grade team hadn't lost a round until our Everest meet on March 6th, which shook them up a little bit and made them realize that they need to make sure everyone is at their top game for DVL.
DVL started off somewhat slow and shaky for us during pool play. The seventh grade lost two rounds and eight grade lost one round which worried us going into the bracket rounds. Both teams came back much stronger knowing they needed to be quick and sharp. It quickly showed that they hadn’t given up and soon took command and won the first round in bracket play. In the second round of bracket play they were a little nervous and both teams were a little behind the other team in points, but they came back quickly to answer the next few questions correctly and both teams won their rounds to take First place in DVL.
These students should be very proud of themselves, everyone on the Eighth grade team scored at one time or another during the DVL, contributing to the win. Unfortunately not all of the seventh graders scored during DVL but the ones that did scored big for our team. I will miss this year’s eighth grade team immensely and look forward to next year with the returning seventh graders and up coming sixth graders. Thank you all for a great season!!!!!!
