Andy Wehrman is an Assistant Professor of History at Central Michigan University. He was an All-Star and the #3 scorer at the first HSNCT in 1999.

How did you get involved in quiz bowl?

My brother Mike was an incredible quiz bowl player. He’s two years older than me, and I followed his lead. I played a bit in middle school, and then joined my him on the North Kansas City High School quiz bowl team my freshman year. I won two Missouri state championships with my brother at the helm, and then two more [after he graduated]. We competed at every national tournament that we could under Missouri’s restrictive rules. We had several top-ten finishes but could never quite eclipse some of the best teams of that era, like Dorman, Detroit Catholic Central, Brookwood, and State College.

Then I followed my brother to the University of Arkansas, where I played quiz bowl all five years I was there and was team president the last three years. I went to graduate school in history at Northwestern University. I played actively for one year, joining the great [regular NAQT national championship staff member and Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner] Colby Burnett, and then took on more of a coaching/advisory role for the rest of my time there.

What are some of your favorite memories of quiz bowl?

There are so many memories. Quiz bowl was a big part of my life during high school and college. My fondest memories are the travels. Loading up with some of my closest friends in cars and vans and hitting the road. My high school and college teammates are spread out all over the country now, but I think we really forged lifelong friendships on those trips. And I have very fond memories of my high school coach Larry Allen. He was so unbelievably patient and invested in us.

We used to practice for hours every day after school, and we would travel to tournaments nearly every weekend. In practice we would go over old questions (Mr. Allen built up a huge library of questions), but just as often practice would devolve into us breaking out books and reading. If we didn’t know something, Mr. Allen would pause and take out a textbook or other reference material and just briefly lecture to us on the Stono Rebellion, tell us the plot of Jude the Obscure, or bring us over to his computer to look closely at Holbein’s The Ambassadors. And then someone would say, “didn’t Henry James write a novel called The Ambassadors?” And we would be off on another tangent. Quiz bowl gives us all such a wonderful excuse to be curious about the world.

As for things specific to quiz bowl, I wish I had the tape, but there was a televised quiz bowl tournament in Kansas City on ACE Cablevision. They would do rounds of 45 quick, one-line questions and would air one game a week. After my freshman year of high school, 1995–1996, they didn’t do it any more. But I remember one game against one of our rivals in which Mike answered 36 of the 45 questions, and I answered 4. These were short questions that almost everyone knew the answers to, but Mike was just so incredibly fast on the buzzer. The host of the show was just pleading with Mike to slow down and let others have a turn, and he had none of it. Lots of my memories are of me sitting next to my brother as he single-handedly led the team.

What do you remember about the first HSNCT?

A lot of the details have faded. But this was a tournament that I was really excited about that seemed like it might not happen. 1999 was my senior year at North Kansas City. In April was the Columbine shooting. These have become so routine, unfortunately, but I remember having many of our practices and extracurricular activities canceled, as people worried about copycat events. Then in May, Oklahoma [where the 1999 HSNCT was hosted, in Norman] had one of the worst tornado seasons on record. (Here’s some trivia: those Oklahoma tornadoes in 1999 produced the highest wind speeds ever recorded on Earth.) There was so much destruction that we worried about whether the tournament was going to be held until, I think, right up to the event.

We were excited that NAQT was going to do a high school national tournament. It was a small field (certainly by today’s standards) [26], but some of the top teams from all over the country came. No one at the tournament had any way of knowing what the questions would be like. Power tossups were a novelty that we were excited about. We had played in few NAQT high school invitationals, and I had watched my brother play in NAQT’s college championship, so we had a little more experience than some teams, but I remember thinking that NAQT’s questions for HSNCT were going to be really, really hard. And I think everyone had to get used to the style of play over the first few rounds. We underperformed a little bit. I remember blowing up at Mr. Allen after once particularly intense loss. I was really more accustomed to the speed questions we typically played on, but I remember one of my teammates, Phil Smith, having one of his best tournaments. We managed to squeak into the playoffs. I remember playing some of my best games in the playoffs in narrow losses to Brookwood and Detroit Catholic Central. [Editor’s note: North Kansas City finished tied for fourth place.]

I also remember the leading scorer of the tournament, George Ellison. A number of Oklahoma teams signed up to play at HSNCT because it was local for them. We had played several tournaments in Oklahoma previously and no one had never seen George, but he was a terrific player. His name was consistently at the top of the statistics, and everyone at the tournament was asking “Who is this guy‽” The HSNCT didn’t have Small School playoffs then, but George and his Union City team deserve some sort of honor.

How did your team get invited?

I’m not sure what we did specifically to qualify for the HSNCT, but we won a lot of tournaments that year. We traveled to Oklahoma to play in tournaments somewhat regularly, so even though it was a six-hour drive from Kansas City, this was a close tournament for us, especially for a national championship.

Who team was your biggest competition?

In Missouri our biggest rivals were always Liberty and Savannah (a small school but always a quiz bowl powerhouse). Regionally we had a lot of battles against Fort Smith Northside in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Edmond Memorial and Edmond Santa Fe in Oklahoma. These were all teams with terrific players and coaches as dedicated as we were. On the national level we always wanted to beat Dorman and Detroit Catholic Central. Now that I live in Michigan, it still bugs me that my NKC teams, although we had several very close games, never managed to beat DCC.

What is your life like these days?

I live in Midland, Michigan, with my wife Ellen (who I dragged to many quiz bowl tournaments in college) and our two kids Charlie (age six) and Walt (age four). I’m an assistant professor of early American history at Central Michigan University.

Do you have a favorite buzz?

Anytime I could beat my brother to question was a good time. I think we lost the game by 400 points, but I remember as a freshman in college answering a tossup on the Treaty of New Echota in the first line or so against Andrew Yaphe’s University of Chicago team at ACF Nationals.

I was trying to remember some specific buzzes from the first HSNCT. The one that I can remember the most clearly was my worst buzz. The question was asking for the name of a Native American nation whose name was a single syllable. I buzzed in confidently and said “Utah.” D’oh!

How about a favorite question?

My favorite question that I ever wrote was on Scrooge McDuck. I wrote it in high school, and it ended up in Arkansas’ packet at ACF Nationals. At that time ACF was strictly academic, so sneaking in a trash question was something of a coup. It was written in the biography-bowl style:

He was born in Scotland, the son of a Glasgow miner, and as a youth he earned money selling shoes and selling firewood. In 1879, he left Scotland and moved to the United States, where his uncle was a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. In 1882 he staked out a claim and mined copper in Montana; the mine boomed. That combined with his stock in RCA gave him three cubic acres of money by the late 1940s. In 1910 he moved to the city of Duckberg and constantly battled the Beagle Boys for his fortune. For 10 points, name this Disney comic-book character whose fortune is estimated at 91 multiplijillion, 9 obsquatumatillian, 632 dollars and 62 cents.

What has changed since 1999?

A ton has changed. The biggest change is how the internet changed the game. Quiz bowl as I grew up playing it was mostly one- or two-line questions. Some were just straightforward questions like “Born in Boston in 1809, this author is more often associated with Baltimore. Name this author and poet who wrote “The Cask of Amontillado.”

It didn’t mean the questions were necessarily easy, but they were short and choppy. A good player could buzz after the “1809.” The questions were mostly written from encyclopedias, and that’s how encyclopedia entries were organized. They really suited history-minded players like my brother and me, because many of the questions were organized chronologically, even the science questions, which ultimately became derided as “biography bowl.” Now question writers everywhere have access a much greater breadth and depth of sources, and the questions reflect that, especially in the sciences.

How has quiz bowl prepared you for life?

Quiz bowl shaped me in all sorts of ways. For one, nobody wants to play me in Trivial Pursuit, but people tend to want me on their team for pub trivia. Without quiz bowl and Coach Larry Allen giving me the exposure to history, arts, and culture, I’m not sure I would have majored in history in college. College history classes were so good for making me a better quiz bowl player, and being good at quiz bowl made me perform better in classes. Having a base of knowledge through quiz bowl meant that I was never intimidated by taking a class in a different field, because I felt that I knew a little bit about it before the first lecture or opening the first textbook.

Also, writing quiz bowl questions made me a better writer. At North Kansas City we wrote our own tournaments, and, of course, I continued writing questions through college. Writing a good quiz bowl question condenses many good writing practices. Questions should be lively and interesting. They should implicitly make an argument about the importance of their subject. They will be read aloud, so questions must read well and be understood by an audience that is only hearing them not reading them. They should be written concisely and cleanly edited.

Although I don’t write many questions any more, as a historian I use these skills all the time in my writing. In graduate school, my advisor loved to assign two-page papers. We would read two or three big history books and we were expected to write an analytical paper in two pages or less. Writing quiz bowl questions helped me learn how to write short, tightly packed sentences. This was also handy when taking essay exams in college as well.

Are you still involved with quiz bowl today?

I’m not really, unless you count raising the next generation of Wehrman quiz bowlers. I wouldn’t mind doing more or reading for tournaments, but it’s tough giving up those Saturdays with my own kids (which should make us all appreciate the sacrifices that quiz bowl coaches make).

The last major thing I did in the quiz bowl world was write and direct the Junior Wildcat middle school tournament at Northwestern in 2009. It was sort of my love letter to quiz bowl. Middle school was such a wasteland for quiz bowl and quiz bowl questions. Prompted by some discussions on the quiz bowl message board, I decided to write a pyramidal quiz bowl tournament for middle schoolers. I was convinced that the format would not only be playable by middle school teams but would be a vast improvement over the kinds of questions that middle schoolers typically played on. It was a smashing success, and, I think (to toot my own horn), had something to do with the proliferation of middle school events that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. [Editor’s note: NAQT launched its middle school program two competition years later, in 2010–2011. The first MSNCT was held in 2011.]