#11. An Unexpected Success (Friday, April 7, 2006)

What was your best day…of succeeding unexpectedly?

There are two definitions of unexpected. There’s unexpected in the sense of something just happening out of the blue. Then there’s unexpected in the sense of something going in a way that was completely out of any realm of possibility you had in mind.

This day was the second kind.

This Friday was the Ottawa regional finals for Reach for the Top, the Canadian high school quizbowl competition (#109, video example here) where they ask fast-paced knowledge questions and the teams have to answer them as quickly as possible. Three of the six teams playing today will qualify for the Ontario Provincials in Toronto (where the later rounds are televised, and where I would choke badly a year later…, #59).

But this is only my sophomore year, so I’m not even on the radar of our school’s main team. The team consists of our two best players: Alex Gibbons (senior captain) and Jake Carter (junior); with the final two spots alternating between Brian Hurst (junior, #84), Sean Stone (senior, #89), Sebastian Soletsky (junior), and my best friend Nigel Healey (sophomore, #22, #14).

With the importance of these games, we needed to put together our best effort. So the plan was that those six guys would get most – if not all – of the playing time. But our teacher advisor Ms. Coakley did allow the rest of us to come if we wanted (with no guarantee that we’d get to play).

And I wouldn’t have come – except there was a history project¹ that I wanted another day to work on. So I told my history teacher (#109) that I had a Reach tournament that day, and ended up going.

The first game is against the worst of the six teams, Holy Trinity. We take a big lead. So just before the second half begins, Ms. Coakley subs me in because “I won’t get a chance to play otherwise.” I kill it. I sweep a sports category and get four or five other questions.

And the rest of the team as a whole seems to be a little off their usual game today. So, riding the hot hand, Ms. Coakley puts me in for the majority of the games – which surprises me tremendously.

And I continue scoring points at a rate no one expected me to. Which is critical, because we end up playing several close games. The next game we win against Colonel By by 30 (I get an 80-point swing by identifying that Rimouski is in Quebec), and right after that we win against Merivale (and Jake Ryerson, #56) by a similarly close score. (Though we then lose to Bell by 10.²) And through all this, I’m just in total disbelief. Like, here I am, a second-string player, literally winning the most important games of the year for my quizbowl team.

We end up barely getting top seed for the four-team playoffs. But from there we win two easy games and cruise to the city title³. I can’t believe it. As a sophomore, I was arguably the third best player (behind Alex and Jake) on a city champion team – even better than Brian and Nigel on this particular day.⁴ And I am a key reason why we’re even going to Provincials (though I still don’t end up going as the main five).

Going into the day, there is no way I could have imagined that.

And it was in that moment, hoisting up the city champion’s plaque with the rest of the team, that I first realized that I was actually a good quizbowl player – and that I could be a great quizbowl player if I kept working at it. Leading to that NAQT question-writing job (#52), that trip to Provincials the next year (#59), that domination of university-level quizbowl (#22), and maybe more…

Coincidentally, a very interesting/beyond-sophomore-level project on the causes of the Great Depression. A month after I’d returned to Ottawa (for the job) when I went back to Lisgar to visit my history teacher and Ms. Coakley, I mentioned that one to him specifically as an inspiration for my eventual career choice.
Because I got tripped up when they asked what Utah’s basketball team’s “nickname” (who uses that term?) was – and my neighborhood friend Xiaodong answered “Jazz” ahead of me.
We lost to Colonel By in the final last year by 10 points.
You can tell that I have these rare moments where I do better than Nigel carefully tracked (see #47, #22, #14).