BY KYRA BACON
CCHS students Julieanna Bacon, Persis Bhadha, Alexis Bhadha and Jessica Hujber participated in the annual school duel television show, which premiered on BECON TV March 7th.
School Duel is a competition in which select students from different schools answer trivia questions to compete against each other. The questions are random and include topics such as past Super Bowl’s or elements on the periodic table. At this year’s School Duel, eight schools competed, two at a time. In both rounds that CCHS students competed in, they went against Western High School. Every time a question is asked, any person on either team can hit their buzzer and answer the question. If they answer correctly, their team receives points, but if not, the question goes to the other team.
“I pretty much focused on the questions the entire time and not worrying about being filmed, so I didn’t really get nervous,” Team Captain Bhadha said.
The CCHS School Duel team practiced a few days before the taping, mostly relying on previous knowledge. The four of them went on the School Duel website and looked at past competition videos to see what kind of questions would be asked and how previous winning teams presented themselves. They also briefed themselves on the current news by reading newspapers and watching the news.
“I was looking over an article on the Golden Globes two days before, and actually two questions that they asked were on that,” Bacon said.
Not only was CCHS excited to participate in the School Duel, but the team was pleasantly surprised to learn that the competition would be filmed and shown on the BECON TV channel. This only increased the participant’s anticipation for the event.
“It was pretty cool being on television,” Bacon said. “It was surprising to see how often they kept re-doing the scenes or rushing over to fix our collar or add some makeup. It’s supposed to look real and live, but sometimes the buzzer or microphone wouldn’t work well and they would have to go back and re-shoot it and you would have to remember your answer.”
Although the CCHS School Duel team did not win, scoring 180 to Western’s 540, they scored higher than some of the other schools competing. The episode aired on Thursday, March 7th on the BECON News Channel.
“One guy on the Western team was very good,” Bacon said. “He had done a lot of preparation, and has won a lot of these trivia quizzes. In order to win, you pretty much had to beat him to the buzzer.”
If you want to see the episode and check out how CCHS did, visit www.bscu.org/schoolduel to see the video.
