After delving into history books, the Diamond Bar High School History Club took eighth place at the National History Bowl regional qualifier. The National History Bowl is a history-based competition open to teams from several high schools. The teams that place in the top 50% in the regional competitions move on to a national competition held later in the year.
Hosting several trivia-based tryouts with the use of a Jeopardy-style buzzer system to fill out their roster, the leaders of the club judged potential participants on speed, accuracy, and confidence. Once they had their roster set, the club’s real work started–preparing for actual competition.
“The History Bowl tests us on pretty much every category of history there is, from arts & entertainment to global politics to ancient empires, so it’s a little hard to know everything,” History Club co-president Nina Wu said. “Our team decided to split up each category and allow each member to become experts on something niche.”
They only had a few weeks to improve quickly before the competition. One of the things the team needed to improve on was strategy. Since the team lacked knowledge of the content of the actual competition, they had to do some extensive studying.
“In the beginning, none of us knew how it worked, what style the questions were, or what kind of history we should study,” Wu said. “But as we began training, we realized that there were patterns to the categories of questions they asked and through this, we were able to frame our knowledge to better suit the competition.”
However, after some training, they eventually managed to maximize the efficiency of their conceptual application by going through dozens of past history bowl questions to test their knowledge.
“Overall, we managed to successfully answer quite a few questions about the topics we were individually skilled at,” Wu said. “I found that we ended up just going for it even if we weren’t 100% sure that our answers were right oftentimes the answer [was] simpler than you’d think.”
After a successful first competition, the club is preparing for future competitions. With their next competition set for March 9th, the team is holding another tryout on Feb. 1 to fill out rosters even further. The History Club still has a bit of time to further improve. Now possessing a better understanding of the competition, they aim for another high placement.
“Until then, we’re going to have weekly training sessions,” Wu said. “But since we now know how these competitions really work, we’re going to study certain materials more. With the help of history teachers and the additional members on the team, we’re hoping to place even higher next time.”
