Tuesday, June 1, 2021

CVU's Scholars Bowl Shines in National Championship Tournament

Here's a guest post from John Bennett, CVU's Scholars Bowl coach and social studies teacher. He wrote this to CVU faculty and staff to provide an update on the progress the team made in a national tournament this past weekend. Congratulations on a wonderful performance on the national level!

Read more about the team in a recent Shelburne News article.


A long, busy, and challenging CVU Scholars Bowl season culminated in an outstanding showing at the High School National Championship Tournament, played online on May 29-30. CVU's team registered a series of upsets over traditional national powers to earn a spot in the tournament playoffs. On Saturday our 5-3 opening round record put us in the top 70 teams of the field of 226 from the U.S.A and several other countries. C.V.U became the first Vermont team since 2016 to reach the playoff level of the national championship, and we are the only Vermont school to do it twice (we also reached that level in our last appearance in 2011). 

We were eliminated in the playoffs on Sunday against a strong school from California.

Prior to that, our wins included matches against teams from Grady HS (Atlanta), which had been ranked in the top 50 teams in the country, Thomas Jefferson Institute of Science and Technology (VA)- one of the top magnet schools in the country, and Plano West (Texas) which won the national championship in 2018. Our players showed great discipline and game play throughout the tournament. On the individual level, Evan McMahan ranked in the top 10% of all scorers in the Saturday matches.

This was a long, unusual, and occasionally grueling season for our team. We played in 24 events with 125 matches over the past 8 months. (A normal in person season is 8 or 9 events with 40-45 matches) We had to adapt to a completely new method of playing, one which ran counter to our usual style. Because of hybrid, COVID, and cohorts, there was no time in which our varsity team was physically present in the same room all year. We had to do everything online, sometimes at odd hours and sometimes (as was the case Saturday) to be on Zoom for as long as 9 hours in a day. In spite of all this, the team persevered to a splendid finale.

Our season proves once again that CVU's students can thrive and succeed against the best in academic competition. And remember- you are the people who taught them the social studies, science, literature and mathematical knowledge skills that allow them to be great players.

Kudos to the team and to all of CVU! We will hopefully be back with another strong team for in-person play next year.

Our team for Nationals this weekend included -
Isaac Kremenstov, Patton Wager, Ben Wilson (12th grade)
Evan McMahan (11th grade)
Ava Rohrbaugh (10th grade)

Thanks to assistant coach Kiran McCormick for his help with the team this year. and thanks to all for your continued support.


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