Five Wrangell teens know their books, chapters and verses better than any other team in Alaska, and for the second year in a row Wrangell won the state title at The Salvation Army’s Bible Bowl competition.
The team was so dominant and won by such a wide margin at the competition March 16 in Juneau that “Anchorage actually forfeited,” said Capt. Chase Green of The Salvation Army’s Wrangell church.
Haines took second and Juneau won third in the four-team contest, he said.
With the state title in hand, Wrangell will move on to the nationals, scheduled for June 15 in Pasadena, California, Green said.
Last year’s first-place Wrangell team placed third at the competition in Los Angeles.
The state competition pitted four teams against each other in one matchup, with contestants answering questions and scoring points with correct answers. With so many more contestants, the 13-team nationals will be a round-robin tournament, Green said.
“Kudos to our kids in Wrangell, they really wanted it bad,” he said of the state title. They studied and practiced two hours a day every day for the three weeks leading up to the competition.
All the work paid off. “It was brutal,” he said of the team’s victory margin.
The team consists of Clara and Everett Edens, Kaiya and Amura Brevick, and Arabella Nore, coached by Damon Roher, who coached last year’s winning team, too. Roher himself was a Bible Bowl competitor more than a decade ago, Green said.
The five team members range in age from 13 to 16 years old.
The nationwide Bible Bowl has been around for decades, with Wrangell making several appearances at regional competitions in the 2000s, Green said.
Some of the hardest questions at this year’s state meet asked the teens to cite book, chapter and verse of Bible passages, he said. Some of the questions were: “Finish this quote.”
Even with so much study and practice, “they can very easily blur together after awhile,” he said.
The Salvation Army’s website describes the event: “Bible Bowl is an academic game where teens match knowledge about a designated portion of scripture in a competitive arena. It will take many hours of study and memorization, as well as a good attitude and the ability to work as a team.”
The Wrangell teens will get a break in study sessions, but just a short one. “We took this week off, for sure,” Green said March 21.
Reader Comments(0)