Eliza Grames is a Ph.D. candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. She is well-regarded as a writer of pop culture-themed packets.

How did you get involved with quiz bowl?

I had never heard of quiz bowl in high school. I went to high school in northern Minnesota, which, despite its proximity to Robert Hentzel, is a quiz bowl desert. Instead, I played Knowledge Bowl all through high school. In the first week of my freshman year at the University of Minnesota, a friend from my dorm, Lizzie Houns, invited me to practice because she had played quiz bowl in high school. I was really, really terrible at it. At my first college tournament, I still couldn’t tell the difference between tossups and bonuses and I distinctly remember not being able to recall who the second president of the United States was. Despite this, older members of the team like Bernadette Spencer and Rob Carson were really friendly and encouraging so I stuck with it. Eventually I got the hang of how quiz bowl works, and for the next two years I served as the team president and then as treasurer. After graduating, I kept staffing high school tournaments in the Minneapolis area.

What has life been like since your collegiate playing days?

I actually started playing again! I’m in the second year of a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, so I got involved with the team here. It’s a small team, but we’ve gone to a few tournaments and have even hosted some collegiate tournaments.

How did you first hear about NAQT?

The University of Minnesota hosts a large high school tournament every fall called GINVIT, so the first time I heard of NAQT was preparing to direct that tournament my sophomore year of college in 2010. Because the questions were shipped by Emily Pike from within Minnesota, at the time I didn’t realize that NAQT was a national organization; to me, NAQT was just where we got questions from. It took until I was invited to staff the HSNCT a year and a half later to realize that NAQT worked with teams across the country to provide questions and put together national tournaments.

How and when did you start working for NAQT?

I started working for NAQT in the summer of 2015. Robert Hentzel emailed me because they were looking to hire someone to help with day-to-day tasks like emailing teams, helping new tournament directors get resources they need, entering data, etc. I was working for a non-profit at the time, but the chance to do quiz bowl organizational work was too good to pass up. It was an excellent job and I loved contacting tournament directors and helping new teams get started. The most satisfying part was probably getting new college teams started by former high school players who went to college somewhere without a team. Colleges host a lot of high school tournaments, so new college teams are good for local high school quiz bowl.

What are your favorite memories of quiz bowl?

To me, the best part of quiz bowl is the people. Sure, early buzzes and close games and interesting questions are great, but all my favorite memories of quiz bowl are from just hanging out with friends I made in quiz bowl, like having bad movie nights with the University of Minnesota team so we could watch Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter for the fifth time, driving to Chicago for tournaments and playing old trash [pop culture] questions in the van on the way there, or amassing a huge group of staffers to walk to the Fashion Outlets [Mall] in Rosemont for lunch during the HSNCT. It’s hard to actually pinpoint a favorite memory since the best parts are all the little things.

Of NAQT?

Coming from Minnesota, I have a bit of a weird relationship to NAQT. Minnesota staff are lucky because we get to help playtest questions sometimes to make sure that the difficulty is appropriate and there are no big errors. My favorite NAQT memory is playtesting the SSNCT because I just remember sitting around a living room laughing about the fact that “L-dopa” would make a great name for a drug lord, one of the Hentzel children fell asleep on the sofa so staffers sat on the floor to hear questions, and occasionally Robert Hentzel would indicate to us that we shouldn’t buzz in so that the oldest Hentzel kid, Nathaniel [then aged about 6], could answer the question. It seems like a silly favorite NAQT memory, but I think I liked it because it represents NAQT pretty well. Everyone at NAQT is there because they love quiz bowl and want to do their best to spread high-quality quiz bowl everywhere, even if it means sitting on the floor to check that questions have correct grammar.

Of the HSNCT?

My favorite HSNCT memory is from the first time I volunteered at it. I was assigned a random scorekeeper, a college player from the University of Michigan that I’d never met before, but apparently he knew who I was. You see, the University of Michigan apparently had a fantasy quiz bowl league at the time. Just like fantasy football, you pick players for your team and then depending on how they do at the ICT [Intercollegiate Championship Tournament], you get points. There’s no reason anyone in their right mind would choose me for a fantasy quiz bowl team. At my peak I was just okay, and I spent most of my time organizing things instead of playing, and definitely didn’t spend any time studying. But Bryan Berend knew that Minnesota had qualified two Division II teams for the ICT in 2012, and he had an inkling that I would probably want to play on the B team since I wasn’t very competitive and liked to play with my friend Melanie Keating. He was right, which means that my personal PPG [points per game statistic] was much higher than it would have been if I played on the A team. His fantasy quiz bowl team did well, and apparently this made me ”quiz bowl famous” for a little bit.

Do you have a favorite buzz?

I’m not sure if I would call it my favorite, but my most memorable buzz was a game-deciding tossup during a tiebreaker game at the ICT to decide which teams would make second bracket. We were in a three-way tie with Notre Dame and Northwestern, and based on our PPG we played the first half of the packet against Notre Dame. We had to win the game to make the second bracket. Now, the reason I remember this buzz but it isn’t my favorite is because it is the one and only time I’ve intentionally been deceptive when answering a question because I didn’t really know the answer. The tossup was on “The Hollow Men” by T. S. Eliot. As soon as I buzzed, I realized that I wasn’t sure if it was the plural “men” or the singular “man” so I panicked and ambiguously said ”The Hollow Min.“ We won the [half] game 155-140.

What about a favorite protest?

My favorite protest wasn’t one that I lodged or even know all the details of; I just overheard the protest resolution in the control room. The protest phone rang, Robert Hentzel answered, and in the most exasperated way said “What? No! Mos Eisley is clearly not an establishment, it’s a city” and then hung up. It was probably the quickest a protest at a national tournament has ever been decided.

What memories do you have of your first HSNCT?

The first time I attended the HSNCT was as a staffer in 2012. I’d never been to an HSNCT, so I had no idea what to expect, but all the players and coaches were so kind and I had a blast. After the tournament, I was leaving the hotel in Atlanta to head to the airport, and an entire team from Pennsylvania stopped me to tell me how much fun they’d had at HSNCT and thanked me for reading to them. I’d never gotten feedback from a team before, so I was shocked when their coach asked me if I was reading the finals because the players thought I was “the best” at reading. I laughed and told them I wasn’t, because there are many readers who are much, much better than me (rumor has it that some people can actually pronounce chemical names), but that interaction helped solidify in my mind how important the HSNCT is to players and how much impact staff can have on teams’ experiences.

Most of your staffing assignments nowadays are in a control room. What are your most and least favorite aspects of running a control room at HSNCT?

The best thing about running a control room is knowing that I can help make the tournament run as smoothly as possible. At a tournament as big as the HSNCT, there’s always something bound to go wrong, whether this means someone got locked out of a room, a team got lost on the way to their next game, a buzzer malfunctioned, or a multitude of other things. You never really know what’s going to happen, so you always have to be prepared and ready to deal with any situation to keep the tournament moving. It’s nice to know when you solve a problem that it helped the tournament keep going.

The second best part of being in a control room is quadruple-checking the math on scoresheets with the other volunteers. At face value, it seems like a boring job; we get a stack of scoresheets every round and then we’re the third or fourth set of eyes on a scoresheet to check that the scorekeeper’s math adds up on every individual player’s stats, the bonuses, and the overall team score. Errors are extremely rare, and when we do find one, it never decides a game, so it’s pretty monotonous work. What makes it fun is that the volunteers come from different parts of the country, so we start rooting for random teams and it reminds us that the –5, 10, and 15 point values we see on the page really mean something.

The first time I ran a control room, the other control room volunteers working with me were a C-team player from a team whose A and B teams qualified and a parent of a middle schooler playing on the only team for his school. Every time we got a scoresheet related to their teams or a Minnesota team like Wayzata, we got excited and started talking about the game results, whether it was a win or a loss, and speculated on how well the team would do in their next game.

The worst part of running a control room is not being able to interact with the players and coaches. I don’t get to talk to different teams all day, read any exciting games, or even see the questions. At lunch during HSNCT, my friends who are moderating games all talk about what questions they liked best, the sick buzz some player had on a tossup, or that one wacky bonus part. I can’t relate, because in a control room you’re just making sure things run smoothly, putting out fires, and making sure 10 + 20 still equals 30. I love making sure the tournament runs smoothly, but that’s definitely the worst part of being in a control room. There’s no downtime before a round starts where you get to just joke around with players, find out how their rounds have been, or commiserate over their negs from the previous round.

Do you have any advice to local tournament directors about running a control room?

My best advice for running a control room is to be prepared for absolutely anything. I don’t mean just having contingency schedules in case teams drop at midnight the day before a tournament, printing extra scoresheets, making sure you have a plan for any playoff situations that could happen, etc. (though you should do all of that!). I mean making sure you have cough drops for when your readers lose their voice halfway through the day, pencils for your scorekeepers who didn’t bring one or who keep making errors in ink, bandages for when dress shoes give someone a blister, protein bars in case a diabetic attendee has a problem, and any other thing you could possibly need.

How do you see HSNCT evolving in the next 5, 10, or 20 years?

In general, I’m hoping quiz bowl starts being played more internationally. There have been non-U.S. teams at HSNCT before, and it would be great to see quiz bowl spread more. I think it would be really good for the game and would increase the diversity of what types of questions get asked so that the quiz bowl canon gets a bit less America-centric.

What would you tell your past self about quiz bowl?

I wish I had known about the wider quiz bowl community sooner. There are so many ways to get involved by writing questions, staffing tournaments (even in non-moderating roles!), helping start new teams, or just participating in discussions on the [Quizbowl Resource Center] forums.