Rob Kremer is a math teacher and quiz bowl coach from Danville, Kentucky. Danville High School holds the distinction of winning the most NAQT championship titles without having actually won a championship event.

How did you get involved with quiz bowl?

I grew up in Kentucky, so I’ve been involved with academic competitions playing Quick Recall since I was in fifth grade at Alexandria Elementary (I didn’t make the team in fourth grade). I played all the way through Reiley Middle School and Campbell County High School. My high school team played in a couple of quiz bowl tournaments. I think we went to Vanderbilt for their ABC tournament once or twice and we played in a national tournament somewhere.

My first real exposure to quiz bowl was in college. I joined the University of Kentucky quiz bowl team my first semester and went to a few tournaments with them. I didn’t stick with it though. I was primarily a math player in high school (it is a much bigger part of the Quick Recall format in Kentucky), so I was going to have to learn an entirely new subject area to be competitive. Between classes and everything else I had going on, it wasn’t a commitment I felt like I could make.

When I went into teaching and started looking for a job, my friend Chris Girard from Simon Kenton High School put me in touch with the previous coach at Danville, who was about to leave. Everything ended up working out there and I inherited a team that had won the previous two NAQT Small School Championships. So I got really deep into quiz bowl from there.

How did you first hear about NAQT?

I first heard about NAQT in college during my brief time on the Kentucky quiz bowl team. The people running the team at the time were more focused on ACF, so NAQT was just mentioned in passing. I really heard about it a lot more from my students when I started coaching at Danville. I was still new to quiz bowl at the time, so the kids knew a lot more than I did. It didn’t take me long to get on board with the advantages of quiz bowl and NAQT versus other formats I was more familiar with. My students and I have always really appreciate that the focus of the format is on which team knows the most and not which team is able to lawyer the rules better.

What is the qualification process like for you and Danville in Kentucky?

Over the last couple of years we’ve had a big uptick in the number of quiz bowl and NAQT tournaments that are run in Kentucky, so we usually have a lot of different chances to qualify. We actually haven’t qualified for the HSNCT this year yet. We did qualify for the SSNCT in December at the Class Act Tournament in Louisville. Our captain (Eli Gooch) ended up playing solo at that tournament because our football team was playing in the state championship game the same day. So several of our players went to that, we had one student who was sick, and another that was catching up on a big project that was due the next week.

What’s your local field like?

Our toughest opponent over the last year or two has been Glasgow. They’re another small school from Kentucky and we’ve played them at virtually every tournament we’ve both attended. Every match we played against them last year was a back-and-forth battle, and we ended up about 50-50 with them for the entire year. That included our win over them in the prelims at the SSNCT and their win over us in the finals of the SSNCT!

What are your hopes for your team this school year?

We graduated a lot of great kids last year, so we’re rebuilding a little bit. We’re already qualified for the SSNCT and I would like for us to qualify for the HSNCT as well. The kids and I are hoping to do well in our upcoming district, regional, and state competitions. We’re also really hoping to make another deep run at SSNCT to follow up on our success from last year.

What do you remember about your first HSNCT in 2007?

Our school has a really big speech and debate team, so the weekend of HSNCT was the same weekend as one of their national championships. One of our starters was also qualified for speech nationals and he chose to go there instead. All of our younger players were also unable to attend, so we were headed into HSNCT with only three players.

Once we arrived, we decided to play a couple of scrimmage rounds. In one of them, we were paired up against a team that I wasn’t familiar with but that the kids had remembered playing in the small school division the year before. They proceeded to crush us. They were powering every question, 30ing every bonus, and we couldn’t get anything against them. The team was super rattled afterward because this was a team they expected to at least be competitive with. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the scrimmage rounds used old questions and that the other team had just happened to hear that packet during a recent practice. We ended up playing their B team in the Small School finals that year and winning the championship.

Back in 2007, what did you think HSNCT would be like now?

I remember being amazed at how smoothly everything ran at the first HSNCT I attended. There were 160 teams, and I was astonished at the level of organization. I don’t know that I ever imagined how much the tournament would keep growing and keep giving more teams and students an opportunity to participate. I thought that it was great that NAQT awarded a separate championship to small schools, but certainly didn’t expect that group to grow so large that it would be broken off into its own tournament like the SSNCT.

How do you see the HSNCT evolving next?

Given how much everything has changed and expanded over the last twelve years that I’ve been really involved, I’m not sure any of us knows what to expect in the next decade. I have to imagine the level of competition will keep rising, the number of great teams will keep increasing, and that we’re in for a lot of exciting years of tournaments. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine!

Do you have a favorite buzz or protest from one of your teams over the years?

I can’t think of any specifically. Most of the buzzes I vaguely remember are negs. And most of those negs are funny because they were so incredibly off-base or so wildly inappropriate that they’re best left in the past!

What about favorite memories of quiz bowl?

My favorite memories of quiz bowl all involve the friends, coaches, and students that I’ve been lucky enough to work with through the years:

I remember losing at the regional tournament in fifth grade because the reader wouldn’t take my answer of “Incans” when the answer sheet said “Incas.”

I remember qualifying for state in seventh grade because the tournament was single-elimination and the two best teams were on the other side of the bracket.

I remember my coach Donn Manker staying after school way too many days my junior year to help me prep for the math test at our state tournament.

I remember the first tournament I ever coached at (at Ezell-Harding in Tennesee) ending with us losing to Dorman in a super tight matchup. One of the last questions was a math tossup that we were learning about the next week in calculus; the four starters—Rachel, John, Hunter, and Hannah—were all in the class. The final score was close enough where that question and its bonuses would have been enough to turn it into a win.

I remember winning the first KAAC Alumni Shootout with Chris, Christopher, and Rick as “Team Weather Delay.”

I remember having to tell Cole and Taylor that we absolutely could not stop for fireworks at the Tennessee border before we came back into Kentucky on the way back from a tournament.

I remember Ethan, Jon, Stacy, Rachel, and Zaid helping me work through my dad’s death as we prepared for the 2011 HSNCT, where we finished third in the small school division).

I remember having to pause a tournament match because Joseph had a nosebleed. And then having to stop the return trip home for the same reason.

I remember the last couple of years coaching Brittany, Joseph, Eric, Emma, Danny, Sarah, Charlie, Race, Saif, Elizabeth, Anas, Eli, Emma, and Amal. Prior to that time I had a couple of tough years teaching and coaching. I even debated quitting for a while. But that group helped me remember why I do this and has brought me so much excitement and joy.

What is the best advice you’ve given a player or team?

That’s a great question that I’m not sure of the answer to. My current team says that most of my advice is usually “give ’em hell.”

What advice do you have for the community at large?

Quiz bowl is a great, fun, competitive game. For players, find the things that you love learning about and the people you enjoy working with and focus on those. Focus on improving, on helping your teammates improve, and on enjoying your time together and everything else will fall into place.

For coaches, everything you do with quiz bowl should be about your kids. Find out what they want, find out what their goals are, find out what they enjoy and do everything you can to help them do those things. Everything else is secondary.