Arcadia

Arcadia High School
Location: Arcadia, CA
Coaches	Christopher Schultz (2009-present)
National Appearances	HSNCT: 2002, 2006-2013
Program Status	Unknown
School Size	Unknown
NAQT Page	link

Arcadia High School is a public high school located in Arcadia, California about 13 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Arcadia took first place at the UCLA Winter Invitational, defeating Rancho Bernardo in a close final match.

Due to the Basileus incident, Arcadia is one of the few teams to have both won and lost games by 500 or more points at the same tournament.

Arcadia Quizbowl is based in Arcadia High School and was originally led by coach Patrick Tierney. In the 2000s, Albert Sylvia took over coaching the team until 2009. Due to a conflict of interest between the track, Academic Decathlon, and Quiz Bowl teams, a shift of advisors was necessary in that year, so since 2009, Christopher Schultz has been coaching the team.

The Arcadia quiz bowl team started in the 1997-1998 school year and competed at the NAQT tournament at Caltech. In the next few years, Arcadia also competed at tournaments at UCI and USC. For some inexplicable reason, Arcadia refrained from attending tournaments at UCLA until during the 2005/2006, which coincided with the time the team began to do recently within the Southern California circuit. Prior to this, it was thought that the team was pretty mediocre as evidenced by the stats from iterations of Trojan Wars and the Caltech High School Tournament that took place in the early 2000s; nonetheless, the team managed to qualify for HSNCT in 2002. Because of the paucity of results, Albert Sylvia being vague about the abilities of those Arcadia teams, as well as the belief that those editions of the team were victims of rampant attendance problems and general apathy lead this period to be affectionately dubbed "the Dark Ages."

Starting in 2005, the team lead by Ben Chu and Roni Harwin showed marked improvement and managed to stumble into a win at the Caltech High School Tournament that fall. This qualified the team for HSNCT and convinced some of its members to begin, albeit hesitantly, to study for quiz bowl. Despite facing strong competition in the form of an explosive Santa Monica team and other regional powers such as Torrey Pines, San Dieguito, Edison, and Dana Hills, the team fared relatively well, securing top bracket finishes at most of the tournaments attended. Playing in more tournaments than ever before, the team got to witness first hand the Basileus incident as well as a strange episode involving a Santa Monica player lighting up and smoking mid match. Their first foray into a national quiz bowl competition, the 2006 HSNCT was regarded as a failure as the team was more interested in playing pranks and doing homework than actually playing quiz bowl.

Subsequent years have seen Arcadia become one of the stronger teams within the Southern California circuit, albeit these years lacked the drama of the 2005/2006 since the team began to take quiz bowl more seriously, even delving into formats outside of NAQT, namely PACE and ACF, an initiative first proposed by co-captain Brian Leung in 2006/2007 but not realized until 2008/2009 due to a general lack of interest in these formats in Southern California until recently.

In 2009-2011, the Arcadia team has consistently placed in the top bracket of local competitions, even qualifying two teams for HSNCT at the UCLA State Championships competition in April 2011, something that hasn't happened since 2007.

At TWAIN XII in 2011, Arcadia sent a record-breaking A-F teams, double-qualifying in that same tournament. Later that year, they managed to qualify a C-Team for HSNCT at the NAQT SoCal State Champs.

In the 2012-2013 season, Arcadia set another Southern California record, sending Arcadias A-G to the NAQT State Championship at Irvine High School. They again qualified and fielded three teams to HSNCT, with Arcadia A losing only one game out of the 65 they played in the SoCal high school circuit that year.

Known National Tournament Appearances

• 2002 HSNCT: 4-6, 41st place
• 2006 HSNCT: 5-5, 63rd place
• 2007 HSNCT: 6-4, 1-2 playoffs, T-33rd place (A), 6-4, 0-2 playoffs, T-49th place (B)
• 2008 HSNCT: 7-3, 1-2 playoffs, T-17th place
• 2009 HSNCT: 6-4, 1-1 playoffs, T-27th place
• 2010 HSNCT: 6-4, 0-1 playoffs, T-43rd place
• 2011 HSNCT: 6-4, 1-2 playoffs, T-33rd place (A), 5-5, T-112th place (B)
• 2012 HSNCT: 6-4, 1-1 playoffs, T-49th place (A), 6-4, 1-1 playoffs, T-49th place (B), 5-5, 101st place (C)
• 2013 HSNCT: 7-3, 1-2 playoffs, T-33rd place (A), 6-4, playoffs, 1-1 playoffs, T-50th place (B), 5-5, 108th place (C)

Current Members

• Jason Cheng
• Corry Wang
• Dustin Lieu
• Boyang Jiao

and 28 other members

Former Members

• Andrew Wang
• Carl Tjo
• Jeff Xiao
• Derek Chou
• Alex Hu
• Alex Wang
• Eddie Xue
• Stanley Yuan
• George Dewey
• Tracy Lee
• Sunil Pedapudi
• Jarita Ta
• Neiman Tan
• Jacqueline Yue

and many others.