Ankush Bajaj
| Ankush Bajaj | |
| Noted subjects | Computational math, Literature, Biology, Chemistry, Contemporary Cinema |
| High school | Hinsdale Central |
| Stats | HDWhite • NAQT |
Ankush Bajaj is a current high school player in his sophomore year at Hinsdale Central High School in Hinsdale, Illinois, and is the 3rd scorer on the A team. While he claims his deep spiritual connection to Hinduism is what enables him to first-line Hinduism questions, Ankush is actually 3/8 Sikh and relies solely on his Children's Edition Illustrated Mahabharata.
2012-2013
Ankush began the year as a student at IMSA, opting to skip freshman year as a 'shmen at the prestigious school. While he was there, he joined the quiz bowl team and went to several practices, though apparently most people were unaware of that fact. After less than a month, Ankush and his mom made the decision to withdraw from the Academy and attend the area school, Hinsdale Central, for undisclosed reasons. Since that time, two possible hypotheses for his transfer have arisen. One states that Hinsdale Central's math department heavily recruited Ankush for its math team, while another proposes that he simply chose Hinsdale because of its better quiz bowl team. Whatever the reason, Ankush immediately joined Scholastic Bowl and made a very strong impression on everyone; freshmen, seniors, and coaches alike; through engaging in capital city contests with B.J. Ryan and lecturing the freshmen on the biology topics that they had yet to cover in class. When the season finally began, Ankush opened with a bang, getting around 5 tossups over the first two matches against Leyden's and Downers Grove South's Junior Varsity teams. He immediately created buzz among the sophomore JV captains, who considered him and Sunny Chen (who had 8 tossups that day) as the definite superstars. Over the season, Ankush continued to experience success, enough so that he and Sunny Chen were moved up to Varsity for one meet, and they contributed in the wins against York and Willowbrook. As Hinsdale was rather inactive outside of the West Suburban Conference, the team only went to one tournament the whole year, Loyburn. At the tournament, the B team was composed of 7 freshmen, as the sophomore captains had mostly quit by then. During one very close match against Maine South B, Mr. McCloud told the team during a timeout to "go for the win" as opposed to balancing playing time, so it was arbitrarily decided that the winning formation, the "Big Three," would be Sunny, Ankush, and James Zhou. Going into the last question tied at 190, Sunny managed to get the last tossup, on painting, and the team ended up 30ing the bonus, probably its only 30 the entire tourney, and it ended up being Hinsdale Central B's only win in the morning. The team finished the day 4-7, though one loss against Stevenson B must have been lost. Ankush ended with 12.14 ppg that day, and was very sad that computational math was not as popular outside of IHSA.
2013-2014
Ankush is undoubtedly one of the more committed members of the Hinsdale Central quiz bowl team, and after James did surprisingly well at Earlybird, his cockiness started to annoy and discourage Ankush. As a response to Sunny's ridicule and ranting, Ankush was reluctantly pushed into the spot of literature specialist, though he still frequently beats Sunny in biology and chemistry. In addition, he powers Mahabharatha 4 out of 5 times, and averages 27 ppb on Hinduism bonuses. Meanwhile, he has made significant progress in lit, as he actually read The Catcher in the Rye, has browsed the summaries for maybe 17 other books, and owns a book of short stories that he hopefully reads. Ankush's development as a literature player really strengthened the team, and marked the beginning of Hinsdale Central's emergence out of mediocrity.