Matt Bollinger

Matthew Bollinger
Noted subjects	General, Literature, Mythology, Music, Arts
Current college	University of Virginia (2010-2014)
Past colleges	N/A
High school	Saint Anselms Abbey School (2006-2010)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Matt Bollinger played for the University of Virginia, during which time he became the best active player in college quizbowl. He was a member of the St. Anselm's class of 2010.

After his high school teammate Aidan Mehigan became good at quizbowl, Matt went on an enormous study binge over the summer of 2009, which paid off when he was the second highest scorer at the 2010 NSC (where his team placed fourth). With Chris Ray, Eric Mukherjee, and Dominic Machado, he played on a team that won the Saturday event of VCU Open 2010.

Along with Will Butler, he led UVA to victory at the 2011 Penn Bowl, finishing as the second leading scorer at the tournament. Without Will, Matt was the 2nd individual scorer in Division I (as a freshman) at the 2011 ICT, and was the alleged top scorer at 2011 ACF Nationals. In the 2011-12 season, Matt led UVA to a 1st place finish at the 2012 ICT and a 2nd place finish at 2012 ACF Nationals, and was the high scorer on the winning team at Chicago Open. When Virginia failed to take home either major title in 2012-13, he, Evan Adams, and Tommy Casalaspi embarked on a successful program to avenge themselves on the quizbowl community. In the 2013-14 season, Bollinger led UVA in sweeping the national tournaments, scoring more powers individually than any other attending team while securing a second Division I ICT title over Yale, and putting up 89 PPG at 2014 ACF Nationals, at which his team cleared the field undefeated).

Matt is a writer for, and the Chief Editor of, HSAPQ. His other editing experience includes assisting Kurtis Droge in editing ANGST, being brought on to edit literature and mythology for the 2011 NSC, editing several subjects for MOO, head-editing 2012 ACF Fall, and head-editing 2013 Chicago Open.

Matt is the subject of a number of notable quizbowl running jokes, most of which were popularized by Mike Cheyne. These include:

• "That's a word, Mike Sorice!" -- Occurred during the NSC All-Star Round, when Bollinger responded to a bonus part on "hapticity" by inexplicably telling moderator Mike Sorice that it was a word.

• "Zeppelins" -- Occurred after Matt insisted that a NASAT tossup on zeppelins written by Mike Cheyne was extremely difficult to answer. "Zeppelins" are now sometimes used facetiously as benchmark of absurd difficulty.

• "Rizzoli and Isles" -- A reference to the unpopular TNT program. Carsten Gehring and Mike Cheyne have begun referring to Bollinger (Rizzoli) and Evan Adams (Isles) by this name. Evan Adams' recent decision to attend UVA for law school ensures this joke will likely still have some mileage. (n.b. - the debut of the similarly-titled TNT show Franklin & Bash naturally led to a brief search for quizbowl figures to arbitrarily assign the roles to. Results were inconclusive.)

• "True knowledge of the Pig War" -- Resulted from a long and tortuous argument about a NASAT tossup on "the United States-Canada border", in which Matt hypothesized that his teammate Jacob Wasserman was somehow going unrewarded for his long years of studying a minor nineteenth-century border conflict, or something. Now used to refer to any hyperbolic complaint about a question's failure to reward "real knowledge".

• Matt is also noted for his tendency to blush, a fact he was unaware of until an IRC conversation in which he claimed not to know what his own face looks like. He also once accidentally gave $11, rather than the $2 he presumably intended to give, to a panhandler at the Richmond Five Guys while staffing CULT; this resulted in an abortive, though highly amusing, attempt to chase the panhandler down the street to retrieve his ten-dollar bill.