Duke


Duke University
Location: Durham, NC
Current President or Coach	Jacob Egol
National championships	N/A
NAQT Page	link

Duke University is a private university located in Durham, North Carolina.

History

Duke's quizbowl club was active in the late 1990s, primarily attending NAQT tournaments and ACC Conference tournaments. Duke's team attended ICT in 1997, 1999, and 2001, and their best finish in that era was 16th place at the 1997 ICT.

After the 2001 ICT, Duke was relatively inactive until 2007, when they once again began attending Mid-Atlantic tournaments semi-regularly, primarily at regular difficulty and below. This iteration of Duke's club never fielded a team at a national tournament.

The modern iteration of Duke quizbowl began in 2014 under the leadership of John Stathis and Ryan Humphrey, and later Gabriel Guedes. Between 2014 and 2019, Duke A was regularly a Top 25 team in polls, and they attended both national championships in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Duke also fielded a DII team at the 2015 ICT and qualified a DII team for 2015 ACF Nationals, but chose not to attend. Duke's top finishes at recent nationals have been a 21st place finish at the 2016 ICT, and a 16th place (3rd place undergraduate) finish at 2017 ACF Nationals.

Recent History

After hosting 2019 ACF Regionals, Duke's club nearly collapsed when Gabriel Guedes stepped down to focus on grad school applications. However, thanks to Annabelle Yang's leadership and a club-record-breaking 13 freshmen joining the club in 2019, Duke became very active once again and achieved many top regional finishes in the 2019-2020 season, including an ACF Regionals undergraduate title and an undefeated record at DII SCT. Duke was unable to field teams at ACF Nationals and ICT that year, however, due to both tournaments having been postponed/canceled due to COVID-19.

Duke drew fire for in early September 2020 as the host of the controversial Mid-Atlantic LIT mirror, which ran exceedingly long due to two cheating accusations that arose in the afternoon during the tournament, on top of inept organization due to inexperience with hosting online. Despite that Duke's club officers were busy sorting through evidence for both accusations, disqualifying stats, and writing emails to the accused on the morning after the tournament, their lack of communication caused members of the broader quizbowl community to suspect on the HSQB Forums and in the Quizbowl Discord that they were ignoring the accusations or trying to cover them up, and that they wouldn't do anything about the accusations unless someone said anything. Furthermore, one of the accusations was against Angikar Ghosal, who played on Duke's house team at the tournament (the other accusation was against Chase Chiang of Princeton), and the community was also suggesting that the accusation against Angikar was not being taken as seriously. Ultimately, Duke's club officers publicly resolved both accusations as quickly and thoroughly as they could (albeit with significant strain on their mental health due to pressure to act fast, as well as with having to juggle preparations for midterm exams and medical school interviews), apologized for not handling them promptly and seeming like they weren't given equal weight, and apologized for Angikar's behavior (which also involved inappropriate comments and talking out of turn during gameplay).^[1] The remainder of the 2020-2021 season then proceeded healthily and productively, and the club decided to suspend Angikar from online gameplay at least for the remainder of the academic year.

Since John Stathis founded the Triangle Quizbowl Alliance in 2020, Duke and UNC have begun to coordinate club activities together more often, leading to a unified Research Triangle quizbowl presence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, both clubs began to meet for weekly joint practices and non-quizbowl game nights, and also pooled members and other club resources to co-host many successful spring 2021 tournaments. With the return of in-person quizbowl, this has transitioned to monthly Triangle joint practices being hosted at Duke, co-hosting in-person tournaments, and organizing shared travel for tournaments outside the Triangle. At Duke-UNC co-hosted tournaments, you can often find mixed house team(s) with players from both schools, and occasionally with NC State as well. Additionally, during Summer 2020, many Duke players participated in weekly readings of housewritten questions, spearheaded by UNC's Grant Peet in the burgeoning Triangle Discord. This sparked enthusiasm for question writing among many Duke and UNC players and encouraged them to apply to write for 2021 WORKSHOP, where they constituted the majority of writers. Not long after 2021 WORKSHOP was complete, Duke and UNC began work on ARCADIA for the upcoming fall season, where many of the 2021 WORKSHOP Triangle writers became first-time editors and helped train another batch of Triangle writers that went on to write for 2022 WORKSHOP.

Tournaments Hosted

ARCADIA at UNC/Duke
2021 ACF Fall at Duke/UNC
BHSAT XXX at Duke/UNC (HS)
2021 WORKSHOP at Duke/UNC
2020 LIT at Duke
BHSAT XXIX at Duke (HS)
2019 ACF Fall at Duke
2019 ACF Regionals at Duke
2018 SCOP Novice at Duke
2017 Maryland Fall at Duke
2016 Penn Bowl at Duke
2016 EFT at Duke

Current Members (as of 2021–2022)

Alumni

External Links

Duke Quiz Bowl

References

↑ https://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24335

[LIT_Mid-Atlantic_Mirror.2C_HSQB_Forums-1] ttps://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24335

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