Arcadia
Arcadia High School is a high school located in Arcadia, California. 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 has been led by coach Albert Sylvia for the entirety of its existence. Details of the early days of Arcadia's quiz bowl team are rather sketchy, it is known however, that the team was organized around in the late 1990s and early 2000s mainly participating in NAQT tournaments at Caltech 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 hesistantly, 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 quizbowl.
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 intitative 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.
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