Kiwanis Bowl

For the still-extant Varsity Quiz Kiwanis Bowl played in Clark County, Nevada, see Varsity Quiz.

Kiwanis Bowl was a format played in Orange County and other parts of California, Nevada, and Hawaii (and maybe other places as well). As the name suggests, it was sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. Evidence that it existed as early as 1980 comes from former State Assembly candidate Bill Orton, who claimed to have been the captain for Edison's Kiwanis Bowl team in that year. According the website of the Nevada Varsity Quiz program, California Kiwanis Bowl had been in existence since 1969, as it was this year that members of the Orange County Kiwanis Club helped the Clark County club start a quiz program.

During at least part of its existence, questions were written by John Gose. After John Gose stopped writing questions or something (someone blogged that they had eaten with him in March 2002, so he couldn't have just disappeared), a Kiwanis Bowl-like event was held at UCI in 2000 and 2001 known as Anteater Bowl. As recently as 2004 UCI attempted to revive this tournament, though barring Anteater Bowl III actually happening it has not been seen outside of Santa Ana since 2001. It still exists, in some form, as an intra-district competition in the Santa Ana Unified School District high schools; a Myspace forum post indicates that a Kiwanis Bowl tournament was held at Los Amigos High School in November 2006.

Dana Hills apparently made the finals of Kiwanis Bowl for ten straight years at one points. Capistrano Valley won sometime in the mid-1990s, possibly 1996, though Gustavo Arellano claims that Anaheim High won in both 1996 and 1997 (it's possible that this writer has misremembered the date of an old newspaper article, or that Anaheim and Capistrano Valley played in different sections). The PACE NSC program from 1998 indicates that Los Alamitos won the Los Angeles Regional and Tri-State Championship.

Format

Most of this is based on personal recollection and an announcement of Anteater Bowl III, so it may not be entirely accurate.

Teams of five players competed in each of three rounds per match. Substitutions were allowed immediately after Round 1 and Round 2, but not in the middle of rounds or before tiebreaker questions.

In Round 1, "Best of Ten", teams answered ten short tossups worth either five or ten points each. In Round 2, "Give and Take", five bonus categories worth 100 points each were announced. The team with more points at the end of Round 1 chose one category to answer questions on and one category that the other team would have to answer questions on. The other team would then pick from the remaining three categories. In Round 3, "Best of Twenty", teams answered twenty more pyramidal tossups worth either fifteen or twenty points each.