The 2009 NSC was held on May 23rd-24th at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The tournament was won by the Charter School of Wilmington, and State College took second. The top scorer was Daichi Ueda from Walter Johnson.
The 2009 NSC was the last NSC to use the old PACE format and the last NSC at which the All-Star Game consisted entirely of trash questions. There were actually two All-Star Games played at the 2009 NSC - an all-trash game and a much lower-key, all-academic game after the awards ceremony was concluded; the trash game was discontinued after 2009 and an all-academic game on especially hard questions took its place. The 2009 NSC schedule was also the only NSC in which two parallel playoff brackets played and had a mere crossover game across brackets to determine the final champion of the tournament (and placings such as 3rd vs. 4th, 5th vs. 6th, etc.); for 2010, this schedule had four additional superplayoff crossover games added to it so the top eight teams at the tournament all had to play one another before any team could be declared the champion.