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, since both tournaments were canceled due to COVID-19.
Duke drew fire in 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 having no prior experience with hosting online. Their slow communication following the tournament 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, as well as that one of the accusations was not being taken as seriously since it involved a player from Duke's house team (the other accusation was against a player from Princeton). Ultimately, both accusations were publicly resolved as quickly and thoroughly as possible, Duke's club officers apologized for not handling the accusations promptly or equally, and the club had a healthy and productive season afterward.[1]
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 they also pooled members and other club resources to co-host many successful spring 2021 tournaments. With the return of in-person quizbowl, this 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 occasionally find house team(s) with players from both schools and occasionally from NC State, too. Additionally, during Summer 2020, many Duke players participated in weekly readings of housewritten questions, spearheaded by UNC's Grant Peet. 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 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
- 2022 ARCADIA at Duke/UNC
- 2022 Penn Bowl at Duke
- 2021 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 Active Members (as of 2022–2023)
- Jacob Egol
- Kevin Jiang
- Payton Schubel
- Ashish Subramanian
- Jerry Lin
- Erik Novak
- Ethan Rehder
- Brandon Weiss
- Justin Zhang
- Zev van Zanten
- Charlie Linder
- Simon Gorbaty
- Evan Knox
- Angikar Ghosal
Alumni
- Annabelle Yang
- Lucian Li
- James Zhou
- Gabriel Guedes
- Ryan Humphrey
- John Stathis
- John Bernabie
- Adil Khan
- Shaunak Amin