by dxdtdemon » Fri May 01, 2015 10:00 pm
Here are some anecdotes from what I think I remember and a few files that I still have that say some things:
Beavercreek won the winner's bracket and the first game of the final at all of the regionals at Northmont from 2000-03. I'm not sure how many other teams have gone undefeated at regionals in a four-year span. The runner up in 2000 and 2001 was St. Xavier, 2002 was Sycamore, and 2003 was Northmont. I think that was Northmont's first-ever appearance at the state tournament.
2000 was rather uneventful, although I remember that St. X kept complaining about my parents' moderating skills and were ticked that one of them was going to be the scorekeeper in the final. I think that one of the people from Northmont read.
Beavercreek went undefeated in the 2000-01 school year, and in one of the rounds at regionals, they won by 63 points.
In 2002, we won each game by more than 30 points. Our closest margin of victory came in round one against a team who regularly played in tournaments that involved calculators, and were really ticked off when they couldn't use them. We won a game by 61 points, and were disappointed that we couldn't match the 63 from the previous year. One of those two games was against London. I'm not sure who the other opponent was. This is probably one of the few times a superintendent showed up to watch an academic tournament.
In 2003, we almost lost to Carroll, which was then a new team coached by our former assistant coach, in round one. My teammates had a conflict in the afternoon, and so I played the final with three random friends, since we didn't have a B team since we knew the program was going to be cut at the end of that school year. We still beat Northmont handily.
The 2000 state tournament is probably one of the few in OAC history for which Fisher Catholic didn't qualify. The eight teams were Beavercreek, St. X., St. Charles, Granville, Oberlin, Hawken, Copley, and a team from the NW region I don't remember. St. Charles beat Beavercreek in the winner's bracket final. At the time, the remaining teams in the loser's bracket were Copley and Hawken. For some reason, there was a random draw about which two of the three teams got to play next instead of having Copley play Hawken with the winner then playing us. Hawken drew the bye. Copley had just won the previous few OAC state tournaments, and still had a pretty good team that year. In the middle of the category round, they were leading by double digits, but then the lead began to be chipped away. At the time, the lightning round was ten one-point questions, and so they thought their lead of four going into the round was relatively safe. After the ninth question, the game was tied. On the last question, the first word was either an article or a preposition, but definitely something you couldn't buzz off of. A Copley player had an accidental buzz right after that first word. Ironically, the question asked what the then-new acronym LOL stood for. A member of our team got it, and the "LOL incident" was one of the funnier anecdotes of OAC history for a few years. A member of Hawken had just edged out a member of our team to be on the national math team not too long before the tournament happened, and so while the member of our team didn't play on the A team that often, he was allowed to get his revenge on Hawken. He did, and beating St. Charles twice after that didn't seem too big of a feat with all the momentum of the previous two rounds.
The 2001 state tournament was also rather uneventful. Most coaches and players around the state that year claimed that our B team (which I was still on due to off-buzzer issues) was the second best team in the state that year, and we only beat the A team once in practice all year. One interesting feat that year was that Beavercreek beat St. X in the winner's bracket final at regionals, the regional final, the winner's bracket final at state, and the state final. I'm not sure if any equivalent feat has happened before or since. I think that there were some oddball teams that made state that year for the first time that may not have been back since.
I think I described what I remember about the 2002 tournament in the other post.
2003 was a disappointing state tournament for a lot of teams. Most of the good teams that year were all-senior, and the fact that this tournament happened at the end of AP week was one of the causes of the fatigue factor for a lot of the favored teams, of which I think there were about six that had some reasonable expectation of winning. I think if you rated those teams one to six, St. Charles would've been number six on everyone's list, but the other five just played like crap. I think two of the three teams that finished between second and fourth were not among the six. One interesting feat we almost pulled off happened in the round we got sent to the loser's bracket. That year, the lightning round was twenty one-point questions. We came into the lightning round down by 19 to Fisher Catholic. We got the first 16 questions in the lightning round. On the 17th question, two of my teammates had a buzzer race. The guy whose buzzer lit up gave the wrong answer, and got slapped by the girl who lost the buzzer race and would've had the correct answer. Fisher Catholic finally locks up the game by giving the right answer, but I'm not sure if that would've been the biggest comeback in state tournament history or if there have been bigger ones.
Jonathan Graham
Beavercreek(1999-2003), Ohio State (2003-07), Wright State(2012-fall14)
occasional question writer