Buzz! The scholarly voice of a young competitor, Dashiell Radkey-Drilling, ’29, pipes up, “Benzene!”

“Correct!” exclaims the moderator. Applause and celebration breaks out; the WHHS junior high academic quiz team has gone undefeated in the Miami Valley Middle School Invitational tournament. 

WHHS has two Academic Quiz Teams (AQT), a high school and junior high team. The junior high team recently got a new coach, Elliot Glum, who is currently a long-term substitute teacher. 

“In September, Brian Meeron, the coach of varsity, approached me and said they had the idea of adding a junior high coach this year, somebody to work more directly with that group,” Glum said. “I didn’t know a lot about quiz teams at the time… but once I started going to the practices, reading the questions and scoring it, I fell in love with it.”

During the practices, students of all grade levels come together, forming a distinct culture.

“It’s a lot of different personalities, but everybody gets along really well,” Glum said. “The high school kids have done a great job of fostering an environment that’s friendly to all of the grades.”

Early on, Glum noticed Radkey-Drilling performed exceptionally well.

“We had to make a rule early in the season that during practice his questions that he got right were worth a little bit less than everybody else’s or else there was no way to make fair teams,” Glum said. 

Radkey-Drilling joined the quiz team last year in his seventh grade year, however he has been collecting all of this knowledge his whole life.

“I’m a sponge… anything I hear gets mixed up with the other stuff and can be recalled, and that’s really what the quiz team allows,” Radkey-Drilling said. “This has been with me all my life, this has just been who I am.”

So far, Radkey-Drilling has played a total of 31 games in four tournaments, with a power percentage of 26.7% as he had 40 powers and 110 regular tossups. 

A toss up is when a player buzzes in to answer a question, and if someone answers the question early enough, that is called a power and a correct answer is worth 15 points instead of 10.

“He is really strong at figuring out what the answer to a question is going to be super early on, so that’s been really impressive,” Glum said.

Radkey-Drilling also has a Points Per 20 Tossups Heard (PP20TH) of 55.95%, which is higher than those of all the high school and middle school players in WHHS history except for one. 

As the year continues, the middle school team as a whole has grown, and each player fills a certain niche they are interested in. 

“We took a whole bunch of interesting kids, people with interests ranging from comic books to musical theatre from number theory to social sciences, and we put them all in a room and had them answer trivia questions,” Radkey-Drilling said. “In other words, we all think towards something, but we don’t think the same.” 

Radkey-Drilling has one commonality for the real motivation to keep going in AQT. 

“You’ve gotta have that drive for more knowledge,” Radkey-Drilling said. “You can’t become complacent with what knowledge you have.”