Cullen and Dalton talk about their favorite memories of Matt and play tributes from quizzers and coaches across the country.
Cullen and Dalton talk about their favorite memories of Matt and play tributes from quizzers and coaches across the country.
Comments 1
Matt West will be greatly missed. I remember he worked very hard to make sure Bible Quiz could go on even when much of the country was locked down. He took the concept of virtual quizzing and developed it so well that whole spectaculars and even part of a major tournament’s Round Robin were done online.
I don’t know whether I knew his name first or he knew mine. It seemed he knew everybody, and if a guy wanted to get involved more, he went out of his way to make sure he could.
Back in January or February when he asked me if I was interested to go to CI with him, I didn’t yet realize that he had taken teams he pieced together to what must have been about a hundred tournaments over the years, but I would find out soon enough. When we met up in Atlanta en route to Colorado, I was given a nickname almost before we hit the road. He called me Cinnamon Squirrel, after randomly giving me a box of cake mix he had brought along. It rarely took much for him to name someone– he had a gift for it, along with the sense of humor that we’ll remember so well.
While we were on the road, he made up a bracket in his head for us quizzers to determine which teams we thought would win. He was always good at that kind of stuff, and used it many times to the betterment of the Bible Quizzing community. Here on the Biblequizzer.net podcast, he talked about everything that had to do with the quiz, and by listening to it I would learn the history of Bible Quiz, what was going on at tournaments I didn’t attend, who was who and what strategies and philosophies worked for what purposes. He always wanted to grow Bible Quiz broad, so that as many kids as possible would be memorizing God’s Word, even if a lot of them weren’t the best competitive quizzers. He knew the Word of God would not return void, and so he advocated every method of getting more people’s feet wet, while still encouraging the high-level competition we see at the majors.
I was blessed to know Matt West, and I look forward to seeing him again in Heaven.