By Ron Zyhaus
The 19th annual PQA Tournament was held on Saturday, February 7. As always, many of the top teams were there in order to conclude their PQA season.
A Little about PQA:
PQA has been in existence for 19 years. It was founded by David Douglas and is currently run by George Wood. PQA is very team oriented compared to many other tournaments–they do not permit passing of answers and it only takes 5 to quiz out. Also, PQA is exclusively 2-team quizzing. This year there were 38 teams from 11 ministries. Of PQA’s 221 quizzers, 23 were seniors.
PQA Regular Season Summary:
PQA is different from other tournaments because all of the teams have competed in PQA’s league all year; the PQA tournament is the Bible Quiz equivalent of the NFL’s playoffs. Of the top 5 teams, 2 were from Faith, 2 from Athens, and 1 from Hampton Park. Right above my picture, we have links to the top teams and top quizzers.
Not surprisingly, Tiffany Parrott was the year’s top quizzer. She was the only person to quiz out in every quiz that she participated in. There were some other familiar names in the top 10–Bryce Tyson, Pleasant View (3rd); Jonathan Bishop, Faith (4th); and Anthony Licata, Athens (6th). Alaina George from Temple finished 2nd and Katie Greer from Calvary came in 5th. I’ll let you check out the rest on your own.
The Actual Tournament: The results of the tournament were fairly surprising. PQA usually has a tendency to not go according to their regular season rankings, but I thought that I could count on Jonathan Bishop or Bryce Tyson or at least Tiffany Parrot to bring their team a long way in the tournament. Instead, none of the top 5 individual’s teams made it to the final four. The theme of the tournament seemed to be experience carrying the day. The final two teams (Pleasant View Defenders and Athens 1) were filled with both school’s older quizzers. Despite Esther Tobias probably not finishing as high individually during the season as she would have liked, she reestablished herself as one of the top quizzers in the Southeast. Even more remarkably, Athens jumped from 20th place into the finals. Athens lost their first quiz of the day, but refused to lose anymore. They closed beating Faith 3 and then Pleasant View Defenders twice.
Long-Term Effects
The fact that both Athens and Pleasant View were able to defeat Faith makes both of them legitimate teams with a chance to contend as we march on towards SCQANIT and AACS. With results coming in from the Colorado Tournament (which should be our next article in a couple of days), this year is shaping up to be one of the most competitive ever.