By Breanna Richardson
For early rounds, click here.
Editor’s Note: This originally linked to an article about the first half by George Lindsay, which has been lost. Therefore, we are linking to the stats of the tournament.
These were the most competitive RAMS finals I have ever seen. And of course they were probably one of the longest finals I’ve ever had to endure. Going into the final quizzes it was very possible for any of the three teams to win seeing they all were excellent. Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, it got down to three teams, all of which hadn’t lost all day. This can only mean that there would be at least four more quizzes, but because of the stiff competition we went a full five quizzes. The top three teams were Calvary of Winter Garden Mighty Arrows, Open Door Baptist Church, and FBCCF Elementary and Luke. In the last three team quiz I remember Grace D’Amico from Open Door saying, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.” At that point we all felt like that. Most everyone drove 3 or 4 hours that morning and by this time were extremely tired and wanted to go home (with the trophy, of course). Before the finals began I even heard one coaches talking about shifting the finals to single elimination in order to get done sooner. But the tournament did go on as a double elimination tournament. So here is a quick synopsis of each of the five final quizzes.
Quiz 1:
Calvary struggled at the very beginning with errors and stayed in the hole for the first part of the quiz and ended up with the loss. Open Door and FBCCF stayed close to each other, but Open Door finally pulled away and got a high win.
Quiz 2:
FBCCF struggled with errors at the beginning but held all till the end. Going into question 20 each team was separated by a mere 20 points with FBCCF on the losing end. Calvary correctly answered question 20 tying them with Open Door and sealing FBCCF’s doom. The “unnecessary” tiebreaker, as Matt West called it, was answered by Open Door. Thus, Open Door got the high and FBCCF got their first loss of the day.
Quiz 3:
Calvary had a phenomenal quiz by David Tyrrell who quizzed out and breezed his team through to a high win. Once again, Open Door and FBCCF stayed close and fought for a middle win. But Open Door was starting to look exhausted and their correctly answered questions coming farther and farther apart. Open Door just couldn’t keep up and ended up with the loss.
Quiz 4:
Going into this quiz every team had a loss, and this would be the final three team quiz. Open Door couldn’t overcome their previous loss and struggled with errors as well as weariness sinking them to their second loss. Calvary ended up with the high and FBCCF the middle.
Quiz 5:
The final quiz was the most competitive of all the quizzes. Calvary started out with an early lead due to a couple of errors on FBCCF. But it wasn’t long before FBCCF made a come back and even overtook Calvary. They came so close to a high win; then once again, they didn’t pace themselves and began making errors. At the end of question 18 FBCCF was behind 10 points and needed both questions to win. Question 19 was from II Corinthians 13 (a weak chapter for FBCCF) and Calvary answered correctly and secured themselves a high win.