Seedings after Day 3 of High School Challenge Preliminaries: 1. Ithaca: 3-0 (1125 points) 2. Fillmore: 3-0 (795 points) 3. Cooperstown: 3-0 (690 points) 4. Montrose: 3-0 (625 points) 5. Notre Dame: 2-1 (580 points) T6. Homer: 2-1 (515 points) T6. Northeast Bradford: 2-1 (515 points) 8. Elmira Free Academy: 2-1 (510 points) Southside and Seton Catholic also both finished 2-1, but have been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention due to their lower overall point totals. Teams for tomorrows final preliminary round: Delaware Valley, Horseheads, Mountain View, Oneonta, Owego Free Academy, Spencer-Van Etten, Tioga Central, Wallenpaupack. A dangerous, and definitely the least-predictable, field weve had this week, and the playoff seedings depend -greatly- on what happens tomorrow. Delaware Valley is the tournaments #2 overall seed, but have to play a far tougher schedule than any of the other 3 seeded teams did. (Ithaca, Fillmore, Cooperstown) DV starts with CASSC champion (albeit in an upset) Oneonta, continues against the dangerous Andrew Adams and his Mountain View squad, and then finishes off against the 2013 runnerup and 5-time Hewitt Trophy winner Horseheads, who graduated 2013 HSC MVP Tim Claypool, who singlehandedly brought HHS to within one question of a title last year, but who always show up with a team thats at least competitive, and more than that if they actually play some tournaments to prepare. DV has two killer history players in seniors Dan Reno and Josiah DeVizia, the best fine arts player in the tournament in sophomore Drake Eshleman, and they have an asset that only Ithaca can match - a bona fide literature specialist, sophomore Saimun Shahee, who has moved from DV B to indispensable A-team weapon in just a few months of what Im told is bordering-on-fanatical Protobowl play and online preparation. They are going to be a handful for anyone, even the vaunted IHS team, but theyre not going to be playing against empty seats on day one, by any means. Owego Free Academy and Tioga Central are both in the semifinals of the WATS-WAVR Scholarship Challenge, and in fact will meet in a semifinal match of that competition. Here, they meet on day one. Owego was a solid mid-table team at BrainBusters Fall, and had obviously put in a lot of work when I saw them a month and a half later at the SC prelims, winning every match by about 150 points and completely outclassing the (admittedly rather weak) competition. Tioga Central may be the most intriguing team in this tournament. They won the very first Hewitt Trophy way back in 1978, but despite occasional playoff appearances since then, that remains their only title. They have been active in the Twin Tiers Quiz League pretty much since its inception in the late 1980s, but are appearing at HSC for the first time in over a decade. Despite their relative lack of experience, they are a dangerous team who could very well go 3-0 and throw a large monkey wrench into the playoff seeding works, for one major reason. Unlike most relatively new teams, they are absolutely -fearless- on the buzzer. If they have an inkling that they might know the answer, lights are going on in front of them. The problem is that, despite winning their SC prelim impressively, they were frequently -too- aggressive, sometimes ringing in before they could possibly have had the first idea what the answer was. At SC, even given the fact that any miss on a question there is -10 points to the score, they were able to get away with this because of the weak opposition they faced, and the fact that they -do- know a lot of things. At TC3, they wont get penalized with point deductions with a repeat performance of misplaced aggression, and on day one they might even get away with giving their opponents some free shots at questions. On day one. If they get to the knockouts, start buzzing whenever Brooks Sanders coughs too loudly, miss, and give free shots at questions to the likes of Cooperstown/DV/Fillmore/Ithaca, they wont be in the tournament long enough to regret it. You can give free questions to the once-a-year schools that mostly populate SC and survive. Do it to those four teams, and they will eat you alive. Tiogas performance in this tournament will -completely- depend on their ability to show some discretion in their buzzing. IF they can manage to do that, they are by far the team outside the top 4 with the best shot at upsetting one of those top 4 in a one-off match, because almost no one in this tournament is going to beat them in any buzzer race. Im looking forward to seeing if they can do it.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:36:28 +0000
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