Every Saturday morning most grandparents turn on the KDKA Channel 2 news for the latest information and Pittsburgh area weather, but sometimes they will stay tuned in long enough to catch KD Quiz, the area’s favorite high school quiz game!

What was lovingly known as Hometown High Q for decades before now has a new sponsor and therefore a new name: KD Quiz.

Beaver Area competes on KD Quiz once a year and always does reasonably well. This year seniors Gracie Turyan and Ian McCarty Cogis represented Beaver Area along with junior and team captain Ava Sutter.

This year the Bobcat KD Quiz team filmed and competed December 6 for a later broadcast date.

KD Quiz is fairly complicated with many different rounds, ways to score points, and sometimes seemingly impossible questions. Plus, with the rechristened game there came harder questions and different question types for the competitors.

To participate, the Bobcats logged onto the Zoom call where KD Quiz is filmed, and met Ray Petelin, a KDKA news anchor who hosts the program and reads the KD Quiz questions. (The Zoom filming format is a Covid holdover as the program used to be filmed in person at the KDKA studios in Pittsburgh.)

Beaver Area was the first team to record their intros that tell a few fun facts about each team member. After those were done the Bobcats learned that they were competing against the Bentworth Bearcats and the North Allegheny Tigers.

The Tigers have won the KD Quiz competition multiple years in the past, so the Bobcats knew that they would have to fight even to earn second place.

Once all of the frills of being on TV were over the first round began and the first round categories were assigned. This round was not timed and consisted of eight questions that all correlated with the team’s assigned category.

Bentworth had the first choice in categories and chose Analogies which was seen as the obvious easiest option. After that, North A chose the categories that were only described as Postal Codes and The Periodic Table.

That left Beaver Area’s team with the final category: Partying from History and Literature. This category proved to have the hardest questions.

In round two, all three teams answer questions from the same category and have one minute to answer as many as possible. This category was Math Vocabulary, and all three teams answered six out of eight questions correctly.

The third round was another timed round that only had two open-ended math questions. Beaver Area received a half point in that round.

The final round was a wager round offering either a 30, 20, or 10 point clue. The teams could choose to either take a guess on the 30 or 20 point clues or wait for the easiest 10 point clue.

Both Bentworth and North A earned 30 points in total, but this was the round that Beaver Area swept with 50 points. The Bobcats successfully answered a question about the opioid epidemic on the 30 point clue and a question about Henry Ford on the 20 point clue.

Sadly, those points weren’t enough to put Beaver Area atop the competition. Once again North A held forth with 260 points, followed by the Bearcats with 170, and finally the Bobcats with a respectable 155 points.

With such a seemingly lopsided outcome, there was concern about matching such a big school like North A against smaller competitors.

Turyan felt that “It was an unfair matchup because we were against North Allegheny. They have more people in one [graduating] class than we have in our whole high school.”

But minor controversy aside, the experience was worthwhile: “Overall, it was a fun experience and it was an academic challenge,” she concluded.