November 11, 2023 - The Raiders of East Peoria Community High School win the 23rd Annual Peoria Area World Affairs Council International Scholastic Bowl! While being the top-scoring team of the day, their victory was no cakewalk. The cardiac kids from East Peoria narrowly swept every finals match by only a margin of two-three questions in each round, escaping an upset by rookies El Paso-Gridley & winning a dogfight against Mid-Illini rivals, Metamora.
"Every one of those teams that we played today, all were equally worthy champions of the tournament today. We kept our cool & we stayed locked in all the way to the finish," Coach Norman said. The Raiders are no strangers to the International Scholastic Bowl having finished 3rd in 2017 & as runnersup last year in 2022. East Peoria won the $300 grand prize, trophy, & will qualify to compete at the WACA Academic WorldQuest in Washington, D.C. in April 2024.
Rounding out the top finalists were - Washington Community (2nd Place), Metamora (3rd Place), & St. Teresa of Decatur (4th Place). All final four playoff games were in fact nailbiters with each match coming down to only one-two questions each.
The day featured several upsets & nailbiters as U-High advanced to finals by knocking out Galesburg, 300-310, Pool B turned into a pool-of-death with Metamora & IVC advancing on points instead of defending champion Streator, & El Paso-Gridley making their first ever finals appearance winning a tiebreaker over Eureka on points.
Topping out the All Tournament Team, was Logan Philips of St. Teresa, who soared above the field answering an incredible 48 toss ups during the morning rounds. That comes out to answering nearly 50% of the 100 questions heard by teams during the first five rounds of the tournament. Philips, a junior, was named to the second team Class A IHSSBCA All-State team last season.
The 23rd Annual International Scholastic Bowl was a year of change for the Peoria Area World Affairs Council. Leading the question writing team & acting as Tournament Director was Trevor Nigus. Over the past year, Nigus has been critical in overhauling & revamping the scholastic bowl tournament to standards that he saw as a player & as a coach. Assisting Nigus, was former teammate & PAWAC AWQ alum, Mitch Baron, who acted as head editor of the question sets and as a moderator for the tournament.
"It's been 15 years since I've been to PAWAC. My experiences then were of long days with kids struggling to answer questions in low-scoring affairs. These question sets are night & day to then. I look forward to coming back next year. Well done!" one coach said. Compared to previous years, the toss up questions were nearly twice as long and followed a clear distribution of Geography, History, Social Studies, Science, Literature, Fine Arts, & Miscellaneous categories. The majority of questions including some clue related to current events this past year.
Making the tournament possible were the many volunteers from PAWAC as well as friends of PAWAC including former coaches, former players, & Bradley University students. Who we could not have done it without them!
