On Saturday, the first of April, Ladue Horton Watkins High School’s Quiz Bowl team members stood at the school’s doors welcoming competitors for the sixth iteration of the Ladue Invitational Spring Tournament, more commonly referred to as LIST. After the previous Quiz Bowl captain left  in 2015, the tournament was neglected in 2016. Sensing the need to revive the tradition, the new co-captain, Raj Paul, decided to act.

The main procedure in preparation for the Quiz Bowl tournament was to write the question set. The writing process took up most of the school year, starting back in July, and concluding just before winter break.

“The question topics vary from philosophy to sciences,” head-editor and sophomore Moses Schindler said. “We tried to keep the difficulty balanced in order to ensure all teams a fair playing-field.”

The team had to create nearly six-hundred of these questions. In the end, the Quiz Bowlers compiled the questions into problem sets called packets for use in competition. Then came the actual tournament. The tournament saw a total of twenty-two teams from Missouri and Illinois participate, each contending for the trophy.

Ladue Quiz Bowl team members organized and helped facilitate the major functions of the contest. Many students who weren’t members of the Quiz Bowl club even volunteered their time in assistance.

“Throughout the day, most of us [moderators] were positioned in rooms where we would read off the packets that the Quiz Bowl team had written,” Schindler said. “After a match had been completed, we would report the scores to our behind-the-scenes coordinator, Raj Paul. He eventually entered the scores into a database.”