Fingers on the buzzers

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This article was published 28/05/2016 (3705 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology…’

— Sam Cooke

This weekend, a team of students from Kelvin High School is in Toronto, attempting to become the first Manitoba squad to win Reach for the Top’s national title since a band of brainiacs from Deloraine Collegiate Institute turned the trick 32 long years ago.

During the past several months, regional tournaments were held from coast to coast to determine what schools would qualify for this year’s cerebral showdown, which got underway May 27 and wraps up May 29. In mid-April, Kelvin booked its ticket to the dance by prevailing over St. Paul’s High School in the Manitoba final, which was staged at Millennium Library.

Given that 2016 marks Reach for the Top’s 50th anniversary as a nationwide in-quiz-ition, Kelvin coach John Martens figures there’s no time like the present to end this province’s championship drought.

“We’ve been to (the nationals) nine times since I joined the team in 2000,” said Martens, who teaches band when he’s not peppering his troupe with “short-snappers” along the lines of, “Whose face is on the Canadian $100 bill?” and “The show Arrested Development is focused on a family with what surname?” (Sir Robert Borden! Bluth!)

“Kelvin has won Manitoba more times than anybody but St. Paul’s (High School), I’m pretty sure, but it’s been over 40 years since Kelvin won it all so yeah, it’d be nice to do it this year.” (Besides Deloraine and Kelvin, three other schools from Manitoba have come out on top — River East Collegiate in 1971, Glenlawn Collegiate in 1977 and Dakota Collegiate in 1982.)

Brian Mayes, the Winnipeg city councillor for St. Vital, served as quizmaster for the 2016 provincial final. Never mind head-scratchers about tallest mountains, longest rivers and deepest lakes; the question on most people’s lips when they heard about Mayes’ involvement was, “Reach for the Top is still a thing?”

From the mid-1960s to the late ‘80s, Reach for the Top, which was originally patterned after the BBC radio and television show Top of the Form, aired regularly on CBC-TV. Noteworthy hosts back then included Alex Trebek and Winnipeg’s Bill Guest. From 1990 to 2012, the finals were broadcast on smaller networks, including TV Ontario and Canadian Learning Channel. For the last several years, however, fans of the game have had to rely on YouTube or social media to find out who came out on top.

“I really do think it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind,” said Mayes, who participated in Reach for the Top 36 years ago, when he was a Grade 12 student at Dakota Collegiate. “Like a lot of people my age, I grew up watching it on TV and have very positive memories associated with Reach. So one of the things I’ve been trying to do since becoming councillor is get it out there a bit… give it a higher profile. We do a great job promoting high school athletics but academics, not so much.”

Mayes, who also coached Brandon’s Crocus Plains High School to a provincial title in 2006, said Reach for the Top functions a bit differently, now that it’s not a televised event. While today’s matches are measured by the number of questions posed — 80 — when he played, games were precisely 20 minutes long. That often led to stall tactics, Mayes chuckled, if a team was trying to sit on a lead with only a minute or two left on the clock.

“I remember one time there was a question, “Who wrote the score for the musical Anne of Green Gables?” Mayes said, recalling he once spent an entire month studying opera, only to be foiled when the musical category during a pivotal contest turned out to be “Rock groups of the 1960s.”

“I didn’t know the answer but because we were leading by 60 points, I buzzed in to try and kill a few seconds. When Bill Guest asked me what my answer was, I smirked and said, really slowly, ‘Wolfgang… Amadeus… Mozart.’ I got a big laugh from the audience but later one of the judges told me I was violating the rules, and not to do that again.”

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Daniel Hill is Reach for the Top’s national director. Sixteen teams will compete for the 2016 crown, he said when reached at his office in Toronto. (Alas, when Hill tried out for the Reach for the Top team at his high school umpteen years ago, he failed to make the cut, he said with a laugh.)

“Because this is our 50th year, that has been a big incentive to do a few things we’ve been meaning to do for a number of years now,” Hill said, adding Ryan Vickers, a former Wheel of Fortune champ, will be this year’s MC. “We’ve created a charitable foundation that will give out bursaries to students and we’ve also started coming up with a list of alumni, which so far includes two ex-prime ministers, Steven Harper and Kim Campbell.”

And since it is Reach for the Top’s golden anniversary, Hill and his staff are also making preparations so Canadians will get the chance to see what occurs this weekend, just like in years past.

“We’ll be taping all of the games live on the floor,” he said, stating the questions being used were submitted by a mix of retired teachers, freelance writers and past participants. “It will then go thru a post-production phase, when we’ll clean up the audio, etc., before we post it online using a video streaming provider like Vimeo.” (For more details, go to www.reachforthetop.com.)

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It isn’t a fluke Kelvin, whose record versus other Manitoba schools is a mind-blowing 60-1 since 2014, is a year-in year-out Reach for the Top powerhouse. This year’s unit practised during the lunch hour five days a week from September to May, Martens said — not necessarily to bone up on facts and figures, but more to help players stay level-headed when the chips are down.

“The first tournament I played in, near the end of the game my nerves were shot,” said Mohamed Aden, a Grade 12 student at Kelvin who listed his areas of expertise as geography, American history and Christian theology. “At one point I was just buzzing in on everything, whether I heard the question or not.”

“And once you buzz in by mistake, you’re done,” piped in Aden’s teammate, Eric Kielback. “It’s crappy because not only did you get (the answer) wrong, you kept somebody from your team who knew the answer from getting those points for you.”

“We’re a smart team, we’re a good team and we may know the answers to two-thirds of the questions but guess what? So do the kids at St. John’s-Ravenscourt and so do the kids at St. Paul’s,” Martens said. “So we work a lot at relaxing and anticipating what a question might be, before the people we’re playing do.”

To illustrate his point, Martens cited a scenario from a few years ago, when it was announced the next set of questions in a particular match were going to centre around famous economists. No sooner had the host said, “To start things off, this British…” than one of Martens’ pupils buzzed in and said, “The answer is John Maynard Keynes.”

“Correct,” the host said.

“Moving on to question No. 2: In his book…”

“Karl Marx,” replied the same student, having correctly guessed the next clue was going to be Das Kapital.

“By the time the guy got to his last question, our guy only waited until the host said, ‘He…’ before buzzing in,” said Martens, shaking his head. “This kid only knew two other economists — John Kenneth Galbraith and Adam Smith — that hadn’t come up yet and he took a chance the answer was going to be Galbraith. Not only was he right, he also completely crushed our opponents’ morale.

“We ended up winning that game by 300 points or something stupid, and were off to the nationals.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca