<rleton's Academic Quiz Team won both its fourth consecutive sectional Division I undergraduate title and its second consecutive Division II (novice teams) title at National Academic Quiz Tournament's North sectional championships played at Carleton on Saturday. Teams attending came from three states: Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
In Division I, senior Garrett Ryan, the tournament’s #3 overall scorer, teamed with junior Nathanel Snell and sophomores Andreas Stoehr and Austin Bell, to compile a match record of 10-4 on the day, placing third overall in the sectional championships (behind two powerful University of Minnesota teams) and winning Carleton’s ninth undergraduate title in the past eleven years. A second Carleton Division I team of senior Ted Kuhn, junior Chris Burke, and sophomores Marc Boyce and Michael Servis, went 1-13.
In Division II, a separate bracketing limited to freshmen or other relatively novice undergraduate players, two Carleton teams collectively went 24-2 over the course of a fourteen-team round robin. Frosh Carsten Gehring, Frank Firke, Max Bearak, and Scott Fox had a perfect day, going 13-0 to win the North sectional championship. Gehring was Division II’s #2 overall scorer, and Firke was #6.
A second Carleton “novice” team, consisting of second-year player Dan Ehrenberg and first-years Dustin Anderson, Anna Swanson, and Emily Barter, went 11-2 in the round robin and then dropped a tiebreaker match to Grinnell to finish 3rd overall in the division.
The weekend results will mean that Carleton will certainly again qualify at least one team in each division for the NAQT national championships, to be played April 4-5 in Dallas. Thirty-two teams from across the U.S. and Canada will be issued invitations in each division. It is possible that Carleton’s second Division II team might also have earned an invitation to nationals due to their strong 3rd place sectionals performance.
2009 will thus be the thirteenth consecutive year that Carleton will place a team into the Division I field at NAQT’s intercollegiate championships, a consistency record matched by only two other schools, the University of Chicago and University of Florida.