(February 28, 2001) -- The Scholastic Bowl varsity teams from Clark, Hoover, Glendale and CV high schools will compete on March 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Glendale High School’s auditorium. Hosted by Fritz Coleman from KNBC-TV, the competition will be televised on Marcus Cable channel 15.

The team has spent the past three weeks during lunch, tutorial and Saturday mornings preparing for the competition. “We have been going through sample questions to jog our memory and prepare for the real thing,” said junior Sandra Ngamsanga. Next Monday all of the participants will compete in a one-hour essay competition.  The schools’ beginning score is determined by how well the participants do on the essay portion.

Prior to participating on the varsity team, all participants join junior varsity, where they compete in a district-wide competition during the spring.  The purpose of joining junior varsity is “to prepare students for the varsity, beginning with easier questions,” team coach Susan Newcomer said. Once students qualify for junior varsity, they can try to qualify for the varsity team.

Samantha Lawler, Jimmy Kan, Chester Ramos, Jeff Shaw and Sandra Ngamsanga qualified to represent Clark. Other students not chosen to participate on the varsity team will remain on the junior varsity.

Winners from the junior varsity team receive a medal, depending on what place they come in, talk to teammates and write answers on a sign and the other where individual team members answer questions individually by sounding a buzzer more quickly than other competitions.

Newcomer said that the Scholastic Bowl members have practiced different kinds of testing on a wide range of subjects. This was necessary in order to focus on the “area of expertise of each individual student.”

In the previous two years, Clark ranked last place among the four other high schools with a score of 27 in1999 and 39 last year. According to Newcomer, Clark had “quite a disadvantage in the past two years because we did not have seniors competing.”

Certain information is covered in the competition that requires all four years of high school education, she said.  Junior Chester Ramos said, “I think we can do better this year.  Now we have seniors and upper level classes that we could not access on previous competitions.”