What was a highlight of this year's Castra?
Joseph Amsbary: As a way to kind of cool down at the end of castra, we played novice kickoff round 1s and hyperbuzzed ridiculously early on every question and then just guessed all of the common answers for easy questions like Zeus and Julius Caesar. We were terrible at getting the questions right, but it was a lot of fun.
Minyoung Hwang: Working with all the novices and intermediates was great; getting to know everyone on the teams definitely helped with a sense of camaraderie at the actual competition.
Matt Nelson: Probably the time I sneezed so hard that I knocked my sunglasses off my head and made Andino miss a tossup.
Peter McMahon: The highlight for me was hearing the entire “elevator story” for the first time from Mrs. Lewis.
Simon Van Der Weide: My highlight of Castra was hearing about the Ostrich inside joke a week late.
What were the most difficult teams you played while at Nationals? Any surprises?
MN: Florida and Massachusetts both made Finals which is lowkey what we expected the entire year, but I was surprised/impressed that Florida came so close to winning it all for the second year in a row after losing Aspen and Noah from last year's team.
JA: The most difficult team we played at Nationals was definitely Wisconsin. They beat us twice, once by about 100 points in prelims and then by 5 points in finals.
SV: Most difficult team we played at Nationals was Massachusetts; none of the other teams surprised me.
MH: Probably the teams in the finals (Florida and Massachusetts) were the strongest; I was also impressed by Illinois’ speed.
PM: The most difficult team this year for me was Massachusetts. I was rather surprised; I was expecting Florida to be the most difficult.
What was the craziest buzz you made or heard someone else make at Nationals?
MH: Probably the last tossup in finals; Florida buzzed in on “a leafy –” and knew the answer; it also required a lot of knowledge about Latin words deriving from other Latin words, which is a pretty new question type.
MN: Matthew Thomas has gotten the visual question in Finals without hearing the letter in back to back years. That's kind of annoying but also a pretty impressive ability to logic out the answer.
JA: While I’m sure that there were some really good buzzes, I don’t remember any of them so I’m going to go with my worst buzz, which came in semis. I buzzed on a question after both other teams had buzzed out but before the question had been read twice. As bad as that is in general, it was even worse because Mrs. Lewis and JP had been telling us all that day to not do exactly that because it had happened earlier. As soon as I buzzed, I regretted it because I knew they were going to lecture me about it (which they did).
SV: My craziest buzz at Nationals was the fractions question in finals because I’d been waiting for fractions for over a year.
PM: I buzzed in at “Magister manuit discipulis suis ut orationes suos diligenter—” and just guessed that it was talking about giving speeches, so I got it right.
CERTAMEN CONVERSATIONS:
Interviews with State Certamen players
VJCL FALL FORUM PAGE 9
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