Highly successful Truman Quiz Bowl team faces more key hurdles this month

(This story appears in The News-Herald Newspapers this week. It was written by Dave Komer.)

This month the Truman High School Quiz Bowl team will find out if it still has all of the answers.

Over the next two weekends the team will be heading to tournaments at Michigan State University in East Lansing, with the state championship set for April 19-20.

The Downriver champion Cougars hope to build on a huge year, while sending retiring Coach Mike McClain out with a bang.

Quiz Bowl is a game of questions on topics such as history, science and literature, where teams compete with a buzzer. A moderator poses the questions and teams score points by the questions they answer correctly. In the conference in which Truman competes, each school has four members per team.

Truman, champion of the Southern Wayne County Quiz Bowl Tournament and undefeated in its league, will compete in Lansing on April 19-20 for the state title.

The Cougars are led by McClain, 62, who is essentially the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Quiz Bowl for this area.

The retired math teacher started the programs at Truman and Kennedy high schools and is a moderator for the Southern Wayne Conference.

This season, Truman went a perfect 9-0 in the conference. Then, at the tournament hosted by Wayne County Community College on Feb. 13-14 the team won all three of its matches.

In the championship, it defeated Roosevelt High school by a score of 365-245.

Not only was Truman undefeated, but it also scored a total of 4,185 points in the conference. The next highest point total was Huron High School’s 2,785 in the 15-team conference.

There isn’t really a secret to the Cougars’ success, however, McClain said.

He said he likes his team members to be well-rounded and encourages them to participate in everything else from the drama club to team sports.

“I get to work with kids that are really good and that are invested in school,” McClain said. “I want them to be at practice, but I don’t blame them for being gone (if they have to attend something else).

“We have a great team and we’ve had a great year.”

It also doesn’t hurt that the Truman Quiz Bowl has two of its’ top players in recent memory.

The club boasts the duo of Adam Greene and Patrick Murray among its top four players, who help spearhead the mental firepower. The two are ranked first and second in their senior class, with Murray maintaining a 4.27 GPA and Greene’s at 4.269.

McClain said Greene is No. 1 all-time and Murray is No. 2 in Truman’s Quiz Bowl history, with Greene, recently offered a scholarship to Michigan State University’s Honors College, consistently a top-10 finisher in state competitions.

“This season, Adam was our MVP,” McClain said. “He essentially blew a lot of other teams right out of the water. Patrick is great, too. On many other teams he would be their top player.”_Greene said McClain keeps the team sharp, but everyone has fun.

“We love what we’re doing and we have a passion for the material,” said Greene, who is ranked fourth in the state at 71.25 points per game, according to MSU March Madness 2013.

Murray said one key is keeping a cool head under pressure.

“They say that golf is 90 percent mental, so is Quiz Bowl,” he said. “It takes a lot of studying and hard work. You have to stay calm.”

McClain, a retired teacher who spent 38 years in the district, said he is retiring to spend time with his wife and travel, but will remain as a moderator for the conference.

What made the team’s conference championship even more special was that a week before the Quiz Bowl conference tournament in February, he was hospitalized for a week with a blood clot in his lung.

His devotion to the craft nearly killed him. McClain said that despite feeling under the weather he put off going to the doctor to see what was wrong, in order to work on Quiz Bowl questions in his spare time, exacerbating his condition.

McClain missed part of the conference championships, but returned after resting and talking it over with his heart and lung doctor.

There was a “win one for the Gipper” mentality in the back of the team members’ minds during the conference tournament, Greene said.

Murray said everyone was concerned for McClain and is happy to have him back.

“We owe him a lot,” he said. “He is a father figure for all of us. He spends a lot of his time.”

McClain said that when he was in school there was no such thing as Quiz Bowl, but he gets joy out of moderating, coaching and through his students’ success.

“I’ve applied twice to ‘Jeopardy,’” he said with a laugh. “I’m jealous. I am so envious. I would have loved to have competed in something like this.”

To see the story on the newspaper Web site, just click on thenewsherald.com.