I still don’t have all of the pictures, so, I’m sure I’ll be doing another post on all of this when I see more of them show up online.
But, I have some, so, away we go.
6 pm – Telecommunications Building: I know (I KNOW) that one of the last things I told Kevin as he left for school Monday morning was to make sure that he budgeted enough time to get from OHS to WKAR tonight. Today’s a busy day…he had the first of the dress rehearsals for the play and that will stretch until at least 7 pm tonight. Kevin will have to leave early to make it on time.
Heck, Kevin even posted a message on Facebook,
“Do not forget, our final QuizBusters match(es) of the year are tomorrow at 6:15! This means be there by 6:00. Everyone should attend if they are able! Be there or be square.”
So, yeah, at 6 pm I’m in the lobby waiting. The team and the other parents are there waiting. Herr Floyd is there. But no Kevin.
(I’ll take a picture of the welcome message on the screen in the lobby as I stew about the nature of teenagers and wait….)
Call him, there is no answer…..so I’m taking that to mean that he’s driving and must be close.
6:05 pm. No Kevin. Call again, no answer.
6:07 pm. Kevin calls me. He has hit a car in the parking deck next to the Studio.
Walk outside to the deck to meet up with a boy and my first words for him were not “are you ok?” or “what happened”….they are more along the lines of “I told you to make sure you weren’t running late!”. Because, of course, he was rushing because he was late and didn’t see the woman at this unmarked four-way intersection.
Tell him that he needs to get inside NOW…and that I’ll take care of this mess.
(to be fair, the woman didn’t see him either. I’m not sure who was at fault in this debacle)
(this is about $2.5K in damage. Crushed the light and the structure around it; the fender and the body panel is crunched back almost to the driver door. I was able to drive it home, but, the tire rubbed when I turned right. As the final aside here, our USAA insurance, for the first time ever, has completely and totally sucked on the customer satisfaction front in dealing with this)
The MSU police take their sweet time showing up; it doesn’t improve my mood much that I’m certain to miss most, if not all, of the first game.
Green Division Championship: Finally get into the lobby and ask the person who is coordinating things if I can get back into the studio area and watch the game in progress from the alternate studio. Turns out they aren’t showing the game in that alternate studio, but, they do let me stand quietly in the control room and watch the rest of the game.
(this picture sucks….I wish I had taken the time to make sure I got a quality picture while I stood there)
I walk in and it is a little disorienting figuring out what is going on….those blurry television screens above don’t’ show our team, just Saline right at that moment. They are answering a bonus and I see that they have 210 points. This is a very nervous data point…there are teams that don’t get that total against us in a whole game!
Things keep going and I realize a) we are winning, I think we had 280 at that point and b) they are just coming to halftime.
(before the start of the Saline match)
So, the game goes on. The team continues the season long tradition of not winning the toss-up to get the video bonus right after halftime and at one point they are only down by 30 points. But they win the next toss-up (I think), do well on the pop quiz (I think Kevin did very well here) and go on to pull away for the 440-300 win.
Green Division Champions!
So now there is a break….we get to wait while the White Division champion is determined. I get a chance to finally ask Kevin some pointed questions (like what exactly happened? why didn’t you leave the school earlier?) and learn that the late arrival is primarily due to his long long McDonalds stop. I had noticed that there were a lot of Chicken McNuggets on the floor of the car when I was dealing with the crash aftermath.
The coach, and the other parents, tell me that Kevin didn’t seem too rattled during the game. One set of parents say they were in the garage and heard the accident…and it sounded loud.
Grand Division Championship: Anyway, as stated previously, the team was not looking past White Cloud. WC had brought a large contingent…and they did a sports-type chant out in the hallway before the Grand Championship. That didn’t really matter though….I think WC held their own in the First Ten and the Pop Quizzes but we dominated the toss-ups. And because the show looks at this match as an exhibition there is less time for the actual game….WC fell behind early and never really had a chance to catch up
The Grand Champions. Kevin finishes 12-0 in his Quizbusters career. Team and alternates
These pictures are of the plaques outside. There aren’t many kids who are going to be able to say they went 12-0 (or better!). Kevin’s partner as a two-time champ, Abhijit, is 11-0…he was not on the team for the first game last year. Ravi has a shot at going 18-0!
For all the unexpected greatness of seeing the game from the control room, this final match sucked….they took the bleachers they had out of the studio and since I was one of the last ones into the studio I had to sit so far back I couldn’t see anything except by craning my neck to look back at one of the monitors.
They did, for the first time this year, win the video bonus toss-up. I could see the smiles as the kids joked about that. Totally bombed the next question though (who wrote Peter Pan?). The questions in the final game seemed pretty uneven…some were ridiculously simple.
With Trophies and Team Trophy
I think (I know) there are better pictures out there….the station photographer took a bunch of them. I have none…..my phone battery was consumed by Kevin-Wreck-2013 aftermath!
