Cookie Davis

Communications sophomore Brianna Steidle, strings sophomore Emily Winters, communications sophomores Uma Raja, Megan Horan, Sam Marshall (L-R) ready to compete in the Grand Battle at the Education Network studio in Boynton Beach.

When most people envision epic duels, they tend not to picture a group of teenage girls answering questions about books on television. However, this year’s Battle of the Books was just that. On Feb. 6, the Dreyfoos team Beaux Arts headed to Boynton Beach to compete against Jupiter High School.

Beaux Arts members are communications sophomores Megan Horan, Samantha Marshall, Uma Raja, Brianna Steidle and strings sophomore Emily Winters. The team sponsor is media center specialist Cookie Davis and the team captain is Samantha Marshall. To qualify for the Grand Battle of the Books, teams have to make it through the preliminary round in late January. In the preliminaries, teams read 15 books and have 20 minutes to answer as many multiple choice book trivia questions as they can. The two teams who answer the most questions correctly get to advance to the Grand Battle. Over 50 high school teams competed in the school district event this year.

“I think we all did so well because, even before being a team for this competition, we were all friends,” Marshall said. “For a team to work, each member really has to care about the others, and for us that was already how things [were].”

Beaux Arts divided the 15 books among themselves and read extra books as well. They have been studying for the battle since winter break.

“Our team split up the books, so to prepare I made sure I knew my three books as well as I could before reading some of the others,” Marshall said. “What helped a lot was watching the videos from past competitions.  Knowing what it would be like took away some of the stress and helped me know what to focus on.”

The day of the Grand Battle, Beaux Arts had an SRA and arrived at the Education Network studios at 10 a.m. The Grand Battle is different than preliminaries because it is not multiple choice. Teams have 15 seconds to answer a question and they have to state the title and the author for full credit. The first team to get 100 points wins.

“That day the most important thing to me wasn’t whether we won or lost— it was really amazing to just be there with this great group of people who’d put so much time and energy into this competition,” Marshall said. “Getting to prove that we’d done our best, and then to win, really made me appreciate how well we’d worked together.”

Tensions were high as both Dreyfoos and Jupiter High School challenged the judges on the answers to the questions. For example, Dreyfoos challenged the question “In which book does a character almost fall off a boat?” because two books contained characters that almost fell off a boat. Teams waited as judges fished out the books to ensure that the challenges were legitimate.

“The best part was all of the challenging of the questions,” Horan said. “It was quite exciting to see people reject the answers given and it also gave us well needed breaks in the competition.”

While it was not easy, Dreyfoos prevailed. The team took home medals and a large trophy that resides in the Media Center for the third year in a row.

“I hope we are able to go [to the Grand Battle] next year,” Horan said.  “I want to collect the 2016 version of the medal to go along with my 2015 version. I’d like the 2017 version as well.”