UCI Whips ‘Snooty’ Foes, Takes Western College Bowl Title

UC Irvine defeated Pomona College, Stanford and other colleges last weekend on the way to the Western Regional College Bowl title.

The team will compete for the national championship at the end of April in St. Paul, Minn. The regional competition was held in San Luis Obispo.

“It’s especially gratifying for a public institution like UCI to thrash on the private schools and send them back to their snooty campuses,” team captain Tom Davey said. “Their $20,000 tuition doesn’t seem to be giving them any more knowledge than our $1,600 tuition.”

College Bowl academic competition began in the 1950s. UCI joined the tournament in 1983. Since then, UCI has won more division titles than any university in the 19-college region covering California, Nevada and Hawaii, Davey said.

Marti Barmore, student activities director, coaches the four-member UCI squad.

Nicknamed the Varsity Sport of the Mind, the competition is similar to the TV game show “Jeopardy.”

“It’s a fun way to compete without working up a sweat,” Davey said.

Games are played in two seven-minute halves. Questions are worth 10 points, bonus questions up to 30 points. The questions cover politics, medicine, geography, literature, history, current events, art and music.

Members of the winning UCI team, consisting of four undergraduates, are: Davey, 35, an English major; Jerry Koshimizu, 27, a biology major; John Bowler, 31, an electrical engineering major, and David Frakt, 20, a history major.

“We’re a very well-balanced team,” Davey said.

“The Stanford team was especially ferocious,” he added, noting that the Cardinal had a medical student and a law student on its team.

Regarding the national competition, Davey said: “It seems to me if we can beat Stanford, then we can beat the Ivy League schools back East that take the College Bowl as seriously as Stanford does.”