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Four years ago, Mary Nugent was just starting at Holmen High School as a combination English as a second language/gifted and talented resource teacher and she had an idea: Why not start a high school quiz bowl team?

She did some research and sent out some recruiting letters to incoming freshmen, including Ben Williams. He and Zach Butzler, Dylan Schank and Mike Deml had done quiz bowl in seventh- and eighth-grade.

“I thought that was pretty fun, a good way to use intelligence for something else,” Williams said.

It was fun, yes, but they had known heartache, too. One year they lost in the championship round to an Onalaska team, who got what the Holmen team members considered was a super easy topic in the final round: South American capitols.

“We were mad, by quiz bowl standards,” said Butzler.

That first year, there were 12 members of the Holmen High School quiz bowl team, and seven of them stayed with it all four years, helping to build the program and this year, for the first time, taking part in a national competition. In addition to Butzler, Deml, Schank and Williams, the other charter members of the HHS quiz bowl team include Cody Haro, Ravi Shah and Sam Connell.

All seven of them graduated within the top 15 of the Class of 2008 — Shah was valedictorian. But more impressive than that, they helped build membership on the quiz bowl team to 26 by making quiz bowl cool.

“They stuck with it for four years and developed it into a program that’s national quality,” Nugent said. “I can’t say enough about these kids.”

Eight members of the team — the seniors plus junior James Breu — recently returned from a two-day national tournament in Chicago in which they played six matches and were the only team from Wisconsin. They were used to playing 10 matches in the seven day-long competitions they took part in in Minnesota, so the six-match format was a bit easy for them in terms of pace.

The competition was far from easy, however. Opposing schools were mostly private academies, and the two HHS teams managed just one win between them. Still, team members said, they felt very good about their first experience in national competition, keeping things close in every match.

“I thought we did really well,” said Connell. “I don’t think we embarrassed ourselves.”

“We didn’t get our butts kicked,” Schank said.

The National Academic Championship format was somewhat different from the National Academic Quizbowl Tournaments format they were used to. It was foreign to them in a number of ways, including buzzing in strategies and the potential for stealing the other team’s points.

Each of the team members has his areas of special knowledge. Haro and Schank are especially good at geography, Shah and Williams know science, Connell and Butzler know literature and Williams is the resident expert on female pop singers.

One thing most of the team members are good at is sports trivia, a rarity among quiz bowl teams, and they got a chance to shine with that at nationals. In the lightning round, they answered all 10 questions in 60 seconds on college mascots. That feat, rarely achieved, earned them a special prize: two packs of chocolate cigarettes.

The national competition capped the most successful season for the team. They made the playoffs in each of the competitions they entered up until the national one, and in the spring competition at UW-Madison, which is considered to be a sort of state championship event, they had a team place second.

That second-place team included Shah, Schank, Butzler and — in a sign of hope for the future — freshman Aaron Boggs.

The quiz bowl team members had to finance the trip to nationals themselves, and they did that in part by putting on a brat fry and car wash and selling candles and suckers. They also got some help from D&M Recycling, a company run by Nugent’s husband, Dean, and from Williams’ mother, Terri, and Connell’s mother, Stephanie Bentzen.

Team members expressed gratitude for what Nugent has done for them and the program. “I don’t even think there’s a word to describe what she’s done for it,” Williams said.

Nugent was equally as grateful for the hard work and commitment shown by the senior quiz bowl members, from whom she expects great things in the future.

“They’ve been the best to work with. I will always remember them,” Nugent said. “We’ve got some people who are going to make a big difference.”

Contact Randy Erickson at randy.erickson@lee.net or 786-6812.