High school students from across the Southeast will be competing in Ole Miss’s annual Brain Brawl this Saturday.
Forty-two teams from Mississippi and its neighboring states will partake in a quiz bowl tournament to test their knowledge on topics such as history, science, literature and popular culture.
“Brain Brawl is one of those competitions where anything can happen,” Matthew DeLoach, director of academic competitions, said. “A lot of these teams are young, and Brain Brawl is probably their first actual tournament. I expect Lamar Hall will be generating a lot of brain power on Saturday.”
Sophomore Andrew Lund at Lamar High School in Meridian said it will be a fun yet challenging day for his first tournament.
“This is my first time ever doing the Brain Brawl, so I’m looking forward to it,” Lund said. “I think it should go well because we’ve been practicing a lot in preparation for it, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see on Saturday.”
More than 140 other students from around the region will join Lund in competing for the title of champion.
Registration begins at 8 a.m. in the lobby of Lamar Hall and the first match will take place at 9 a.m., also in Lamar. Some teams will be arriving from as far as five hours away just to participate and try to claim the championship.
The event also serves as an opportunity for Ole Miss students to receive community service hours. College students will be volunteering as timekeepers and scorekeepers throughout the day.
Meliah Grant, a sophomore communication sciences and disorders major, volunteered at last year’s Brain Brawl.
“I signed up to help out last year just to receive CAC hours for the honors college, but I ended up having a really great time keeping score and watching those kids compete,” Grant said. “It was so cool to see how much these high school kids knew. Some of it was about stuff I’d never even heard of.”
The 42 teams will be broken into brackets of six based on their school size. These brackets will be formed in round-robin style competition, unlike the championship, which will have single-elimination rounds.
DeLoach said competitions like this are not only fun to watch, but also help increase the scholastic reputation of the University.
“I am happy to host these intelligent high school students on the Ole Miss campus and hope that they will choose our University to pursue their college degree,” DeLoach said.
