Battle of the brains

Students compete in Trivial Pursuit

Originally published in the Valencia Voice

“Which sport changed its original names, Flim Flam, and Whiff Whaff?” Tough question, but not for the students competing on the self named Team Elmo for Osceola Campus’ biannual Trivial Pursuit tournament on Friday.

A total of three teams with five players each competed in the small class- room for a chance at the coveted “Valencia Community College Trivial Pursuit Challenge 2010” trophy.

“With so many of our intramural activities here on campus being athletic in origin, it’s nice to have an academic focused competition,” said host and ques- tion reader, professor Albert Groccia.

Both team, Visigoths, and team, 5 Guys, had Valencia professors among their ranks.

“It was rigged!” said Team Elmo competitor Hernan Perez with a laugh. “Age and PhDs was the one thing that the other teams had over us from the beginning.”

Team Elmo placed third in the tournament. For 12 rounds the battle raged on, and after Team Elmo’s elimination, the competition only got more stiff with the last round ending in a tie.

“We must go into sudden death,” said Groccia, as he calculated the final scores.

Each team climbed point-by-point toward victory, but in the end a single question about fine dining is what doomed 5 Guys who had dominated the majority of the game.

21 to 20. The Visigoths had won.

Half the room burst into raucous cheers.

“Well I’ve played in the last 20 tournaments,” said 5 Guys team organizer pro- fessor Ronald VonBehren. “Out of the 20 I’ve won 10, but this is the third time in a row that they (Visigoths) have won.”

“This is my sixth tournament and I think it all worked out well,” said team organizer of the Visigoths, Allen Dunn. “Our weakest category was probably science, but with our combined knowledge I think we did pretty well for ourselves.”

Osceola campus’ intramural program hosts a number of sports and gaming events every week and the details on their dates and times can be found on the campus’ activities calender online.