Lexington High School’s quiz team will return to your television screens on April 5, showcasing trivia skills on GBH’s sixteenth season of High School Quiz Show.
Alongside 16 other local high schools, LHS’s team competes to answer trivia questions in four different rounds of the buzzer-style competition: a “toss-up” round, a “head-to-head” round, a category round, and a lightning round. Teams get eliminated as the show progresses in the same way March Madness works. In the end, two teams will go head to head.
Lexington has won on three of the show’s seasons, including in 2024 when the team defeated the prestigious private Buckingham Browne & Nichols School. LHS is the show’s winningest team.
Sound stressful? Alvan Hossain, a sophomore on the team, said it’s actually not. LHS’s past successes gave him “reassurance” that the team could “thrive” this year.
While the program is a competition, “that feels secondary,” Josh Olivier-Mason, one of the team’s coaches, told LexObserver.
“Sometimes it can feel like you’re pushing and pushing and pushing to get into a certain college and everything you’re learning is a means to an end,” Olivier-Mason, who is also an English teacher at LHS, said. “What I like about this group is it feels like we’re learning for its own sake.”
Hossain is joined by seniors Atreya Mallanna and Owen Jiang, and sophomore Shishir Bharadwaj on stage this year. Juniors Eric Zhang and Adam Tzafiri are alternates.
Mallanna, who has been on the team since his freshman year, decided he wanted to compete in the tournament after watching the show as a child.
“When I was younger, I didn’t only watch Arthur and Curious George, but also things like Quiz Show, because it appears on PBS,” he said. “From a very young age, I knew that I wanted to join the team.”
During his first year on the team, Mallanna competed virtually due to COVID, which he said was awkward. But after two years of on-camera practice, he felt confident and a “sense of calm,” this year.
“You have your teammates with you, you have the audience there, it becomes less and less nerve wracking,” he said. “Especially the fact that we’re a team together, just working collectively, that makes it less intimidating to know that we’re in this together.”
The public can attend the tapings of the show in January. Some schools pack buses full of friends, family, teachers, and mascots to support their home teams, Hillary Wells, the show’s executive producer, told LexObserver.
“The audience brings incredible support, energy, and a love of learning,” she said. “Its hard to describe the energy because it’s got its own feel and flavor, but it’s a real feel good experience.”
Because the show airs from February to May, the winner of season 16 is still under wraps.
Members of Lexington’s team study the recordings of prior seasons and compete in “knowledge quest” competitions, as Olivier-Mason put it, to prepare for GBH’s competition.
Two of the team members compete in Quiz Bowl club, an academic quiz tournament where students compete against other local schools, Jiang said. Last year, Hossain’s Quiz Bowl team made it to the national tournament. LHS also has a Science Bowl and a National Ocean Sciences Bowl team.
The team members each have their own niche, Jiang said. Mallanna is really good at geography, history, and sports and Bharadwaj is really good at literature.
“They really communicated a lot in preparation, so I think that [was] really helpful for [their] success,” Olivier-Mason said. “The team itself is sort of independent of me. I feel like the meetings we have are mostly organizational.”
Olivier-Mason also said that learning the cadence of Joe Hanson, the show’s host, and how to use the buzzer are other skills the team works to perfect.
Wells said GBH’s High School Game Show was born out of seeing how students’ athletic achievements were being celebrated in the media more than the achievements of students who had other interests.
“This is an opportunity for their whole community…to support them and to have this platform has been really wonderful for students who don’t feel like they have their people or their niche at their school,” she said. “Not only are they finding people who have similar interests, they’re getting validated for their academic interest which can be tough in the school environment.”
To qualify to be on the show, school teams must take a 50-question quiz on GBH’s “Super Sunday” in the fall. Seventeen teams make the cut.
You can watch GBH’s High School Quiz show on GBH 2 and the High School Quiz Show YouTube channel on Saturdays at 6 PM.
Congratulations to the whole team!!
All the Best!