Zanesville team wins National Bible tournament

ZANESVILLE – Competing against teams from all 50 states and every province in Canada, three students representing a church from Zanesville won the National North American Bible quiz tournament. Again.

Elayna, 19, and Torrie Glover, 17, and Tanner Carroll, 18, are all on the senior Bible quiz team at Anchor Church in Zanesville. Twenty-one kids are on quiz teams at the church, said Cyndi Bounds, quiz team coordinator, ranging from beginners to intermediate to the senior team.

Elayna, Torrie and Tanner have been quizzing, and winning, together for eight years.

“We’ve had six championships out of eight years,” Elayna said.

“They kind of made history,” Bounds said.

Elayna, Torrie and Tanner had to memorize 530 Bible verses from the books of John, John 1, John 2, John 3 and Revelation. They had to know and understand the complete context of every verse, so it wasn’t just straight “memorization.” A question might ask competitors to identify the “they” in a certain verse, but “they” might have only been identified six verses before, or in another chapter entirely.

Students can compete in the tournaments until they’re 18 years old. This was Tanner and Elayna’s last time at this particular tournament. Torrie is eligible for one more year. They said they felt good about what they accomplished while on the team.

“It’s still sinking in, like, did this really happen?” Elayna said.

Tanner said he would study two and a half hours each day to prepare.

He would focus on words that are only mentioned once and verses that contain animals or body parts or names, especially names. Elayna said they would quote verses at each other to practice.

The team, in addition to competing nationally, participated in state tournaments that took place every month from January to June this year. The Anchor Church senior team won all of them.

“I’ve been quizzing for 12 years,” Elayna said. Tanner, who is from Lifeway Church, joined the quizzing team at Anchor Church several years ago. He had no one to quiz with at Lifeway, Bounds said, so Anchor let him join its team.

Elayna said one of her favorite parts of competing was traveling. The national tournament this year was in St. Louis, Missouri.

“The competition is probably the best part for me,” Tanner said.

The national tournament was organized into a simple bracket, double-elimination style. There was no seeding, Bounds said, and placements on the bracket were determined by random drawing.

“There’s always the possibility that the two best teams in the country play each other in the first round,” Tanner said.

The first eight questions out of 20 in each round are worth 10 points, questions nine through 17 are worth 20 points and the final three questions are worth 30 points. Once competitors buzz in, they have 30 seconds to answer.

But Bounds said the caliber of competitors at the tournament is so high, that if they wait for the question to be read completely, they would miss their chance to answer first, so students have to anticipate the rest of the question and buzz in before it’s finished being read.

Bounds has been coaching the quiz teams at Anchor Church for years.

“I have a passion to see these kids learn in the word of God,” she said.

Bounds said it’s great that the kids at Anchor Church have done so well in the quizzing tournaments, but “trophies rust,” and the understanding that they now have of the Bible is the real prize.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a national champion,” she said. “You can’t take that away.”

At the tournament this year, Tanner, Torrie and Elayna competed against teams from St. Louis, Wisconsin, Ohio and California. Two teams from each state competed, as well as two teams from each of the Canadian provinces.

ksnyder2@zanesvilletimesrecorder.com

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Twitter: @KL_Snyder