Our first real practice began. The captain and coach would grab a book, then give a quick overview of each book. The group would then give their opinions on the book. Not everyone talked about every book because only the captain had read all of the books. I was the only one who didn't talk at all. I only read one book, and it wasn't chosen. I guess they didn't want to talk about a 50 page book.
Afterwards, it was decided that we would have a mock competition of 3 on 3. The parents got really excited. This is what this team was all about. The captain was given the responsibility to sort the teams. I thought she would make the teams somewhat fair. I was foolish. She chose the next two highest scorers on her team, and us bottom three on a team. Oh well, I got ready for a butt kicking.
The rules were simple. There were a bunch of questions in a box. Answer a question, get a point. If a player fails to answer the question correctly, the other team is allowed to answer the question to get a point. First team to 10 wins.
It was decided that the weakest member go first, and the strongest member be the anchor. I was chosen to go first. My team wasn't going to win. I just hoped that the game would be short as to save us from the embarrassment. And so the game began.
The coached whirled her hand in the box and pulled out a card. She asked me a question. I could the see looks of disgust from my teammates and their parents. They gave me no chance of answering the question. If I were a betting man, I would agree with them. However, the question the coach asked just happened to be about the one book I read. I got the first point of the game. Sweet!
The other team got question 2. To my astonishment, it was also about the same book, and they got the answer wrong! I quickly answered. 2-0 underdogs!
I would have been happy getting beat 10-2. I got my two questions, I can relax knowing I didn't embarrass myself. Little did I know, luck was going to fall in my favor some more...
The rest of the questions that were drawn that day required us to simply match authors with books titles. As I said before, I just studied that, and I had a knack for memorization. For some reason, the captain's teammates missed all of them. I took advantage and answered them all. My teammates went 0% as well, but with a 2-0 lead, the captain couldn't catch up. The underdogs beat the captain's stacked team. The little scrub just shocked the Dewey Decimal out of the preps.