Merrimack High Defeats Kingswood Regional High

(DURHAM, February 6, 2022)  -  Granite State Challenge defending champs, Merrimack High, defeated the Kingswood Regional High in the first round of the 40th season of Granite State Challenge.

The first game of the season pits Kingswood Regional High School against Merrimack High School.  Playing for Kingswood High were Captain and senior Aubrey Overall, senior Juliet Bonnevie, sophomore Tyler Olkkola and senior Braden Viands, The team alternates were sophomore Preston Mills and senior Emma Scott. The team is coached by John Struble. Kingswood Regional High School is located in Wolfeboro and enrolls around 804 students.

Playing for Merrimack High were Captain and junior Jack Pikora, senior Connor Bobbitt, junior Aris Corman-O'Reilly, junior Alli Pikora and alternates junior Rainier Murray and sophomore Kishan Sreenivasan. The team is coached by Sara Campbell and Liz Dumais. Merrimack High is located in Merrimack, NH in Hillsborough County and enrolls around 1,170 students.

Granite State Challenge is played in four rounds.  In the first round of the game, correct answers are worth 10 points and there is no loss of points for an incorrect answer. Jack Pikora of Merrimack put the first points on the board by correctly identifying Styx as the river Thetis dipped Achilles in to make him immortal.  Kingswood got its first points when senior Juliet Bonnevie identified Peanuts as the comic featuring Marcy, Lucy, Sally, Woodstock, and Linus.  Merrimack played a strong first round and led by a score of 170-30 going into Round  2.

In the second round, correct answers are worth 20 points and there is no loss of point for an incorrect answer.  Kingswood captain, senior Aubrey Overall, quickly picked up 20 points for her team by identifying Albert Einstein as the scientist known for special relativity and general relativity.  sophomore Tyler Olkkola of Kingswood put 20 more points on the board for Kingswood when he named Groundhog Day as the movie featuring Bill Murray as weatherman Phil Conners.  Neither team could finish the proverb "familiarity breeds contempt." Merrimack's Connor Bobbitt put 20 points on the board when he named pandas as the 1972 gift to the U.S from China. the next question was the Unitil Power Question worth double points. Unfortunately, neither team could answer the question:  In 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, this musician shocked his fans by “going electric.”*  Merrimack went on to answer the rest of the questions in the round and ended with a score of 350-70.

The third round of the game is the Three Strikes and You're Out Round. Each team picks a 10-question category and each team member, starting with the captain, gets one question. The team continues to answer questions until they miss three questions. Each team also has three passes in each round.  If a team answers all 10 questions correctly, they pick up an additional 10 points.

Kingswood chose the category "Hip Cat " in which all of the answers were famous felines. They correctly identified nine out of ten famous cats and picked up 90 points, missing only on Mr. Bigglesworth as the hairless cat companion to Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies.

Merrimack picked the category "In the Pink" - the answers to all of the questions in the category included the word pink. They correctly identified the Pink Panther, Pink Floyd, pink eye, and the Pink Ladies from the movie Grease but missed on the animated series Pinky and the Brain, the John Mellencamp song "Pink Houses" and the movie Pretty in Pink,  ending their round with a pickup of 40 points. At the end of the round, the score was Merrimack  390 and Kingswood 160.

In the final round, correct answers are worth 20 points, but an incorrect answer will cost a team 20 points and leads can be quickly lost or gained. Merrimack lost 20 points when Jack Pikora incorrectly named bats instead of bandicoots, as a nocturnal marsupial omnivore found in the Australia–New Guinea region, but he got the points back when he identified the Taj Mahal as a monument built as a memorial built by Emperor Shah Jahan to his wife Mumtaz Mahal. Senior Juliet Bonnevie of Kingswood came right back and named Serena Williams as the tennis player with 23 Grand Slam singles titles, one fewer than Margaret Court, who has 24. Merrimack junior Aris Corman-O'Reilly correctly identified the patella as the kneecap and George Elliot as the author of Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and The Mill on the Floss, and then calculating the area of a rectangle with a width of 6 inches and a length of 8 inches, picking up a quick 60 points for her team. Jack Pikora and  Alli Pikora answered the next two questions correctly adding another 40 points to the scoreboard for Merrimack. In the end, Merrimack won the round and the game by a score of 570-200

Merrimack now moves on to the quarterfinals where they will meet either the Academy for Science and Design out of Nashua or Plymouth Regional High on April 9 at 6 pm on NHPBS.

Granite State Challenge features New Hampshire's top high school academic quiz teams as they demonstrate remarkable teamwork, quick thinking, and smarts to beat the clock and buzz in first on this iconic New Hampshire game show. The game emphasizes quick recall of math, science, social studies, language arts, and fine arts facts - along with questions about current events, entertainment, sports, and New Hampshire.

You can follow your favorite team, test your own knowledge with GRANITE STATE CHALLENGE online quizzes, and more at the GRANITE STATE CHALLENGE web page or try your hands at daily brainteasers on the GRANITE STATE CHALLENGE Facebook page.

GRANITE STATE CHALLENGE is funded by lead sponsor Unitil; with additional funding from NEA New Hampshire, Safety Insurance, New Hampshire Lottery, D.F. Richard, Cognia, and HRCU.

Pressroom Contact

Carla Gordon Russell
Director of Communications
crussell@nhpbs.org
(603) 868-4339