By Mike Steely
Senior Writer
steelym@knoxfocus.com
The Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl, which pits teams from 44 high schools across our region, begins its 42th season on East Tennessee PBS TV today. The 5:30 p.m. program is hosted and written by Frank Murphy and features outstanding high school students from the surrounding counties and Whitley County, Kentucky.
Teams of four students answer a variety of questions ranging from literature to religion and each game is a single-elimination match. Winning teams advance in the brackets and the final two teams compete for the Frank Miller Memorial Trophy and a cash stipend
Murphy is returning for his tenth season. Recent winners of the Scholars’ Bowl include Webb School, Hardin Valley, J. Frank White Academy, Maryville, Cedar Springs Home School, and Farragut High School.
The Focus asked Murphy about the show and the students.
In your years hosting and producing the show, were there some surprising moments?
One year the students from J. Frank White Academy kept asking me to go to lunch with them after recording their episodes. I said I wouldn’t go during the season, but they got me to promise to go to lunch with them if they won the championship. I got the Chicken Parmigianino at Olive Garden.
I’m flattered and tickled when the students use their introductions to make a comment about me. Some have mentioned my neckties. Some have teased me about jobs from my past that they read about on Wikipedia. This year, one student from Science Hill High School told me that Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl was the first American TV show she saw after her family immigrated. She said it helped her learn English.
Before each game, I try to give the students helpful advice. I tell them that they will look better if they sit up straight. I tell them it’s better to take a guess than to say nothing. No answer always means no points. As a result, the team from Unicoi High School would often say “Robert Frost” when they didn’t know an answer. It got a laugh but it also caught on and other schools started doing it. Not every time, but often enough to be noticeable. I have to keep myself from busting out laughing if a team gets an actual Robert Frost question wrong because their reaction to hearing me say, “No, it was Robert Frost” is priceless.
Which school has won the most each year?
Because it’s a single-elimination tournament, whichever team wins the championship has to win all their games. In the ten years I’ve been hosting, some schools have won the championship twice, including Webb, Hardin Valley and Cedar Springs Home School Group.
How has the show changed over the years?
I think the biggest change is the ability to watch several of the previous seasons on the PBS app or website. The students can use the older shows to study and prepare. They are also more prepared for the player introductions and interviews. Many of the teams coordinate a funny response as they are being interviewed. For example, the four members of a team might decide in advance to all tell me their favorite cheese. Or they might tease me as I mentioned above.
The online streaming numbers for Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl spike every October and November, which is when we record the next season. In the waiting room you might see students huddled around a phone watching an old episode on the PBS app while another group of students is huddled around a different phone watching a different episode of Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl.
When my son was a contestant on the show twenty years ago, each episode only aired once or twice. East Tennessee PBS now airs the show weekdays at 5:30 p.m. all year long. The newest episodes are first broadcast in January, February, and March and are then repeated over the summer. During the rest of the year, they rebroadcast past seasons. Rebroadcasts of Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl are also included as part of a two-hour block of programming called “Teaching Tennessee” on six PBS stations statewide: WNPT Nashville, WKNO Memphis, East Tennessee PBS, WTCI Chattanooga, West TN PBS, and WCTE Upper Cumberland. Tennessee Scholars’ Bowl airs statewide weekdays at 10:30am ET (9:30am CT).
Another way the show has changed is the way we organize the questions. When I first started, I was reading some questions from the same slips of paper that had been used by previous hosts Hop Edwards, Jim Kuehn, Diana Morgan, and Sandra Allyson. Of course new questions get added each year too. The toss-up and bonus questions were unrelated. For example, a student might buzz-in to answer a literature question and then get hit with a pre-calculus bonus question.
Two years ago, at the start of the 40th season, my wife and I took on the task of putting the questions into a database and organizing the questions for each episode so that a toss-up and its bonus come from the same category. That year we also started attaching the coordinated toss-ups and bonuses to blue cards with the Scholars’ Bowl logo on the back, which are visible as I’m reading.
What part do the school’s advisors play in prepping the teams?
Each team’s coach works differently. Some seem to focus on Scholars’ Bowl and study past seasons. Some seem to have a broader approach as they also prepare their teams for other competitions like Science Bowl or Ethics Bowl. Ideally the coaches should balance their team by having at least one student who is good at math, at least one who is good at history, and so on. The coaches also decide whether or not to keep the starting lineup or put in some of their alternates at halftime.
Some coaches seem to be more competitive than others. For example, they might challenge a decision by the judges in a close game. Those challenges are handled off the air so as not to eat up the time on the clock. Each timed half runs for nine-and-half minutes.
I don’t have all the details but Ernie Roberts was contacted by a student at a school that had lost their advisor. Ernie told the student what needed to be done and they were able to get an advisor and go on to win several games in the tournament.
Any comments on this year’s matches?
I noticed a couple of students who rang in too early because they had memorized a question from a previous season and didn’t know that I had added a new question with a similar structure. For example, “Who was the first president to (do whatever)?”
This year I decided to ask the captains of each team to say something at the end of each match. It gave them an opportunity to congratulate their opponents and to compliment their teammates or vice versa. I think it adds a nice touch.
I worry that my friends will get tired of me asking them for ideas for new questions. However, a few of them submitted batches of questions and I put their names in the credits as writers.
