For a team preparing to compete in a national championship, Harvard’s players seem remarkably laid back.

“We’re pretty mellow,” shrugs Stephen Liu, as the team’s starting lineup filters in 30 to 45 minutes late.

But the pace picks up when team member Stephen J. Morrison ’15 starts reading questions with the speed and precision of an auctioneer. Suddenly, the players eagerly lean forward, hands hovering over the table as they prepare to “slap in”—an imitation of the electronic buzzers used in official tournaments.

Stephen Liu, a physics concentrator, handily takes the first few toss-up questions on topics ranging from Norse mythology to modern agronomy.

But David J. Liu ’15, a member of Harvard’s “A” team, suddenly “powers,”—or buzzes in early for bonus points—a question about a symphony. His buzz comes too early for anyone else in the room to figure out the composer, much less the movement, as the team rounds out its first packet of questions.

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Players in the Quiz Bowl community say they think Harvard’s team dates back to the 1980s, but no one interviewed for this article was entirely sure. They won their first national championship in a tournament organized by the Academic Competition Federation in 1995, and picked up occasional titles in the early 2000s.

But in 2008—the year that Watkins joined the squad—the team embarked on run of back to back championships that would last until 2011.

By several measures, Watkins’s tenure on the team coincided with the program’s rise. Joined by two other celebrated Harvard players—Dallas R. Simons ’12 and Theodore J. Gioia ’12—Watkins played on Harvard teams that took home four national championship titles in three years.

In 2011, he helped Harvard become the first undergraduate team to win the NAQT’s Division I national championship, a title that had previously been taken exclusively by teams with more experienced graduate student players. All of these titles were revoked this past month.

But Watkins, who is now a graduate student at New York University, is long gone from the team.

The team is now coping with new challenges—specifically, the loss of Simons and Gioia, whose graduation last year left the team with holes to fill.

This year, a less experienced team led by Stephen Liu and team president Graham W. Moyer ’15 hopes to revive Harvard’s status as a rising Quiz Bowl powerhouse—without the taint of scandal this time.

“We’re definitely rebuilding, but it has nothing to do with Andy Watkins,” Stephen Liu says.

INTEGRITY IN JEOPARDY?

Rarely, a question will stump the whole team. When no one manages to answer a toss-up about American jurisprudence on eminent domain, Morrison tries to prompt his teammates.