All the Alumni Layers

GDS Alumni Carry Yale to Back-to-Back National Championships in Quizbowl

When Yale freshmen and GDS classmates Arthur Delot-Vilain ’21 and Matthew Siff ’20 led their team to the national championship in Intercollegiate Championship Tournament in quizbowl, their GDS classmate and GDS quizbowl alum Nathaniel Rosenberg ’20 wrote the story for the Yale Daily News. 

Then, not even two weeks later, Arthur helped carry Yale’s team to victory in the Academic Competition Federation’s national championship in the undergraduate division. Nathaniel, once again, had a front-row seat for the win and wrote the story of the back-to-back wins for the school paper, the first time Yale has won two in a row in eight years.

Each story—and the path to a national championship it describes—captures far more than the minutiae of quizbowl. There was some parallelism in each, from travel woes and rising to the occasion under pressure, and Nathaniel helps the reader get to know the players’ personalities as well as their journeys to the national championship titles.

In the second tournament, Arthur missed the first day of competition after his flight from New Haven to  Minneapolis was delayed 12 hours. But Arthur’s arrival for the second day brought more than just quizbowl talent—a refrain not-at-all uncommon when learning about GDS alumni. Nathaniel wrote: 

The team was greeted with even more good news when Delot-Vilain arrived that night.

“I think the whole dynamic kind of changed a little bit when Arthur got there,” Sheinberg told the News. “Like obviously he’s really good at quizbowl, but also he’s just a funny guy. There’s a little bit less pressure on the three of us.

With the resumption of play on Sunday, it was clear that a Yale team featuring Delot-Vilain was much stronger than the one from the day before.

Perhaps with this most recent victory—likely the last of the year—Nathaniel can get back to his usual beat, writing about housing and homelessness for the Yale Daily News.

Congratulations to the winners!