Reach for the Top

I started writing this post on September 12, 2002, with the intention of completing it shortly thereafter. Three-plus years later I still haven’t, but I might as well get this part of the story out there… and who knows, maybe I’ll rediscover the story in another three years and finish telling it.

For the last few months I’ve been using a quote from Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip as my e-mail signature:

I’m not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.

I use the quote because it’s accurate: among other things, I’m a serious trivia geek.

I’m a serious competitive trivia geek. As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in facts—I think a lot of it comes from having two teachers as parents, because both of my siblings have a similar bent—and for six years, from Grade 8 through to Grade 13, I was in my element as a member of my schools’ quiz teams.

It helps that I had some early success. I was on the first Super Quiz/All Star Quiz team from Warwick Central Public School with my teammates and friends Jon Craig, Susan Hoeksema, Scott Burchill, Bob Bork, Jeff Frayne, and Peter Agocs, all coached by Frances O’Neil… and we kicked ass, winning the county championship in our first time out. I don’t have tape of any of the televised games, but I do have a photo on the set of our team playing against a group of people I’d eventually be teammates with in high school.

(It’s also that group, plus Shelly Demers, Jodi Cable, and Pam Wilcocks, that built a computerized buzzer system for the school and won the computer science prize at the county science fair… despite discovering halfway through that the person we had doing wiring was colourblind!)

I was hooked.

I’d heard from my father that there was a team at North Lambton Secondary School that had some pretty good players, and soon discovered he was right. Murray Watson, Jason Dodge, Ian Coulthard, Gary Peters and Bev Rider were forces to be reckoned with; Murray and Jason had been recruited years before by Roger Harrington, who’d just given up the coaching position to Ann Walker. Also joining the team that year were Maryann Moons and Dave Mallick, who I’d played against in elementary school. The intermediate team (grade 9 and 10 students) did reasonably well in county competition, as did the seniors, but Sarnia’s St. Clair Secondary—henceforth known as the enemy—won the county.

In Grade 10 I was introduced to Mark Lade—current voice of the TD/Canada Trust automated banking system—who hosted CFPL-TV’s regional Reach for the Top competition. To this day I can recall his distinctive voice at will, and not simply because of what I’ll write about later. CFPL, a former CBC affiliate, had kept Reach running after the main corporation cancelled it nationally. North Lambton hadn’t been in regional televised competition for several years for a variety of reasons, but we managed to back-door our way onto the show.

I graduated to the television team, with Murray, Jason, and Ian, for our wondrous return in a first-round game against London Central—henceforth known as the enemy—in November 1986. That we lost. By 70 points, given up during the snapper round at the end of the show. We were finished.

Well, not quite. The less-glamorous (i.e. non-televised) county School Reach competition remained for the senior and intermediate teams. (School Reach and Reach for the Top are run by the same organization.) By April the seniors (with Gary) had won the county, allowing them (with alternates Maryann and yours truly) to compete in the Southern Ontario School Reach competition in Windsor. That we won. By 5 points. On the final question. Which meant two things: we were going to provincials… and we were going to be on CFPL again.

A couple of things have changed since I wrote that part: Warwick Central has closed, and CFPL was bought by CHUM and renamed to The New PL, and then again to A Channel. Neither is particularly relevant to the story, except as trivia… which was kinda the point.