NYU

New York University
Location: New York, NY
Current President or Coach	Andrea Ladino
National championships	None
NAQT Page	link

New York University (NYU) is a private university whose main campus is located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The team, nicknamed the Violets, is active in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regional circuits and regularly hosts collegiate tournaments.

History

Early history and College Bowl

NYU has a long history of competition in collegiate quiz bowl events. In the 1959–60 season, NYU played four games in the televised rounds of College Bowl, beating Dartmouth (215–145), UNC Chapel Hill (230–120), and Oklahoma (170–150) before losing to Colgate (95–140). The four games were broadcast on consecutive weeks (March 20, March 27, April 3 and April 10, 1960). In the 1969–70 season, they once again qualified for the televised rounds but lost their first and only game to UConn, 165–345. [1]

NYU won College Bowl's Regional Championship (for ACUI Region 3) in 1986–87, 1997–98, and 2001–02, and finished third in 1985–86, 1999–2000 and 2000–01.[2] NYU qualified for the National Championship in 1997–98, when they finished 14th with a 2-13 record, and 2001–02, when they finished 11th with a 6-9 record. [3]

In October 1996, NYU College Bowl representative Petrea Mitchell announced that NYU had de-affiliated from College Bowl Inc. for financial reasons. However, this decision was reversed a few months later. NYU continued playing CBI tournaments through at least 2002.

Independent quizbowl and early tournament hosting

Beginning in the late 1980s, NYU regularly took part in and hosted collegiate quiz bowl tournament outside the College Bowl circuit. The second issue of Buzzer, a early newsletter for the quiz bowl community, notes that NYU participated in a tournament at University of Maryland on November 13-14, 1987, where they finished outside the top four.

The earliest known tournament hosted by New York University was the NYU Invitational in Fall 1988. The exact date is unknown, but since other tournaments were scheduled for mid-November (Terrapin Invitational at Maryland) and "winter" (Nittany Lions Invitational at Penn State and Wisconsin Invitational at UW-Madison), it is presumed the tournament took place in September, October or early November. An NYU Invitational was also announced for 1989 (date implied to be February 3-5). It is unclear if the 1988 tournament was simply postponed to 1989; although the mention of two different tournament directors (Keith Reynolds and Kim LaFond) suggest they were separate events. A Google search for Kim LaFond indicates they worked at the Office of Residential Life before leaving in 2000 for a job at Oberlin College. No records of results or statistics survive from either of these events.

The alt.college.college-bowl Usenet archives on Google Groups indicate that school had an organized quizbowl presence by the fall of 1993, with two individuals, Jodi Cramer and Steve Zwanger, listed as contacts.

In April 1994, NYU College Bowl president-elect Jason Beckerman announced that a packet-submission tournament, the Big Apple Bowl I, will be hosted at NYU on October 7-8, 1994. The tournament was to follow a modified CBI format and include packets with 30 tossups and 30 bonuses each.

NAQT involvement

NYU played in the first ever National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT) Sectional Championship Tournament on November 22, 1996, at Harvard University. The two NYU teams finished 16th and 18th out of 19 teams. A post on Usenet indicated the tournament was well-received by NYU players, and they indicated an interest in playing NAQT Nationals.

NAQT extended an invitation to NYU to fill out their 64-team roster for the inaugural Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, but it appears that NYU declined or failed to show up.

In 2000-01, the NYU team won Division II of NAQT Sectionals 2000-2001, held at Boston University, and thus qualified for ICT, where they finished 20th in a field of 24 teams.

NYU won the 2012 NAQT SCT Region 3 (Division II) hosted at Princeton University and thus qualified for ICT. An NYU team comprised of Mirza Ahmed, Jason Lai, Max Stivers, Katrina Van Laan and Michael Zhuang finished runner-up at ICT (Division II), losing the final to Harvard.

In 2013, NYU finished in second place at NAQT SCT (Region 1) at MIT and went on to a ninth-place finish at Division I ICT.

Since then, NYU has regularly qualified for ICT in Division I and II, and finished as high as 4th place in each (Division II in 2024 and Division I in 2025).

ACF involvement

In their first appearance at ACF Nationals in 2013, NYU finished 18th in a field of 36 teams, in what was to be the last tournament for A team players Yogesh Raut, Jason Lai, and Michael Zhuang. NYU has consistently qualified for ACF Nationals since then, but never finished higher than 18th place.

Other tournaments

An NYU team composed of Mirza Ahmed, Yogest Raut, and Douglas Yetman also won the college division of the 2012 Ridgewood Summer Invitational.

Nationals Results

	ACF Nationals	Division I ICT	Division II ICT
2001			20th
2012			2nd
2013	18th	9th
2014			13th
2015	27th	14th
2017	29th	19th	17th
2018	31st	11th	18th
2019	38th
2023	44th
2024	18th		4th
2025	25th	4th

Current players

• Zaid Asif
• Rico-Ian Banting
• Vinayak Singh Bhadoriya
• Saketh Dontaraju
• Jacob Hardin-Bernhardt
• Nate Kang
• Andrea Ladino
• Elle Lee
• Owen Mimno
• Chansol Park
• Eshan Pant
• Ryan Rosenberg
• Hazel Singh
• Magnolia Schnirman Barria
• Rishi Swaminathan
• Arthur Zhang

Notable former players

• Evan Adams
• Mirza Ahmed
• Sameen Belal
• Lev Bernstein
• Aaron Cohen
• Halle Friedman
• Harrison Hsu
• Jason Lai
• Rahul Rao-Pothuraju
• Yogesh Raut
• Doug Simons
• Arnav Sood
• Max Stivers
• Rohan Vora
• Alec Vulfson
• Harrison Whitaker
• Michael Zhuang