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 continued playing College Bowl events until 2002. 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] Curiously, an alt.college.college-bowl Usenet post indicated that NYU had de-affiliated from College Bowl by April 1997; this suggests that the College Bowl participation in the following years were being run by student government or Office of Residential Life instead of a dedicated club.

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 held at 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 held in 1989 (no date given, but presumed to be in the spring).

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. 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.

ACF

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.

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