Multi-championship achievements

Because quizbowl players enjoy analyzing exceedingly trivial things of this nature, there have been several attempts to recognize possible unique or milestone types of combinations of national championships that players or teams could win.

Classic Triple Crown

The term "Triple Crown" was popular circa the year 2000 to describe a set of three tournament titles: the NAQT ICT overall championship, the ACF Nationals championship, and the College Bowl national championship. Teams or players might be described as winning a "Triple Crown" in a career or a single year. As the NAQT ICT was only created in 1997, and College Bowl lost its relevance to quizbowl by the mid-2000s and ceased operating its namesake tournament entirely after 2008, the term had a limited window of currency.

The 1999 Chicago and 2002 Michigan teams won the single-year Triple Crown. Two other programs won the all-time Triple Crown: Stanford, by winning College Bowl in 1978, ICT in 1998, and ACF in 2010, and Virginia, which won the 2012 ICT, adding to their multiple 1990s College Bowl and ACF Nationals titles. Any team that won College Bowl before it went defunct could theoretically complete an all-time Triple Crown by winning ICT and ACF in the future. It is unlikely that any individual player will win a Triple Crown again, barring a former College Bowl champion returning to play in the modern age; Rob Carson, who played on the 2007 College Bowl and 2011 ICT championship teams with Minnesota, presumably stands the best chance as he need only win ACF Nationals as a graduate student.

Due to the variant styles from College Bowl to ACF Nationals with NAQT in the middle, those teams which had success at all three usually did so by fielding drastically different lineups at the various tournaments. Thus, Adam Kemezis, on the 2002 Michigan team, was the only individual player to win a Triple Crown in a single year.

At least eight other players, Jeff Bennett, Ed Cohn, Alice Chou, Mike Davidson, Susan Ferrari, Matt Lafer, John Sheahan, and Andrew Yaphe, have won a career Triple Crown. Bennett, Cohn, Ferrari, and Sheahan won all the relevant tournaments with Chicago, Lafer and Davidson did so with Michigan, and Yaphe and Chou each won the College Bowl and ACF legs at Virginia before winning an ICT (and additional ACF titles) with Chicago.

Modern Triple Crown

A modern interpretation of the Triple Crown might refer to winning the NAQT ICT, ACF Nationals, and Chicago Open in the same year, as those are clearly the three most prestigious and popular hard tournaments. No single school's team has done this (nor has any team composed of players from a single school ever won Chicago Open at all); the first individual to do so was Ezequiel Berdichevsky in 2005. In 2014, Virginia players Evan Adams, Matt Bollinger, and Tommy Casalaspi won the Triple Crown, joining forces with Dennis Loo at ICT and ACF, and Eric Mukherjee at Chicago Open; moreover Bollinger was the leading scorer at all three tournaments. Seth Teitler managed the lesser but admirable achievement of finishing second, to teams containing Ezequiel, at all three tournaments in 2005; Matt Jackson did the same in 2014.

Seven times, a player has finished first in two of the Triple Crown events and second in the third:

Ezequiel Berdichevsky (2001, 2nd at ICT)
Ezequiel Berdichevsky (2002, 2nd at Chicago Open)
Jeff Hoppes (2004, 2nd at Nationals)
Seth Teitler (2004, 2nd at Nationals)
Adam Kemezis (2005, 2nd at Chicago Open)
Andrew Hart (2011, 2nd at Nationals)
Matt Bollinger (2012, 2nd at Nationals)

Career Triple Crown

Career winners of the Modern Triple Crown (i.e. people who have won at least one ICT, ACF Nationals, and CO across their entire quizbowl playing careers), in addition to the four above, are Andrew Yaphe, Jeff Hoppes, Seth Teitler, Matt Lafer, Selene Koo, and Kevin Koai.

Additionally, Jeff Hoppes and Kevin Koai were both on championship teams at the Division II ICT in their freshmen years.

Grand Slam

This term was coined during ACF Nationals 2012 for a single player winning all four major overall championships in quizbowl--the high school PACE NSC and NAQT HSNCT and the top ACF Nationals and NAQT ICT titles--in a career. It would also be theoretically possible, but exceedingly difficult and unlikely, for a high school student with dual-enrollment college player status to win these all in one year. The only known player to have won the Grand Slam is Evan Adams (2007 HSNCT, 2007 NSC, 2012 (and 2014) ICT, 2014 ACF Nationals). The only player to have won three of the four legs is Shantanu Jha (all but HSNCT).

NAQT Levels

No pithy name has yet been coined for the accumulation of different levels of NAQT championship. Theoretically there are as many as eight national NAQT titles that a player could win over the course of his education (Middle School, HSNCT Small School (retired), SSNCT, HSNCT, CCCT, Top CC at ICT, Division II, Undergraduate, Division I). Out of these, the overall HSNCT title, the Division II championship, the Undergraduate championship, and the Division I championship are perhaps the most clearly prestigious for a single player.

Nobody has ever won all four of the major NAQT levels. Six known players have won three: Jeff Hoppes (Division II, Undergraduate, Division I); Chris Ray (HSNCT, Division II, Division I); Evan Adams (HSNCT, Undergraduate, Division I); Tommy Casalaspi (HSNCT, Undergraduate, Division I), Matt Jackson (Division II, Division I, Undergraduate, in that order), and Ashvin Srivatsa (Division II, Division I, Undergraduate). Both Ray and Casalaspi won their three levels in three consecutive years. None of the six players have eligibility remaining at the level they did not win, so someone else may eventually become the first four-level NAQT champion.

Double Undefeated

The next tier above winning both ICT and ACF Nationals in one year is for a team to do so without losing a game at either tournament. 1999 Chicago, 2002 Michigan, and 2007 Chicago are the only teams who have ever accomplished this.

High School?

Since the creation of HSAPQ's NASAT in 2010, it has been possible for one high school (or, more realistically, a player from one high school) to win three high school national championships in one year, or three throughout one's high school career (HSNCT, NSC, and NASAT). This could be considered a high school Triple Crown.

In 2014, Ben Jones and Arnav Sastry of LASA became the first players to win all of NSC, HSNCT, and NASAT in a single year. Jones had also been on LASA's national-championship NHBB team earlier in the year.

State College (played NASAT as Team Pennsylvania in 2010) and Ladue (played NASAT as Team Missouri in 2013) have won two of the three titles and finished second at the third event, during a year in which they attended all three. The only schools to unify the three titles across multiple years have been State College, which did so upon winning HSNCT in 2011, and LASA, which did so upon winning NSC in 2014.

External Links

The University of Chicago describes the 1999 team's Triple Crown