Jan. 9—Cooperstown Junior-Senior High School emerged as the winner of the Upstate Academic Competition Tuesday, Jan. 9, the first of two quiz-based tournaments for high school students planned for this year at SUNY Oneonta.

Seton Catholic Central in Binghamton came through as the runner-up. The second competition is scheduled for May, though a date has not been announced yet.

Now in its 17th year, the all-day competitions are organized by Catskill Area School Study Council — a partnership between the SUNY Oneonta and area school districts, serving schools in the Otsego Northern Catskills BOCES and the Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego BOCES.

On Tuesday, the tournament drew 20 teams from 11 schools, testing the knowledge of about 120 student in areas like geography, science, literature, art and pop culture.

The teams compete one-on-one played with a buzzer system, answering questions in 30 to 45-minute sessions and advancing in a score-keeping bracket by process of elimination.

Some schools pulled their teams out of the competition early due to the anticipated snow and rain.

Event host Brooks Sanders, who was a contestant on quiz show “Jeopardy!” in 1995, researched and wrote the questions for Tuesday’s competition.

He traveled up from Florida to participate, asking questions of students on a homemade game show set.

He said he’s been involved in academic competitions since 1978, when he taught broadcasting at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

“We started a competition called High School Challenge that served as a training ground for students in communications and broadcasting,” he said. “I’ve always loved this kind of competition. I start with what I know, and if it’s something that I know, I figure they should know it.”

He said that in crafting questions, he tries to meet students where they’re at, taking out foreign language and adding more questions about pop culture in recent question sets.

A team of four seniors from Oneonta High School won the first round on Tuesday, including returning competitor Andrew Web.

Last year, Oneonta made the semi-finals.

“I just had a great time last year,” Web, 17, said. “It’s fun seeing how much you know about all these different topics, and you also get to hang out here all day with your friends.”

Eli House, 17, said that the topics are varied.

“It can be all over the place,” he said. “It could be baseball knowledge, and then it could be, ‘who was this British poet from the 1800s.'”

Newcomer Zachary Grygiel, 17, said he prepared for the competition by looking over quiz-style questions online to get familiar with the format.

Many of the questions require the the contestants to make connections, not just recite facts they may have memorized.

“We had a round where we had to answer 10 questions about things that sounded like football terms, but weren’t,” Grygiel said.

Last year, 18 teams from 13 school districts competed in the competition. Cooperstown won both the January and May tournaments, with Delaware Academy as the runner-up in January and Seton as the runner up in May.