CHARLEMONT — The Academy at Charlemont’s Quiz Bowl team recently participated in the 2026 National Academic Quiz Tournaments’ Small School National Championship Tournament, making it the only Massachusetts team at the national championship.
The team’s three seniors — Ivan Harder, Fallon Paxton and Lucas Tikkala-Cutler — were all on the team in 2025 as well, while seventh grader Urso Blackburn joined this year. The team finished 25th out of 66 schools in the national tournament’s Open Division, the same as in 2025, but Tikkala-Cutler noted the games were “considerably closer than last year.”
The Open Division welcomes schools that are not considered traditional public schools and have an enrollment of less than 350 students across the top three grades, up to grade 12. There is a separate division for traditional public schools.
The students say they each have specific areas of knowledge that they specialize in, but Neale Gay, the team’s coach who also serves as co-head of school for academics, college counselor and humanities teacher, said they are selling themselves short.
“They’re all generalists. They know so much about all of the content areas,” Gay said. “It’s not like [someone gets] a question here and there; I think it’s more than that. Even when we don’t know the answers to the questions, even when we don’t get called on, we’re buzzing in. It’s not as though the only questions we know the answers to are the ones they buzz in on time for, because they’re always buzzing.”
Quiz Bowl is different from other competitions that The Academy at Charlemont takes part in. For starters, the teammates can’t communicate with each other while answering what are called “tossup questions.” These are questions that are presented to both teams, with the clues at first being very specific, and eventually becoming clearer and more obvious. If a team answers correctly, it will be awarded points based on how quickly the question was answered.
Questions are not repeated from the previous year. Topics include science, math, history, literature, mythology, geography, social science, current events, sports and pop culture.
Harder said that, ideally, it should be difficult to prepare for a competition like this, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t study.
“[It’s] more that the game rewards constant curiosity about topics,” Harder said. “I also went through and made some notes on topics that I don’t know very much about.”
Harder is the team’s captain, and Gay said it’s the senior’s leadership that has made the team what it is today. Harder and Tikkala-Cutler joined the team two years ago, Paxton the year after that, and Blackburn this year after hearing an announcement at lunch.
The three seniors all have college plans, with Harder attending Amherst College, Paxton heading to Bard College and Tikkala-Cutler going to Wesleyan University. Gay hopes that all three will continue to do some form of quiz competitions, even if it’s just pub trivia.
“It’s fun competing in non-sports environments at the high school level,” Tikkala-Cutler reflected. “Throughout our education there’s a lot of emphasis on sports, but I think having an opportunity to not just succeed in the classroom, but to take that knowledge and meet other people and compete, and get that additional way to apply the knowledge that we have is really fulfilling and fun.”
The Academy at Charlemont was one of the smallest schools to compete in this year’s Small School National Championship Tournament, held in Rosemont, Illinois on the last weekend of April. With a student population below 100, the academy is almost always the smallest school in any competition. But for Gay, it’s an opportunity for the students to meet others with a vastly different high school experience.
“It’s really cool for kids at such a small school like ours to compete against students that go to larger schools,” Gay said. “We are a small community, we are a small school, and it’s great that students have the opportunity to get outside of our little community and forge these relationships.”
