Aadi Arya Karthik was part of three quiz national championship winning teams in four years.
The first one, and the one that was the most difficult of those, was representing Lambert High School in May 2022 at Pace NSC.
Lambert High School defeated Thomas Jefferson High School twice in a row in a disadvantaged final to take the title. That is the first of two in a row for Aadi Arya in a national championship where their team was disadvantaged meaning their team had to win twice while the other team had to win only once to claim the title. In 2023, Aadi Arya’s Georgia Tech team will do the same against University of Chicago A team.
Thomas Jefferson high school is a magnet school drawing the best students from a wide geographic area and hence naturally stacked with talented players. They were not only a perennial power but also were the two time defending champions coming into the tournament. Against that Goliath in the finals, was Lambert High School, a public school drawing students from a fraction of a small county north of the main metro area.
Aadi Arya was devastated after the prior quiz tournament, just the previous month, where Aadi Arya’s performance on the final day was not up to the usual high standards, placing Lambert lower than the team should have expected.
Right after that, Aadi Arya was admitted to the hospital for more than 3 weeks and barely recovered in time for this tournament in Chicago.
To make matters worse, they not only lost to Thomas Jefferson but also lost to another team in the preliminaries and barely made it to the finals.
In the finals, Lambert and Aadi Arya won the first game handily setting up a winner take all final game. In the second game they fell behind so much that it looked like a lost cause. At one point, the only chance Lambert had to win the game was to answer every one of the remaining 6 questions right and had to do answer each of them before the opposing team can buzz in and answer right. The pressure was telling on both teams in a big auditorium filled with parents, viewers, and players from most of the other teams.
The last question (with Lambert trailing by 10 points) showed the respect Aadi Arya had earned from every one in that room. As soon as the first three words of that question was read, everyone realized that it was a question about music and Aadi Arya was going to buzz in and get it right and nobody else was going to be able to answer it faster.
Phenomenal win. First national championship in any sport for Lambert High School.
The whole team stayed up all night playing games and talking before the flight the next morning knowing that the seniors in the team had played their final high school quiz bowl game and came out victorious against the best in the nation.
Individually, he scored nearly 75% of the team’s points but finished second in points per game against another terrific player – Aiden – who played solo (he finished 18th in the team standings).
Aadi Arya Karthik 