When others were referring to Aadi Arya Karthik as a top 3 generational player in high school quiz bowl …
The best players since where Matt’s post ends (2016-present) were Arya Karthik, Clark Smith, and Hari Parameswaran.
Arya’s Lambert team won the 2022 NSC with Arya leading the field in prelim PPG and being 2nd overall. More impressively than the ppg imo, they had 90 powers in the 16 non-finals games (and then 11 more against the other two best teams in a string of 3 wins..), while the next closest had 59, so basically 2 powers/game more.
… Aadi Arya was happy to point the spotlight on others.
Note the qualification: “best high school quizbowl player” could mean best at the high school game, or most competitive at three- or four-dot difficulties. Both, I think, are reasonable ways of adding specificity to the question – that is, those people who claim that high school quizbowlers should be judged simply by their performance at high school quizbowl are wrong, given the attitudes of most elite high schoolers toward college quizbowl these days, and their frequent participation in even three-dot tournaments (and also the existence of NASAT).
I don’t think it’s proper I share my thoughts here in this regard, but I believe these two criteria would create nontrivially different lists. To reiterate, however, the former list would at this point undoubtedly be crowned by Rohan.
Aadi Arya Karthik 