A Chapel Hill team took home the national title at the Middle School Quiz Bowl Championship Tournament last weekend.
Smith Middle School of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools joined 158 of the top teams in Rosemont, Illinois for the competition and ultimately made history by finishing the tournament with an undefeated record en route to the title.
Team A — consisting of seventh-grader Om Dessai, and eighth graders James Li, Alex Wright, and Ahadi Yara — qualified for playoffs after an eight-game winning streak in the preliminary round. The group did not drop a match out of their 15 opponents, having to come from behind to win both the semifinal and final games. Yara was also honored as an All-Star for correctly answering 55 tossup questions and earning extra points in the preliminary rounds.
Bratton Holmes coached the students, as well as Smith Middle’s other team that finished 33rd in the competition. In an interview with 97.9 The Hill, the Latin teacher recounted the record-breaking run and shared details on how each member of the A team developed to sharpen their strengths and work together to be a cohesive unit.
“I’ve been doing this for a while, and I’ve gotten to the point when I can recognize that a team is really strong,” Holmes said, having been involved with the quiz bowl program for more than a decade. “I did sense that this group had a chance to do a lot of damage at that tournament, and they ended up exceeding my expectations.”
The academic, interscholastic activity blends individual competition and team collaboration. Teams use buzzers to answer questions about science, math, history, literature, mythology, geography, social science, current events, sports, and popular culture. Founded in 1996, National Academic Quiz Tournaments hosts middle school, high school, and college quiz bowl championships across the U.S. NAQT also provides questions to invitational tournaments, league championships, and television shows throughout the year.
The Smith Middle School A team wins the 2025 Middle School National Quiz Bowl Championship Tournament and poses with family members and coach Bratton Holmes. (Photo via NAQT.)
Smith Middle School’s winning team, from left to right: James Li, Ahadi Yara, Alex Wright, and Om Dessai. (Photo via National Academic Quiz Tournaments.)
The middle school tournament’s field featured teams from 27 states and South Korea, and Smith Middle sent two teams to compete on the national stage. Smith Middle’s B team — consisting of Srinidhi Iyer, Sadie Struckmeyer, Abdullatif Tuna, and Eric Zhang — had their own fair share of fireworks. After starting the preliminary round with a 1-3 record, the team rattled off four consecutive victories to qualify for the playoff round. Both of the B team’s losses were by very narrow margins, as it fell to Meadows B from Las Vegas 210-205 in Round 15 after picking up its a 315-290 loss in Round 5 vs. Johnson from Fairfax, Virginia.
The win is the Smith Middle program’s first national title after having placed in the top ten three other times, with its highest finish being fifth. In the 11 years under Holmes’ leadership, the program has won the North Carolina quiz bowl title seven times.
Holmes said he believes as academic feats are now more widely recognized and celebrated, he thinks the Smith Middle A team’s performance will be one for the ages and he hopes the students will parlay their excellence into many other ways through their lives. He added that the experience seeing each one find their strengths and work as a team to reach the highest award was a fitting reward for everyone.
“Watching the kids, particularly those eighth graders who I’ve watched since sixth grade and [seen] them develop, has been really remarkable,” Holmes said. “These kids have achieved something and set a record that, by definition, cannot be broken. It can only be tied — and I don’t know how long it’ll be before that happens. I am extremely proud of them.”
Editor’s Note: 97.9 The Hill’s Emma Cooke also contributed to this report.
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