Page High School’s Battle of the Books team traveled to University of North Carolina at Greensboro on March 4 to participate in the regional competition. Page went against fifteen other teams from Guilford County high schools to answer questions about the books on the official Battle of the Books list. The team consisted of eight members: Paige Azzarita, Jada Copper, Meagan Gutheil, Logan Moy, Sophia Robertson, Anne Spong, Alex White, and David White. Mrs. DeLellis, Page’s librarian, organized meetings, t-shirts, and competition information for the team and even brought snacks at all of the weekly meetings! At the competition, the sixteen teams were split into two rooms. In those rooms, teams competed, each participating in seven rounds of six questions, to get into the finals. Two teams were brought to the center of the room while the other six teams in the room watched. The teams taking their turn chose six members, the maximum number of members on a team was twelve, to go to the front of the room where they sat at a table in front of a panel of judges and a moderator that asked questions. The two teams took turns answering questions about any of the fifteen books that they were asked to read. The teams had to answer a question by identifying the book that the quote or scene was from. Participants received three points for answering a question correctly and identifying the author, they received two points for getting a rebound correct, and they received two points for answering a question correctly but not getting the author correct. Rebounds are questions passed to the other team on stage if the question is answered incorrectly or the time limit is not met. Page got second place in the semi-finals next to Northern, meaning Page was able to advance to the finals. The top four teams from each room, adding up to a total of eight teams, advanced to the next round, and their points were reset.

After lunch, Page went to the finals. First, they watched other teams take turns since they were not scheduled to compete for a couple of rounds. Immediately, the team recognized that the questions were much harder. Team Captain Anne Spong said, “The questions had varying levels of difficulty in both rounds, so it kind of just depended on which level of difficult question you got. They were all randomly mixed together, so the moderator just went down a list. She didn’t intentionally pick difficult questions for the second round, but, overall, the questions in the second round seemed more difficult…So I guess the questions in the second round were just more extremes of what they had been.” When the team went up for their first round, they missed a decent amount of questions, putting them on the bottom of the leaderboard. The first few rounds were rough, but they quickly gained momentum in the second half. Page was the last team, alongside Northwest, to participate in a round. If the team answered every question incorrectly, they would have dropped to 4th place. However, they had a good round and beat Northern out of 2nd place! In the end, Grimsley won first by one question, Page won second, and Northern won third. This was Page’s first time that they placed since 2014 when the team won third, so it was no surprise when the team captains, Paige Azzarita, Meagan Gutheil, and Anne Spong who had participated in Battle of the Books for all four years of high school, nearly cried tears of joy. The team, including Mrs. DeLellis, was called down to get their medals and a plaque for the school shortly after answering their final questions.