The Credit Union Quiz was on for the first time in 4 years a few weeks ago. I’m going to tell you my experience there.

The quiz was for 4^th, 5^th and 6^th class. Since a lot of people wanted to do it, we did trials over the course of 3 days. We had 10 question rounds at big break8. On the 4^th day we were told who got on the teams .There were 4 people per team. Once we were told who got on the teams and the subs for the junior and senior teams, were eventually told our teams. My team consisted of Elliot, Cathal, Danny and me. The other senior team consisted of Eva, Lleyton, Christopher and Emma subbed for Patrick Deay. One of the junior teams was John, Oliver, Emily and Layna. Along with Hannah, Eire, Maddie and Florrie on the other junior team.

Next we started practising with our teams at big break. Those practices had questions such as ‘From which tree do we get acorns from?‘ (oak) and ‘where will the 2028 Olympics be?’ (Los Angeles). After a couple of practices, we were given sheets on a topic to become an ‘expert’. In my case I got ’animals’ and ‘poets and authors’.

After all that, it was finally Friday evening. As normal, me and Emma were picked up from Irish Club and we arrived at my house since we had to bring her to Tullow Community School for the quiz too.

Eventually, it was time to leave the house to go to the quiz, as we drove through the gates of the Community School, I was a little nervous, but mostly excited!

Quite a soft, but busy atmosphere welcomed us in as we walked through the main entrance. Then we found our teams and chose a table. We picked our table close to the prizes. We were given 12 sheets as there were 12 rounds for the senior teams (10 for junior teams).

The questions got harder for the last two rounds which is when I was pretty sure we weren’t tied for first anymore (we’d been tied since round 3).

At the end of all the rounds they were still calculating the scores so we had about 10 minutes before they revealed the scores. Three of the junior teams were tied so they had to have two tie-breakers.

Then eventually he announced the winners in each category (juniors and seniors). Second place wasn’t announced so we had to find out ourselves that we came second! The team who won beat us by 3 points (Ballon NS).

And that was my experience at the Credit Union Quiz 2024. It was a lot of fun and a great experience.