By Blake Deshazo

The Selma Times-Journal

The Concordia College Alabama Quiz Bowl team is headed to the Golden State in March to compete in the 2015 Honda Campus All-Star Challenge National Championship Tournament.

The team will go head-to-head with 47 other quiz bowl teams in Los Angeles March 21-25 at Honda Headquarters.

“I am overly proud of this team,” said assistant coach Glenn King Jr. “They have gone beyond the call of duty to not only represent Concordia College Alabama academically, but they have also gone the extra mile to represent the city of Selma as well.”

Getting the chance to compete for the championship was was no easy task though.  The team had two ways it could punch its ticket to California.

The team could compete well in the National Qualifying Tournament at Alabama State University that was held in January, or they could win the “My HBCU Is a Winner” social media campaign.

Concordia’s team didn’t just perform well in the qualifying tournament, where they compiled a 4-1 record, they also beat out 67 other teams to win first place in the social media campaign, which guaranteed them a spot in the National Championship Tournament.

“I wanted to ensure that we went,” said Dr. Chinwe Okeke, the team’s head coach. “I believe in our team, but I wanted to make sure that we crossed our t’s and dotted our i’s.”

This marks the second year in a row the team has won the social media competition to get the opportunity to compete in California. The team is looking to redeem itself for last year’s performance.

“We were new last year. We had one victory,” Okeke said. “We beat Grambling State in a preliminary round, but we were very new, so we were kind of getting our feet wet. But we are expecting to have a really good showing this year.”

Winning the competition could bring home a $50,000 grant for Concordia, but to earn the prize the team must prepare for the challenge.

“We practice twice a day, four days a week, so we’ll probably be stepping up our normal practice schedule,” Okeke said. “We do a lot of study guides. We study current events, we study a database of questions that the program provides for us and we create our own questions. We do a lot of different things to prepare.”

Okeke said she is also showing her team a little tough love to get them ready for Los Angeles.

“I fuss at them a lot, and it is all out of love because I know how good they are,” Okeke said. “I don’t think they realize how good they are at times, and so it’s just really rewarding for them to be able to go again and show people it wasn’t an accident that they are getting a chance to go again.”