Paly’s Friends of Millard Fillmore Club fell to fourth place in its annual trivia hunt, which began on Friday and ended after last night’s adjudication ceremony at Carlmont High School.

Paly amassed a total of 366 out of 500 points to receive fourth place behind Castilleja High School, which took first place in the competition. After Castilleja came Woodside High School in second place and Carlmont High School in third. According to senior co-captain Vienna Tran, Castilleja, Woodside, and Carlmont scored 409, 407, and 376 points, respectively.

At the adjudication ceremony, participating teams debated over their answers to the trivia questions, while also attempting to find faults in other teams’ sources and bibliographies.

According to Tran, Paly lost points after failing to turn in the required documentation for two bring-in items on time, which led to a 24-point deduction from the team’s overall score.

“We had to turn in the actual bring-in [item] last night, but we didn’t turn in the documentation,” Tran said.

In addition, the team was unable to find documents to support every one of its answers, and made a few mistakes in the bibliography, Tran said.

According to Tran, the team had initially hoped to repeat its win from last year’s competition, in which Paly placed first out of six other high schools.

“As defending champions, we were obviously hoping to get first place,” Tran said, “but we realized that a significant portion of our answers didn’t match [the correct answers], and that we didn’t have enough documentation for the ones that we actually did answer.”

Sophomore team member Ryan Brenner was also surprised and disappointed to hear the results.

“We definitely didn’t know that we were going to be in fourth place,” Brenner said.

Although Paly came into the tournament with significantly fewer members on its team than other schools’ teams, Brenner believes that the team’s size was not one of its main problems during the event.

“If the team is too big, it gets to the point where there’s a lot of people who don’t do anything,” Brenner said.

Ultimately, Tran believes that the team could not have avoided many of its errors, and is proud of the group’s effort.

“I don’t think there was much that we could have done differently,” Tran said. “I think that each individual on the team did the best they could and put in as much time and effort as possible. They were amazing and we appreciate them so much.”

Editor’s note: Seniors Michael Bloch, Anna Bastidas, and Vienna Tran are staff members of The Paly Voice.