The Newcastle team in University Challenge has been knocked out of the competition after being beaten by Merton College, Oxford, following an impressive performance throughout the series culminating in their appearance in the semi-finals, a first in the team’s history.
The outstanding students with in-depth knowledge in a wide variety of fields representing Newcastle were Jack Reynard, Molly Nielsen, Jonathan Noble, and Adam Lowery. The four gained their places in the team in November 2016 after competition with fellow students for the prestigious places.
The Newcastle team’s performance at the semi-finals was followed by a series of wins with big margins against Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and the universities of Sheffield Hallam, Southampton and Bristol.
Adam Lowery told The Courier: “It’s a massive honour to be able to represent Newcastle at this level. It was amazing and exciting to get this far.”
The team’s performance was shown live in Luther’s Bar in NUSU as it aired on BBC Two on 16th April. After the show, Lowery said “it is also really humbling to see how many people turned up tonight and were supporting us, and throughout the entire process. Every time we had a live screening on, so many people turned up and that felt so good.”
Commenting on their head-to-head with Merton College, he added, “you meet a lot of the teams and the further you go on, the more you interact with some of the teams, and I think everyone on our team will agree that we got along really well with them.”
“We were obviously sad to lose, however we were very happy to get this far and to compete against such a great team.”
Merton College, Oxford, went on to take part in the final, and were defeated by St John’s College, Cambridge.
