Ever since I was in elementary school, I have had a significant interest in sports history. I was curious about when each team was at their best, how many championships they had won, and in how many stadiums the teams had played.
I grew up watching MLB and college football, and I got into the NFL and NHL later on. Around this time, I began creating lists in my Notes app about various sports statistics, such as every NFL team’s Super Bowl record. It became a hobby for me, an escape from the demands of my everyday life. There was just something missing, though: I did not feel as though I had a way to share my passion with like-minded people.
I would tell my friends about it, but unless they followed sports, they would have no idea what I was talking about. My family likes watching sports as much as I do, but they had definitely grown tired of listening to me ramble on about how [insert team here] was once known as [insert previous name here] before relocating to its current city.
When I was in high school, I started a trivia club during my senior year. A good chunk of our meetings consisted of me creating sports trivia quizzes on Kahoot that only I knew the answers to, not realizing that I was probably the only sports fan in the room. It went about as well as you would expect.
In January, I began uploading quizzes about sports history to a website called Sporcle.com. I started out by creating quizzes about snapshots in a franchise’s history, such as the playoff opponents that a team faced during its time at a particular stadium (e.g. the Phillies’ playoff opponents while the team played at Veterans Stadium).
By this point, I had known about Sporcle for a while, but I did not know how to create a Sporcle quiz. After I finally figured out how to create a quiz and uploaded it, it was very raw and looked like something that was made over a decade ago.
This quiz was made in Sporcle’s Classic quiz format, which, as the name implies, was the original quiz format from the site’s launch in 2007. These quizzes feature lists of questions that, depending on the rules and options that the quiz creator has enabled, may involve some combination of forcing players to answer the questions in order, ending the quiz when a player answers a question incorrectly (known as a minefield quiz), or disallowing players from skipping a question. My first quiz initially had the no-skip setting enabled, which I was not aware of until a few days later. Oops.
I did not upload another quiz for about five days, as I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go with this. Obviously, I had to design the quizzes so that the colors matched the teams that the quizzes were about. Then there was the issue of time—how much time should I give for players to complete each quiz? You want to make sure that everyone has enough time to complete the quiz, but not so much to the point where the quiz is too easy.
In that time, I changed the settings on my first quiz to ensure that players could answer the questions in any order they desired; I have applied this to every Classic quiz I have created since.
After over a month of uploading Classic quizzes nearly every day, I discovered the joys of the Order Up quiz format. This format gives players all of the answers, but forces them to arrange them in the correct order within the time limit (hence the name). Players are given as many opportunities as there are questions to put the answers in the correct order, losing a point for every incorrect guess.
The Order Up format first launched around when I first began uploading my own quizzes, so I decided to take advantage of the hype surrounding this new format by uploading my own Order Up quizzes. This led to me creating quizzes for a data analysis project in my math class last semester, which became a great opportunity for me to share my love for sports trivia with my classmates and my professor. Someone in the class even played one of my quizzes, which was really cool to see.
Following a brief break from uploading quizzes, I picked up right where I left off. I polished up several quizzes that were in my drafts and released them publicly, and it was like I had not stopped contributing quizzes for two months. In fact, this batch of quizzes would become some of my most successful quizzes on the site to date, as one of them received a Curator’s Pick in Sporcle’s Sports Teams subcategory.
Sporcle is a fantastic website, as you can create and play quizzes about virtually any topic. In addition to the Sports category, there are 14 other quiz categories available: Entertainment, Gaming, Geography, History, Holiday, Just for Fun, Language, Literature, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Religion, Science, and Television. These can appear in the form of one of nine types of quizzes: the aforementioned Classic and Order Up formats, as well as Clickable, Grid, Map, Multiple Choice, Picture Box, Picture Click, and Slideshow.
Anyone can create a quiz about anything and everything, the possibilities are truly endless. If you have an idea for a quiz that does not yet exist, make it yourself! That was my reason for starting to contribute quizzes to the site, and it is why I have continued to come up with new quiz ideas whenever possible. I wanted to share the stories of the sports teams from the leagues that I grew up watching, which in turn helped me to share my own story with sports trivia.
So while I would not necessarily call this my “happily ever after” story, as I am nowhere near finished with contributing and playing quizzes on Sporcle, it felt amazing to finally find an outlet to share my passions for sports history and trivia all at once. Thank you, Sporcle, for helping me to realize my interest in all things related to random sports knowledge.
If you are interested in playing one of my quizzes, click here.
