Whenever he hears a mythology question in a Scholar Bowl match, Ethan Vance gets pretty pumped up.

“I spent three years researching mythology,” the Wellsville-Middletown junior said. “It’s one of my favorite subjects, actually.”

Mythology has been Vance’s biggest strength since he joined the W-M Scholar Bowl team in January. He got a mythology question correct during a match against Clopton on Feb. 7 at the W-M school library.

“I like the symbolism,” Vance said. “It’s how most things in mythology have a real life basis and they explain some kind of phenomenon.”

This year, Vance is part of a team that has five new members, including himself, and two returning players from last year’s team that finished second in the Class 1, District 4 tournament.

“It’s different,” Vance said. “But I like it. It’s interesting and it keeps me occupied.”

W-M hosted a quadrangular match against Montgomery County, North Callaway and Clopton and lost all of the matches. It was the first time the Tigers played a match at home this season.

“It’s nice to play at our own library,” W-M coach Jon Deering said. “We like playing at home. Even though we didn’t get any wins tonight, we usually play a little more comfortably and a little more smoothly at home.”

W-M has a match on Feb. 21 at Bowling Green and will compete in the Eastern Missouri Conference tournament on March 7 at Wright City. The Tigers will travel to Clopton for Class 2 district tournament play this year after hosting Class 1 districts a year ago.

“It will be different not playing districts at home,” Deering said. “I don’t believe we traveled to districts during my entire time here.”

Juniors AJ Sherwood and Meagan Cripe are the returning players from last year’s team. Besides Vance, senior Xavier Baig, sophomores Hunter Bickell and Jonah Slovensky and freshman Jonathan Pike are the other first-year players.

“I think we have a pretty good group of kids this year,” said Sherwood, who earned all-district honors last year. “They’re all really sharp.”

So far this year, the Tigers have played three Scholar Bowl matches and got only their only win against Wright City.

“Definitely, our biggest strengths are in mythology and history, science and math,” Pike said. “Where we fall short most of the time are books and literature, poets, writers, authors and all of that. We fall short pretty much when it comes to remembering authors’ names and songwriters.”

In the quadrangular match, W-M lost 320-100 to North Callaway, 240-170 to Clopton and 340-120 to Montgomery County. The Tigers played without Cripe and Bickell, who had a basketball game at Van-Far that same night.

“We’re pretty young,” Deering said. “Varsity matches against bigger schools such as Montgomery County and North Callaway can be tough for a young team, but I was pretty happy with how they hung in there against Clopton. I thought we could have won that match.”

Vance, who transferred to W-M in the middle of last year, said he was influenced by Deering to join the Scholar Bowl team.

“It sounded very interesting,” Vance said. “I always loved playing Jeopardy or the little trivia games that go on your phone, so I thought it would be an interesting thing to just try. I stuck with it and it turned out pretty fun. I like it.”

Deering said he’s pleased with the way Vance has been performing after three matches.

“He’s been our second top scorer pretty much every time out,” the W-M coach said. “I’m pretty happy about how he’s playing.”

Slovensky has been pretty solid for the Tigers in the religion category. He said he is enjoying his time with the team after a month.

“It’s very interesting,” Slovensky said. “I didn’t think I would like it that much, but I have so far.”