St. Cloud’s KVSC Gears Up for 39th Annual Trivia Weekend

ST. CLOUD -- Teams are strategizing, spies are gathering intel and secrets are about to be divulged, trivia is coming.

St. Cloud State University's campus radio station 88.1FM KVSC is hosting its 39th annual Trivia Weekend this Friday-Sunday. For 50 straight hours, teams will answer more than 450 questions. Jim Gray is the Operations Director for KVSC. He says every year the contest has a specific theme, based on current events.

"During an Olympic year, 2008, we had a sports theme. When 3D movies were a big thing we had a 3D theme and this year its international espionage. This is a theme that's actually been on the back burner and it really just came to the forefront this year, this is something people are talking about, these are things that are in the news right now. So, Codename Trivia: Strategies, Secrets and Spies is our theme for this year."

With nearly 500 questions throughout the marathon, Gray says only a portion of them will be theme based.

"The theme gives us a start point for a lot of the questions, they aren't exactly linked back to the theme. In fact, we usually say not more than 20-30 percent of the questions are directly theme related. But if I'm going to ask you a question about history or science there might be a particular spin that we are going to put on that comes from our theme."

Behind the scenes, it takes hundreds of volunteers to help put on the event. Gray says without the volunteer support, KVSC wouldn't be able to host the contest.

"Over the course of the weekend, we'll have about 300 volunteers to pull this off. It starts with our normal radio operations, keeping stuff on the air. We have different shifts for people coming in about every two hours. There are two-three people on air every hour, it is a pretty intense on-air shift so we try to keep the shifts short."

Aside from the broadcasting side, several volunteers sign up to answer the phones, where teams are calling in to answer the trivia questions.

"I have 50 phone lines pulled into two of our computer labs here that runs our scoring system. So I have 50 phone lines where people will come in and answer the phones. It sounds like something that's not that enjoyable but it is a ridiculous amount of fun and we woo people in by offering food."

To keep up with feeding 50 or more volunteers every hour, three KVSC staff members are constantly running out to pick up food from area restaurants that partner with the station for the event.

On average, KVSC has about 60 trivia teams but Gray says over the years this number is going down despite that more people are playing the game.

"So what we see happening is teams are joining together and forming larger teams. I think at one point we may have had over 80 teams but those team sizes were in the 30s on the high end, now we're seeing teams in the 150 range with people who are involved on a single team because they were members of seven or eight teams only 10 years ago."

If you'd like to form a team, there's still time to register, just follow the link below.

The contest will wrap up with an awards ceremony in Ritsche Auditorium at 8:00 p.m. Sunday. The winning team will earn bragging rights and the Minnesota Masters of Trivia Traveling Trophy. The trophy displays the names of every trivia team who has won over the years.