Quiz Bowl season officially began on Saturday, and the Mexico High School academic team opened with a brand-new starting four.

Last year’s team, captained by 2025 Individual Player National Championship Tournament winner Andrew Peuster and his co-captain Camden Williams, saw one of the greatest successes in MHS academic team history. The Bulldogs brought home a state title, among other accolades, and they left some pretty big shoes to fill.

“We graduated our best class in history,” head coach Dale Schenewerk said. “We lost Camden (Williams), Andrew Peuster and Lucy Gleeson.”

The only returner from the A team this year is co-captain Hunter Feger, who will be leading this “new chapter” with returning competitor Andrew “AJ” Leon.

Feger was on a college visit during the first tournament, so Leon stepped up to lead the team in Saturday's tournament.

He was joined by returning seniors Jude Yance and Alexia Femrite, as well as junior Ash Lee and sophomore Trey Steelman, whom Schenewerk thinks could be their top scorer.

The Missouri Quizbowl Alliance-sanctioned Bulldog Fall Fiesta tournament brought 13 schools to MHS. Fourteen varsity teams and 12 novice teams competed.

The Bulldogs took fourth place overall in the varsity league.

“It’s hard to bounce back after such a good season, but these kids saw what it took,” Schenewerk said. “They’ve shown the ability to be resilient, and it’s a full team effort.”

That full-team mentality is what Yance sees as the team’s key to success.

“We’re clearly not going to be as good as last year, and hopefully this sends a message to younger people that it’s OK to not be as good as Camden and Andrew,” Yance said. “They were an amazing dynamic duo, it was great, but team dynamics, knowledge spread, stuff like that – it falls off when you have people like that.”

Yance, who specializes in history, said he would actually encourage people to not be as good as “super geniuses” Williams and Peuster because he thinks that people might stop studying areas outside their expertise.

The academic team refers to these players who are experts in multiple areas as “generalists.”

“Having the accountability of your team to sometimes pick up the stuff that you miss is a really great feeling, and I think that these incoming people can help build that team dynamic,” he said. “If everyone knows a little bit of something, that ends up being a lot.”

Co-captain Leon was in such a predicament last year. He said that his area of expertise is literature, and the breadth of knowledge between Williams and Peuster was the primary reason he was on the B team.

Leon has been focused on studying literature since he was a freshman, and now he has the opportunity to showcase what he has learned.

“People just assume that we’re going to be falling straight off, but I do believe that we can somewhat fill the shoes,” he said.

And Leon is not without a generalist on his team this year. Femrite, who only competed once last year, is back full time and more than willing to fill in the gaps.

This first tournament was a little stressful, especially when his co-captain Feger wasn’t around, but Leon was still excited by the way his team was playing.