"You Know" Scholarship

$1,000 contest really, you know, paid off for this middle-schooler Evan Koontz, a Pound Middle School student, won $1,000.00 in the Dollars for Scholars program.
BY ERIN ANDERSEN Lincoln Star Journal
You know, sometimes people have annoying little habits.
Such as saying the same meaningless phrase over and over again. Do you know what we’re talking about?
And then there are people—people, like, you know, Evan Koontz, who can turn someone else’s nervous “you know” habit into 1,000 bucks for you-know-who.
That’s just what this 15-year-old Pound Middle School ninth-grader did. And this month, $1,000 in prize money comes his way from the Vada Kinman Oldfield and Col. Barney Oldfield Nebraska Dollars for Scholars program.
All because Evan devoted a chunk of his day to counting how many times a Husker football player said “you know” in a two-minute, 15-second interview.
How many times? Thirty.
That’s nothing compared to the 117 “you knows” Col. Barney Oldfield heard in a 60-minute radio show years ago.
The You Know contest aims to raise awareness of the meaningless phrase among schoolchildren in kindergarten through 12th grade. Rules require students to count the number of “you knows” a person said in a 15-minute or shorter television, radio or newspaper interview. To save “you know”-ers embarrassment, their names are not released to the public.
Evan said the contest seemed like an easy way to win $1,000. So in 2000, he and his father, Al Koontz, started paying attention to people’s “you knows.”
It was Evan’s father who first heard the winning interview on KFOR in 2000. He got a copy of the tape, and Evan sat in front of a tape player counting and tallying “you knows.” Over and over he listened to the interview, marking each time a “you know” interrupted a sentence.
When he was confident with his count, he sent in his entry.
He didn’t win that year. But he was encouraged to try again in 2001.
And; you know, he was lucky the second time around.
Evan said he had all but forgotten about the contest until late February, when a “red slip” with his name on it was sent to his classroom at Pound. Evan was to report to the office. And he knew a “red slip” could mean only one thing: trouble.
“I got kind of scared,” he recalled. “I couldn’t think of what I had done. They took me into the back room and all of my teachers were in there. Then they told me I had won.”
To mark the day, the school gave him a certificate. And his father took him out to dinner.
The actual check comes this month at an awards luncheon.
So what’s this kid is going to do with his newfound riches?
“I haven’t decided yet if I should save it for college or put it in a Roth IRA.”
And as for those annoying “you knows,” well, he’s more aware of them when people say it.
But he says “you know” doesn’t seem to be a prevalent among his peers as another speech pattern—“dude,” as in “Hey, du-u-u-de.”
“That gets annoying after awhile,” Evan confessed.
You know, it probably does.
Read the "Thank You" note to Barney...	2000 Winner

 

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