Monday night's episode of Jeopardy! opened with the usual introduction of the day's three competitors but it featured words that had never been said before in the history of the long-running game show.
"A medical student from Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, this is Matthew Church."
Church started with a poker face but couldn't hold it in, bursting into a big grin by the end of his introduction.
And then host Alex Trebek started the game and Church, Prince George's first-ever Jeopardy! contestant, not only couldn't stop smiling, he couldn't stop offering the right questions for Trebek's answers.
The 26-year-old Duchess Park and UNBC grad crushed the defending champion and the other competitor, winning $24,000 on the way. He actually was so far ahead of the other players that he bet nothing in final Jeopardy! and still won. Church added insult to injury by knowing the answer to the last question when the other competitors didn't.
Last night, he defended his title, adding $5,000 more and will look to become a three-day champion on tonight's episode.
Church's intelligence was already well-known to many local residents, long before this week's appearance on the popular American game show. In 2005, his high school graduation year, he received the Canada Millennium Scholarship and the B.C. Premier's Excellence Award, presented to just 15 B.C. students each year. UNBC also gave him its Scholar's Award, waiving his tuition for his undergraduate studies. He kept up an almost perfect academic record on his way to a Bachelor of Science degree.
Intelligence is not Church's best trait, however. He's actually best known in Prince George for his volunteerism. While still in high school, Church was an active participant in the hospital's Junior Volunteer Program and went on to serve as the coordinator of the program.
He is a former president of the Prince George Road Runners Club (he ran two marathons before finishing high school) and was a coordinator for the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. He served for four years as a trustee with the Prince George Public Library, two of those years as vice-chair of the board , where he helped present the library's annual budget to city council. He is also a founder of the library's successful Youth Advisory Board.
He is a past judge of the Central Interior Science Exhibition. He served for two years on the Mayor's Committee on Youth.
By the time he was 24, Church had received the City of Prince George's Outstanding Community Service Award and was the youngest-ever nominee for Citizen of the Year.
These days, Church is a medical student at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont. As he informed Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek on Monday, he hopes to eventually become a cardiologist.
I was fortunate enough to serve with Church on the library board. When I first met him, I made the mistake of thinking he was just the token youth representative on the board who wouldn't know much about library policy and governance. By the end of the second meeting, I realized it would be me learning from him, since he had already taken on the thankless job of trimming the library's policy manual in half.
As usual, he did an excellent job and the editor in me praised him for his fearless hacking away of all of the unnecessary verbiage and redundancies. The current library board and administrators have Church to thank for a policy document that offers ongoing clear direction on proper library management.
He has done well representing Prince George, as this city's first-ever Jeopardy! contestant, but there's far more to him than being able to recall obscure facts under pressure about Laos and the Hoover Dam.
He doesn't just believe in knowing things but also in doing things, to make his hometown and his world a better place to live.
His Citizen of the Year biography called him "a role model for young and old."
That's an apt description for someone whose devotion to learning and to personal excellence has taught the rest of us some things about caring and community spirit.
