Moonlighting: Scholastic Bowl Coach

Moonlighting. It doesn’t have the bad rap it used to. Today people find ways to make a living and make a life. 

Moonlighting is our series about the radically interdisciplinary lives of Lehigh alumni who are successful in two professional areas, and where a secondary “job” is primarily fun and fulfilling.

In this edition, we meet an engineering executive who is also an award-winning scholastic bowl coach.

Nevagay Abel ’86
Electrical Engineering

Time at Lehigh
Growing up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Abel first set foot on Lehigh’s campus to attend short lectures for high school honor society events. Being familiar with the university made applying here easier, knowing she was interested in engineering. It helped that she had many family members who lived in Bethlehem. 

She began as a commuter student, living with her uncle’s family. But soon she had her own apartment on the Southside. When she needed it, her grandmother was always ready with a home-cooked meal and help with laundry.

She was on campus often, involved in the concert band. She was one of the few first-year students offered a chair in that group. She served as a student conductor for three years and played alto saxophone with several other ensembles. But her primary musical focus was the Marching 97. Her closest Lehigh friends played with the group and stood on desks during Eco Flame.

Professional Success
Abel was interested in management, but she started working at an industrial vacuum furnace manufacturer in Souderton, Pennsylvania. She earned her MBA at night in order to position herself for management. A vacuum furnace competitor recruited her, and soon she found herself in Rockford, Illinois. While she wasn’t keen on the move, she fell in love with the community, what it offered, and the proximity to bigger cities like Chicago and Milwaukee. It didn’t take long for her to feel right at home despite the amount of travel the job required.

In 2001, she focused on her family, becoming pregnant and having a son — now a student studying aerospace engineering. The city of Rockford is known as a producer of custom automation equipment. Abel jumped over to that field to work as a systems integration engineer. 

As her son got older, management again became the focus. She joined Quantum in 2006. In 2009, she managed the electrical engineering team. But acquisitions, co-locations, and restructuring as the company grew soon led her to oversee the mechanical, electrical, and quality control engineering teams as a vice president.

Scholastic Bowl
When Abel’s son entered high school, the coach of the scholastic bowl team retired after a 20-year career. A teacher stepped into the vacancy, and Abel offered to help at practices. After a year, the new coach stepped down. Abel applied to be an assistant coach since she was already doing that work. When no applicants entered the pool for head coaching duties, the school asked Abel to coach. While she was hesitant because she understood the amount of work and time it demanded, she agreed to lead the team. 

She set to work, creating greater depth to the team’s knowledge by studying more in the canon of topics — literature, sciences, math, history, and fine art. She was happy to inherit a team with one of the top players in the country. But that meant developing more talent in the younger grades. 

That year the team placed second in the state tournament and eighth at nationals. Since 2002, the team has placed fourth or higher in the state tournaments — which is quite a legacy to maintain.

She has done just that. In 2023, the team earned first place in the state tournament and 13th in the national tournament. The school put the team on a billboard in town to celebrate the accomplishment and held an assembly where the cheerleaders lauded the players and the student body watched the team battle (and destroy) a team of teachers. 

After the glories of last year, this year is a bit of a rebuild because the team lost three strong seniors. But Abel is working to add players, increase their knowledge, and find the best mix of minds to sit at the table together and compete.

Coach of the Year
In 2023, Abel was honored as Coach of the Year. The win was the result of a combination of several factors. She is one of the few coaches in the state who is not a teacher, has had sustained success at the state and national level, and continues to develop new players and keep the team competitive. 

“As a coach, I want the team to compete with stronger teams and push themselves to get better,” she says. “It’s not always about the win-loss record.”

Even after her son graduated from high school, she has remained with the team because of the excitement. “I enjoy seeing the kids do well — watching a new player win a tossup question or seeing the team get better and better,” she says. 

So, for two hours after school, she sits with the team to discuss current events and then fires up presentations to study topics like poetry, court cases, or electrical concepts. 

On a good day, she puts together the right team that faces question sets the students have studied. On a bad day, she reminds them that “it was in the presentation” and asks them to crack the books more. For a team that has won a televised state quiz bowl tournament 7 out of 10 years, she is clearly doing something right.