The Quizbowl Resource Center

cchiego

A few comments on some of the biggest MSAs missing QB to help nudge any outreach efforts in the right direction: #13 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA -- This is AcaDec land. I once contacted a coach of a "trivia team" at a school in Riverside who expressed some interest at first but qu...

cchiego

Also, they'd probably be a good host if we ever want to do a tournament for both CO and UT teams, as they're about halfway from Denver to Salt Lake. There are plenty of local Knowledge Bowl-playing schools near Grand Junction like Fruita Monument and several other former NAC attendees who would be ...

cchiego

After going to PACE and getting thwomped, I can confirm that losing at PACE is more fun than winning at NAC. Any coach that subjects their student to :chip: is not teaching their students anything about actual learning and is rather giving their team a false sense of security in their abilities. Es...

cchiego

IHSSBCA has All-Sectional and All-State Teams, and qualifying to play at NASAT is also treated as an honor. We also have a Coaches Hall of Fame and a Friend of Scholastic Bowl that goes to adults who are not coaches. Starting next year, we are likely to have a Coach of the Year. All of these awards...

cchiego

With the increased number of teams coming to nationals and the limiting factor of only one team being able to win, I wanted to throw out some ways to help increase the number of recognition opportunities in quizbowl to encourage teams of all levels to keep coming and competing. The ideal here is to ...

cchiego

Knowledge Bowl ended with a posthumously cancelled final after they realized that multiple questions read in the final had been read verbatim earlier in previous matches. Who on earth could have forseen this happening??? Of course, this happened after White Station lost in the semis despite getting ...

cchiego

I'd strongly encourage people to donate to this--it got completely ignored in the national news, but the floods were absolutely devastating around MO and Northeastern Arkansas in many small towns.

cchiego

Thanks so much, Chris. We've been trying to do this without telling schools that they're doing it wrong (I only use the term "bad quizbowl" within the established community). You make a great point about big-name schools being perceived as elitist; I didn't even consider this. We'll try t...

cchiego

Does anyone have any advice on convincing schools to try pyramidal/"good" qb? That's awesome that y'all are going to try to do this! CO is definitely ripe for hosting more pyramidal tournaments given the many teams who play KB. Definitely search through this forum (especially in the theor...

cchiego

a tournament my team plays in October can't be publicly discussed until July (and then only if we ask nicely). It seems that this could easily be avoided, independent of all the other concerns, by setting up private discussion forums for various NAQT sets (for example, an IS-166 Private Discussion ...

cchiego

The best solution here would really be just charging more up front in terms of entry fees (with of course considerable first-time team discounts) while posting more questions from previous years. SCT and ICT are both well-established, well-attended events. The service and product that NAQT provides ...

cchiego

As someone who has been listening to Avery's crummy questions at my sister's IESA events, I can only hope this means his company will kick the bucket and maybe a good middle school writer will get the job. One can dream right? I think a lot of the crappy quiz bowl companies are struggling to make e...

cchiego

The basics : It helps to be affiliated with a current college or high school (ideally on the team or advising that team in some fashion). This gives you a bit of credibility that being just a random person would not have and also may help keep your email from getting stuck in spam filters with a sc...

cchiego

Pulling this out of the gutter: does anyone know if Nebraska has moved toward good questions? A few of the ESUs (Educational Service Units) that run tournaments in the interior of the state seem to have experimented on NAQT questions over the years, but it hasn't really stuck and most seem to be fi...

cchiego

If the choice is between the handful of schools that previously showed up to NAQT State tournaments and the 24+ schools competing in this new event on pyramidal questions, then there should be no question--this is a great deal for pyramidal quizbowl! Yes, worksheets are not ideal, but if this is tru...

cchiego

Just to update with a few other episodes: I really enjoyed this Quizbowl Economics (Quizonomics?) episode that we just recorded and thought it might bring up some interesting discussion points. Note that it's fairly long, so we provide an index to the major topics covered at different time periods o...

cchiego

In the course of looking for previous academic competitions here in Philadelphia, I came across some interesting bits of history from College Bowl Valhalla. "Quiz shows" in general, as anyone who has read the work of Salinger (or who's read Ken Jennings' "Brainiac") can probably ...

cchiego

Did the Westfield Quizbusters show in Nashville get cancelled? I can't find links to it on the CW 58 site and it's not on the NAQT listing. I assume the PBS show in Knoxville is still going? Knowledge Bowl on WREG in Memphis of course is still going strong at 30 years. Gotta say--other TV stations n...

cchiego

Cody wrote:Hot take: closed tournaments are closed and open tournaments are open.

If you need to play under a pseudonym or lie on the forums, ya dun goofed.

Or you could just play a high school tournament as a college. A high school tournament that's a 4.5 hour drive away.

cchiego

They have been claiming in those letters for several years now that they're now pyramidal. I saw a copy of that "sample" last year and based on some comments from others I think that same "sample" has been going around since 2013. Here, by the way, are some actual Questions Unlim...

cchiego

Y'all are preaching to the choir here. You need to go to your school admin and/or the school board as a unified group of as many students and parents as possible. A group of a dozen parents with their kids politely angry and organized to speak at a school board meeting or in a principal's office see...

cchiego

As of right now, there has only been one NAQT-formatted tournament within 3 hours of Memphis, that being ours (White Station's). There have been several others, but they're off the radar of most Memphis-area teams: Poplar Bluff in MO (2.5 hours away) hosted their yearly tournament on NAQT and Itawa...

cchiego

Full stats for the tournament are available under "Stat Reports" here . The final standings in each division (which aren't on the stat reports) were: Open Division: 1. Manheim Township A 2. Great Valley A 3. Lehigh Valley 4. Delaware Valley A Novice Division: 1. Downingtown West 2. Manheim...

cchiego

I have confirmed with all teams in the field and have sent out a final logistics email. We will not be expanding to 42 and will instead remain at 36 teams due to a lack of enough competent moderators in the area. Teams on the waitlist are welcome to stay on it in case a team drops; I will contact th...

cchiego

11. These organisms are infected by the tapeworm D. robusta, and their milk contains the cathelicidin saha-CATH5, which kills MRSA. The strong jaws of this organism are similar to those of the hyena, an example of convergent evolution. These organisms are most closely related to quolls within the f...

cchiego

Can I see round 11 bonus 3? It went Laurens/Lee/South Carolina, and if I remember correctly it mentioned South Carolina in one of the first two parts of the bonus. Round 11 tossup 15 should include Groundwork FOR the Metaphysics of Morals as an acceptable answerline. Round 7 bonus 5 had The Pilgrim...

cchiego

To talk about the episode itself, I'm particularly interested in following up on talk about making better alumni databases. Does something like that exist already, and if not, is there any reason why we don't? An alumni database would indeed be a good thing. The big question is who would have acces...

cchiego

But how were teams seeded initially? I'm asking specifically about high school teams. In my opinion, the brackets were not really fair, especially before Delaware was moved following complaints. You averaged 13 PPB and finished 3rd in your bracket. That was exactly in line with the seeding. I'm not...

cchiego

2. The pneumatic behavior of these things can create so-called blowholes, such as the one in Lion's Den of Cornwall, England. The height of these things is multiplied by lambda squared and divided by h cubed to calculate the Ursell Number, which is used to classify their complex behavior in nonline...

cchiego

Also, I would like to ask again: what metrics were used to seed teams for this event? This is worth an explanation. I had gone through and carefully seeded a 30-team schedule the night before the tournament. We printed out those schedules because everyone had confirmed by then and there were just a...

cchiego

Just plan on lunch to be during rebracketing and communicate this to teams in advance so that they can stock up on food/snacks beforehand if need be. I always recommend snacks for quizbowl tournaments anyways after seeing the dramatic effect eating an apple had on Eric's playing ability a few years ...

cchiego

In the tossup on absinthe in literature, the short story "Hills Like White Elephants" is clued. While the story's characters do, in fact, drink Anis del Toro (identifiable as absinthe based on the fact that it's drunk with water and tastes like licorice, and further by the fact that the w...

cchiego

I think Noah's right that quizbowl is being "undervalued" in some ways because most of us would rather, say volunteer for free to help make a tournament happen rather than demand higher wages. Perhaps we could get more people over time with payment, but then you get into the problem of man...

cchiego

The set ran for the first time on Saturday, and I think overall it went quite well. We've corrected a number of grammar issues and clarified/added alternative answers to a few answerlines based on how they played at the mirror here in Philadelphia. If teams who played at the Illinois site want to pr...

cchiego

This is exactly the right attitude to have and it's great to hear that you took the right things out of your tournament experience yesterday! Many former NAC schools have joined the regular quizbowl circuit in recent years including past NAC powerhouses like Manheim Township, High Tech, and others. ...

cchiego

We are more than halfway to our goal of 42 teams with 2 months to go. I'm going to soft cap at 36 total teams since I want to be sure of our moderator situation and I'd like to reserve a few spaces for new teams that I've been in touch with that are in the process of forming right now. On that note,...

cchiego

Just casually looking at other schools...neither Bearden nor Central has attended an event in the NAQT database since 2010...Webb or Grace Christian hasn't since 2011...West hasn't since 2012 Data is similar for other area schools...Powell, Dobbyns Bennet, Lenoir City, Gibbs, Halls, Maryville, etc....

cchiego

Given that Neg5 is a giant leap forward for quizbowl in every way except for the stats output at this point, can some kind of collaboration between Mostafa and NAQT be accomplished here? If I have to deal with any more poorly-entered Google Sheets at tournaments, I'm going to go insane. Quizbowl in ...

cchiego

Just wanted to remind NY and Jersey teams that Philly is like an hour's drive and there are tournaments coming up on October 8th ( novice-only at Carver HS on the PA Novice set) and October 22nd ( varsity and novice at Friends Select on IS-159A). Make your own Crossing of the Delaware and come visit...

cchiego

Everyone's least-favorite bad quizbowl question "writer" just sold out to Avery Enterprises. Let's hope that might be an improvement for IESA since Avery, at least, seems somewhat aware of pyramidality and the importance of avoiding hoses.

Also, apparently Albania has quizbowl? Who knew.

cchiego

Running Field Update (as of 12/1) Total: (36/36) Field Cap Reached Open (12): Great Valley (2) Lehigh Valley Downingtown East Manheim Township Carver E & S Central Bucks East Friends Select Wissahickon (2) Delaware Valley Lakeland Novice (24): Great Valley (2) Downingtown East Manheim Township (...

cchiego

This is awesome Kyle. There are so many ways that you could use this--as a weekly class activity in a high school class, as a starter for a college lecture as students come in, etc. Keep it up!

cchiego

The quizbowl team at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce our second-annual Quaker Fall Open, to be held on the Penn campus in Philadelphia, PA on Saturday, December 3rd. Divisions and Questions : This tournament will have two divisions: Open and Novice . The Open division will use ...

cchiego

I still run high school tournaments on principle, and maybe if it expands to more schools, we might get a few people to come here (or possibly to nearby schools). I think this is really the key to the rest of the problem. If high school quizbowl in Idaho is limited only to a few top high schools an...

cchiego

Trying to start and keep a team going without an active circuit in the area is going to be very difficult. I think in addition to trying to get a team going at BSU, you're going to need to work to get at least 3-4 other colleges within reasonable driving distance to start teams. I know it's a huge p...

cchiego

I have no intention of saying goodbye from the community for a while longer, but I wonder if, as my generation moves on, this might not be a time to assess the state of the game. Are we on a sustainable course? Are we developing enough new writers to pick up the slack as older editors move on? Are ...

cchiego

Last week I asked a couple of top quizbowl players this very question. Here's the podcast of the three of us talking about various strategies for improving at history.

cchiego

Please click this link for the full list of scheduled quizbowl tournaments in Pennsylvania in the 2016-2017 school year. We will happily update with any date claims or work with teams interested in hosting (we have a few additional first-time hosts that we're working with around the state not announ...

cchiego

It is a tricky transition to play on both circuits, mainly because there are no negs on the NH Circuit. Players used to buzzing without penalty in NH find that to be a very poor strategy in pyramid-structured questions. You don't have to use negs in pyramidal tournaments; it's totally fine to make ...

cchiego

Thanks to the tireless efforts of coaches and players who stood up for good quizbowl, the City League (where La Jolla plays) has now switched to NAQT questions. This is a good reminder to people around the country that positive change can come to even the seemingly most entrenched leagues with enoug...

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