WKU Fall JV Tournament (10/29/2011)

[Rococo A Go Go]

The WKU Academic Competition Club will be hosting the an academic tournament for JV High School (freshmen and sophomores) quizbowl teams in Kentucky and Tennessee, although we'll welcome any team who wants to come here to play and hasn't seen the questions. This tournament will take place on October 29, which is just two weeks before Kentucky's annual JV Challenge tournament, and we encourage teams attending that to come to our tournament. I will be serving as Tournament Director. Feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions, concerns, or advice. We'll be sending out information to schools (along with a registration form that can be used as an invoice) in August.

This tournament will be hosted concurrently with a middle school division, which will likely be running in the same building on the same questions. This creates some space limitations, but we have decided to split the difference and cap the field for each division at 18 teams a piece. Because of this, schools are limited to registering one team until October 1, which is four weeks before the tournament. After that, schools can register as many teams as they want. Schools may express interest for additional teams to be put on to a waitlist, and then moved into the field if there is room in October.

Location: Grise Hall, Western Kentucky University (Bowling Green, KY)

Questions: Along with our Middle School division on the same day, this tournament will be a mirror of SCOP Novice.

Fee: $50 per team. Every team that attends must bring a buzzer system and a staffer. Normally we would not require all teams to bring staffers, but everyone should have older players who are not eligible to play this tournament, and we encourage you to bring them along to help us out. If they need convincing, let them know we'll feed them breakfast and lunch for free.

Payment: We would prefer you pay on the day of the tournament, rather than sending a check ahead of time. We will accept cash or check, and we can accept purchase orders I think. All checks should be made out to the Academic Competition Club.

Format: We will have a pool play format (probably pools of 4, 5, or 6 depending on field size) and will rebracket into another set of pools in the afternoon that are based on performance in the morning. This is the same format we have used at previous tournaments.

To register, coaches can e-mail me at [email protected]

[Rococo A Go Go]

Field

Calloway County
Danville A
Danville B
Daviess County
Dunbar A
Dunbar B
Dunbar C
DuPont Manual A
DuPont Manual B
Ezell-Harding (TN)
Gallatin (TN)
Graves County
Grayson County
Henderson County
Madisonville-North Hopkins
Oldham County A
Oldham County B
Owensboro
University School of Nashville (TN)

Expressed Interest

Portland (TN)

[Rococo A Go Go]

This tournament will take place in Grise Hall. The field is starting fill up quite nicely, so I'd like to remind everyone that teams on the waitlist will be entered into the field on October 1 if there is still space, and that the field cap is set at 18 teams.

[AustinlSmith]

Could we get a field update?

[Rococo A Go Go]

The current field can be found in my second post in this thread.

In keeping with the tradition of WKU Quizbowl tournaments conflicting with campus events and creating awkward situations, this time we are hosting this tournament on the same day as the State Marching Band Championships. In the past we have hosted tournaments at the same time as a circus and a 10K, so we are quite used to having to work around things. I will make sure to give everybody express instructions on where to park (some places on campus will be used for event parking for band, so unless you want to pay you need to avoid the garages) before the tournament. Because there are only so many places to park a bus, and a lot of places to park cars, I would encourage some teams to look into the latter form of transportation if possible. Also if possible, middle schools and high schools from the same district may do well to travel together.

[Rococo A Go Go]

We're at 19 teams now, but we have some space left because of decreased interest in the middle school division. If you're interested in coming, just email me and I can get you a spot.

[Rococo A Go Go]

Field (As of October, 26)

Calloway County
Danville
Daviess County
Dunbar A
Dunbar B
Dunbar C
Dunbar D
DuPont Manual A
DuPont Manual B
Ezell-Harding (TN)
Gallatin (TN)
Graves County
Grayson County
Henderson County
Madisonville-North Hopkins
Oldham County A
Oldham County B
Owensboro
University School of Nashville (TN)

If anyone's planning on dropping, now is the time to do it, I'd really rather not wake up Saturday morning with a bunch of bad news in my inbox.

[Rococo A Go Go]

This is a copy of the email I sent to all of the coaches earlier. The format listed is incorrect, we will work on that between now and Saturday.

First off, I would like to thank you for attending this Saturday's WKU Fall JV Tournament, we are looking forward to having all of your teams on our campus this weekend. Before I do anything else, I want to make sure everyone is on the same page. I have the current field listed here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11552#p227777 (If that's incorrect I seriously HAVE to know ASAP!)

Attached to this email is a map that should be able to help you get around to parking and things like that on Saturday morning, more on that in a bit. Most importantly, this tournament will be held in Grise Hall on WKU's campus. Registration will be in the first floor lobby of the building. We will be having registration from 8:30 to 9 AM. We hope to be done by 4 PM. At 9 AM we'll have an opening meeting while we are going over everything with coaches, players, and staffers. Speaking of which...

Every team attending this tournament needs to bring a staffer. Normally we wouldn't make this a requirement, but every school has juniors and seniors that aren't attending, so we encourage you to enlist them into service, although anyone else should work as well. Some of the staffers will moderate, others will keep score, even others may have both roles throughout the day. The way it should work is that if you have 1 team coming you bring 1 staffer, 2 teams then you bring 2, and etc. If you feel like you can't meet that requirement, we also need to know ASAP. Every school attending needs to bring a buzzer system to, although unless you have 3 or more teams you only need one per school.

As for parking, there is a map attached to this email as I've mentioned before. If you're team is coming by car (or if you have spectators doing so) then you need to park in the lots highlighted in blue. Those are the Potter Lot and the Old Fort Lot. If those are full, there are usually spots in College Hill Lot and Hub Lot located at the top of the hill. For buses, things are a bit more complicated. First off, I would encourage you to not arrive ANY EARLIER than 8:25. There are possibilities of road closures early that morning due to a charity run of some sort. If they can, buses should travel up College St. to the top of the hill at WKU, and drop people off at College High Hall, where someone should be waiting for you to tell you where to go. The buses should then make their way to the 14th Street Lot for parking. This is all highlighted on the attached map.

I've been told to tell you NO FOOD OR DRINK IN ANY ROOMS! Lunch will probably be about 11:30 AM-12:30 PM, so everyone will have an hour (likely a little bit more) to go eat and make it back to Grise Hall. There are eating options on campus very close to Grise, and if you want to drive to an off campus location we will give you some information on close-by restaurants. There will be a hospitality room (probably the 4th or 5th floor lobby) for coaches, staffers, parents, bus drivers, and basically anyone not playing throughout the day. We encourage you to take advantage of this, we'll have some donuts and milk in the morning, and for lunch we'll have chicken, pizza, chips, drinks, and possibly other things if we think demand is high enough.

If the field holds at 20, we'll have a fairly standard quizbowl format. In the morning everyone will be grouped into 4 brackets of 5, and after lunch we will re-bracket into 4 groups of 5 based on morning performance. After that we'll have a 9th round of placement games with 1 vs. 2, 3 vs. 4, and etc all the way down to 19 vs. 20. After the 8th round we'll award individual awards to the top scorers in the tournament, and the top 4 teams will recieve trophies after all is done.

On the ligher side, I'm aware that Halloween is only two days after our tournament. If anyone wants to let their kids play in costumes, I have no objection to that. If a team were to all play in themed costumes (including coaches) then we might think up something to give you for your effort. Hope to see you all on Saturday!

[Rococo A Go Go]

Quick Results:

1. Dunbar A
2. Manual A
3. Ezell-Harding
4. Dunbar B

We had a three way tie for first (top 3 teams were 7-1 on the day with a circle of death scenario) which was broken by Points per Bonus. A more elaborate rundown of everything that went wrong, right, who to thank, and everything else will come up either later this evening or sometime tomorrow. Stats will be forthcoming at that time as well.

[Brian_ECHS]

Stats are up.
http://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/12 ... all_games/

[Rococo A Go Go]

The stats should hopefully be correct, although the order of placement in them isn't. Ties between teams of the same record are broken by head-to-head matchups, and then PPB. Overall I think the questions were very appropriate for the field, we saw the majority of teams fall in between 10 and 20 PPB, with only a handful below and several above. The middle schools found the questions to be a bit more difficult than what they were used to, but I don't think the questions were too easy or too hard, so props to everyone else who worked on SCOP 2 and especially to Kristin Strey for putting together another great set.

Staffing for this tournament was a serious issue throughout the day, but we did manage to get it fixed with the help of some teams. I would like to thank all of the people who staffed, the fellow WKU students (only two of whom were club members!) who helped, and the schools who brought staffers and even used their coaches when they couldn't find anybody else.

I would also like to thank our advisor, Dr. Guy Jordan, for saving this tournament on Friday afternoon by stepping in and getting us a key to the rooms we had reserved, after Access Control told us they weren't going to let us in. We especially have to thank Pat Jordan of the Gordon Ford College of Business for getting him the key. Jessica Steenbergen of Academic Affairs and Derek Olive of Parking and Transportation Services worked hard to help us make this tournament a success.

Several times it seemed like this tournament was on the edge of collapse, but we managed to get most everyone out of here by about 5 PM yesterday with no major problems that we were made aware of. We've learned a lot about tournament hosting out of this experience, and we'll probably not be hosting a tournament quite this large again soon, unless we have very definite staffing committments from a lot of people. I would like to thank all of the teams that came to play and I hope we see you again at future tournaments, starting with the WKU Hilltopper Invitational on November 19th.

[jwoolley]

Hats off to Nick and Brian for sticking it out in the face of adversity and hosting an enjoyable tournament! The questions were very suitable for the JV teams. Owensboro will be back next year.

[AustinlSmith]

I would like to thank Nick for hosting a great tournament as well. There was great competition, and some very enjoyable moderators and staffers as well. Very well ran, and I didn't even recognize any problems (aside from slightly being late).