the return of AHAN wrote:Question: How does a team qualify for the middle school History Bowl? If I understand correctly, the Bee & Bowl nationals will be in June, but I've seen no opportunities to qualify for it, other than by showing up at a high school bowl and playing high schoolers, which may or may not be prohibited by our state organization.
There will be at least 15 History Bowl tournaments with a middle school division around the country this year. These include:
1. Lower Hudson (White Plains, NY on Dec. 19)
2. Northern California Fall (Saratoga, CA on Dec. 6)
3. Hudson Valley Championships (Tuxedo Park, NY on Feb. 20)
4. Capitol Region Championships (Ellicott City, MD on Mar. 12)
5. Colorado (possibly) - (Ft. Collins, CO on Feb. 13)
These have all been held in conjunction with NHBB high school level events. For these events only, NHBB will still run things. The other 10 or more History Bowl events with dedicated middle school divisions will be administered by ACE, so I'll leave it to them to comment further. At the above events, teams qualified the same way they would in a standard high school level History Bowl (i.e. by going 2-2 or better if they have a bye, by going 3-2 or better if they don't, or by winning a playoff game).
ACE can also comment on how specifically teams can qualify if they compete against JV teams and in the instance where some of those games in a JV Division are also against middle school teams, but those policies are up to them.
On the matter of whether playing high schoolers in NHBB events is or is not allowed in Illinois, contact Brad Fischer at
brad@historybowl.com as I know he was looking into this, and I think he did get a response of some sort, but given the confusing nature of the state organization, I don't want to mischaracterize what the response said.