The Quizbowl Resource Center

Thanks as always to Andrew Feist for his help with putting the draws online and maintaining real time stats!
Draws and standings here for USGO, USHB, & Sports & Entertainment Bees. Natl. History Bee & Bowl to follow soon.
http://geographyolympiad.com/gc/
http://geographyolympiad.com/gcjv/
http://ushistorybee.org/ushb/
http://ushistorybee.org/ushbjv/
http://www.historybowl.com/sebee
http://www.historybowl.com/sebeejv/

So what's the deal with the alleged "parent grabbing a volunteer" incident? Did NHBB do anything about the parent? Is NHBB doing anything to ensure volunteer safety in the future?

No one has said anything about this to Nolwenn or me personally. I cannot comment further until I know more details of whatever (if anything) happened. If anyone can help clarify this, please email me at [email protected]. Having said that, in 6 years of running hundreds of events all over the world, I've never heard of anything like this happening, and if anything occurred here, it was certainly a freak incident and not symptomatic of some systemic problem in how NHBB organizes events.

I don't think I'll have some massive post in response, but a few brief notes:
* The fact that the original post of this thread, with the schedule for Friday, was made at ~4am Friday, was not "oh hey I forgot to post this to the boards." That's when the schedule was emailed to participants as well. Saturday's schedule was not finalized until sometime over night Friday into Saturday. The schedule for the bee was still being worked on at midnight Saturday into Sunday; it was online as of 6am Sunday and emailed out at 7am. There were further additions afterwards for people missing in the original schedule.
* There was free wireless access provided by the hotel to anyone who was a Marriott member, but the History Bowl website was slammed with heavy traffic all weekend long and was down on multiple occasions. Given that there were no printed schedules or handouts of any sort, this caused some delays.
* I don't know if discussion of question content is authorized, so I won't go into details, but there were events mentioned in questions that occurred as recently as Wednesday. I'm not saying "what happened last week isn't history", I'm saying "this set should not still be being written on Wednesday." The fact that it was is evident from the number of questions that were poorly edited just from a grammatical standpoint, and the number of repeats of answer lines and of clues.
* I think the new scoring format for the Bee was an improvement, as it discouraged wild guesses early in a question. I do think there needs to be some modification of the format for the prelims, though not necessarily the same system, as there is still every incentive and no risk to throwing out a guess early in a question. Also, there were students who tested out in 5 of 6 rounds and didn't make playoffs; that doesn't seem right.
* On Saturday, I left after reading my three evening rounds and reporting the result, but it seemed that the wild card procedure was predictably chaotic. It was getting close to 10pm, and I'm not sure how much longer it was before those tiebreaks and playoffs got going. The way these things would be set up was not overly confusing, but it would've been far better to just type things out in sentences and put it in teams' check-in folders (and then provide a repeat copy at the start of evening play in case any team lost or ignored it). That way, you don't have Dave trying to get all the details right as he speaks off the cuff.
* I'm curious as to how the teams towards the top felt about the "draft" procedure for the knockout rounds.
* The Sunday schedule allotted from 12:40 to 3:10 to get from "start of bowl knockout rounds" to "start of bee playoffs" (3 rounds of play), and yet still ran behind schedule. In previous years, I've mentioned this, and said I have no problem with pomp and circumstance and celebrating the winners, but a decent amount of that time was spent milling about, waiting for whatever was about to happen next.
* I can't say there was a substantial population that thought "Oh, what's wrong with the Friday night bees is that there aren't two separate ones!" I might be wrong, but [shrug].
* At various points, there was no one at the Help Desk (and I do not at all hold it against you that the Help Desk had to move for some other event, that's not the issue) or the trophy pick-up room. If those people are likely to have to wander, put two people there.

The last bit I just want to set apart from the rest: To any quiz bowl players who may read this, I urge you to (at any tournament not specifically directed by David Madden) ignore the advice to literally "bang on the door" of a game in progress.

Great Bustard wrote:No one has said anything about this to Nolwenn or me personally. I cannot comment further until I know more details of whatever (if anything) happened. If anyone can help clarify this, please email me at [email protected]. Having said that, in 6 years of running hundreds of events all over the world, I've never heard of anything like this happening, and if anything occurred here, it was certainly a freak incident and not symptomatic of some systemic problem in how NHBB organizes events.

I'm not saying it's your/NHBB's fault that this (allegedly) happened in the first place - obviously, that's not the case. But I think all organizations, including NHBB, have to consider the fact that something like this happened and that we all need to have systems in place to deal with them.

I do want to add that it's surprising that the news of this didn't get up to your level; this certainly sounds like something that a TD should be made aware of ASAP.

Great Bustard wrote:No one has said anything about this to Nolwenn or me personally. I cannot comment further until I know more details of whatever (if anything) happened. If anyone can help clarify this, please email me at [email protected]. Having said that, in 6 years of running hundreds of events all over the world, I've never heard of anything like this happening, and if anything occurred here, it was certainly a freak incident and not symptomatic of some systemic problem in how NHBB organizes events.

I don't know that there was any physical contact in the incident, but a few years ago, when there was the cheating accusation in the middle school bowl, I recall that there were parents cornering staffers in the hotel lobby and restaurant and extensively berating them, in at least one case to the point of tears. I don't (nor do I think anyone does) think this is emblematic of how NHBB does things, but expectations need to be set for spectator behavior.

jonpin wrote:I don't (nor do I think anyone does) think this is emblematic of how NHBB does things, but expectations need to be set for spectator behavior.

I certainly agree, and really encourage everyone to consider how to ensure these things don't happen, and if they do happen, how to handle them.

AKKOLADE wrote:I do want to add that it's surprising that the news of this didn't get up to your level; this certainly sounds like something that a TD should be made aware of ASAP.

Just to clarify on this one particular incident. The volunteer in question alerted NHBB leadership (in this case, Will Mantell) about the incident, and, to quote the volunteer, Will "resolved this incident quickly and professionally within 3 to 5 minutes of the incident." The volunteer also spoke with me about a parent being rude, but never mentioned anything about physical contact until he then emailed me today about it to clarify further. From the email I received, while the parent's behavior was uncalled for, the physical contact here was not of a sort where the volunteer's personal safety was ever at issue.
Obviously I agree that parents and all spectators (as well as players, moderators, and all staff) should be respectful at all times; I made an announcement to that effect in my remarks at the Opening Ceremony. Beyond that, there's not really much more I can do here, other than in extremely rare cases, prohibit someone from attending tournaments. It's otherwise impossible to identify which parents are going to be off their rocker in advance. With respect to the middle school parent referenced in the middle school cheating incident (where, btw, there was no cheating going on - the issue was one of false accusations from a parent), that parent has never been back, as his son has never competed again.
NHBB clearly takes issues of this sort seriously, but the volunteer shares my assessment that this was a freak incident, and is comfortable with how we handled things.

jonpin wrote: I don't know that there was any physical contact in the incident, but a few years ago, when there was the cheating accusation in the middle school bowl, I recall that there were parents cornering staffers in the hotel lobby and restaurant and extensively berating them,

Where/when did this happen?? Link to thread? I ask b/c my team was (falsely) accused of swapping players off the 'B' team between games of the advantaged final in 2013.

the return of AHAN wrote:

jonpin wrote: I don't know that there was any physical contact in the incident, but a few years ago, when there was the cheating accusation in the middle school bowl, I recall that there were parents cornering staffers in the hotel lobby and restaurant and extensively berating them,

Where/when did this happen?? Link to thread? I ask b/c my team was (falsely) accused of swapping players off the 'B' team between games of the advantaged final in 2013.

That's not what was being referenced (at least as far as I know - I can't think of any other cheating scandal in the middle school history bowl). Barrington Station didn't compete in the 2013 National History Bowl Middle School final; that was between St. Gregory the Great, NJ and Stoller, OR. The reference was to a game in 2012 in the Middle School National History Bowl national semifinal.

Got it. I was referencing MSNCT, as Jon had only said 'middle school' and that's where my mind went. It never occurred to me that having one triplet on the 'A' team and another on the 'B' team could create such an issue!

Here are a few thoughts. This was my first NHBB Nationals and I thought it mostly went pretty well.

[*] Someone should have been at staffer checkin Friday as people arrived.
[*] I think Friday side events if they were to be run again (i.e. sports and entertainment, though I would LOVE to staff a future "International Trash Olympiad") should run like NAQT's Friday scrimmages, with somewhat ad-hoc staffer assignment and organized by different people than the main tournament.
[*] Having others run Friday night side events also allows the main tournament organizers to focus on the conclusion of the geography or other serious competitions
[*] I think there should have been a full staff meeting on both Friday and Saturday morning, so that any no-shows or whatever can be accounted for and staffers reassigned in person rather than trying to reach them through text or email.
[*] There should be no reason that teams should have been late for their PM rounds because presumably they were told at the team meeting to figure out their PM schedules after the AM round robin based on the posters, and staffers were told to make sure teams knew where they were going (as indicated on the poster). This delay in particular seemed super avoidable even if there was no website at all.
[*] I don't have the set in front of me, from what I remember all the repeated answer lines were between a lightning round and somewhere else. Clues that could help you later also seemed to have been seen in a lightning round.
[*] Woah, the Bee playoff cutoff is really high; someone who gets 8 questions each round but doesn't get a single bonus point misses the cutoff.
[*] I'm not a buzzer engineer but repeatedly mashing the buzzer seems like a bad thing to do, however required to win buzzer races during the bee. If Student 1 buzzes and is prompted, Students 2 through 4 starts pressing buzzers so they can be first to buzz if Student 1 fails to provide the complete answer.