ANNOUNCING: MOQBA Fall Regional Tournaments on Nov. 17, 2012

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Hello coaches,

I am Charlie Dees from the Missouri Quizbowl Alliance, and I am very excited to announce a new series of MOQBA events that we developed and I am coordinating. On November 17th, we will be running our new MOQBA Fall Regional Tournament at 4 different schools across the state. The idea behind this tournament is that we want to give as many teams as possible a chance to play a high quality varsity tournament in the fall where they will be able to win bids to nationals within driving range. We also are offering a discount to teams who did not play an MOQBA tournament last year.

We will have the following regional hosts:
Kansas City Regional - hosted by The Barstow School.
Central Regional - hosted by Centralia.
St. Louis Regional - hosted by Lutheran High School in St. Peters.
Southwest Regional - hosted by Parkview High School in Springfield.

These tournaments are open to all teams, and will all be using the same question set, which is a regular difficulty pyramidal tournament being written by the quizbowl teams of Michigan State university and the University of Delaware. The game rules will be based on the national format of 20 tossups per game, with each tossup having 30 point, non-rebounding bonuses. Each tossup will be worth 10 points, except when a player gets an early buzz and is awarded 15 points for a “power,” or if they give an incorrect interrupt and lose 5 points. Many of you are used to these rules now, which are increasingly being used around Missouri, but for those teams who have not had experience with MOQBA events, please bear in mind that these are national, not MSHSAA, rules for quizbowl, so there will be a lot of differences.

The top placing teams at each tournament will be awarded with a bid to the 2013 PACE National Scholastics Championship. Teams are allowed (even encouraged!) to bring JV players on B and C teams to get them more experience and potentially win your school multiple bids to nationals.

These tournaments will all have an 18 team cap, although if any sites have enough staff and interested teams, we will look into expanding those tournaments down the line. If fields fill, we will guarantee teams around 8 to 10 games, and will use round robin prelims and playoffs. Teams who do not make the playoffs will still be given the chance to play in a consolation pool. I know lots of MSHSAA tournaments don’t do this, but we hope that your teams are interested in the chance to play more games than usual against similarly competitive teams.

The costs for each tournament will be as follows:
$60 - Base fee for each team
$5 discount - for each fully functional buzzer system
$5 discount - for each additional team a school brings (in other words, B teams cost $55)
$10 discount - for teams who did not play an MOQBA event last year
$20 discount - for each experienced moderator a team brings (we will have to approve the moderator before we give the discount, so email the host about this before bringing your moderator to the tournament)

If you are interested in attending one of the sites, please email whoever your nearest regional tournament director is. The tournaments will be filled on a first come, first served basis, so email them soon! Here are the contacts:

Barstow School - Coach Jennifer Padberg, [email protected]
Centralia High School - Coach Ryan Kennedy, [email protected]
Lutheran in St. Peters - Coach Michael Flandermeyer, [email protected]
Parkview High School - Coach Jeff Cherry, [email protected]

We also have many other MOQBA tournaments being announced for this season, so remember to check out www.moqba.org and moquizbowl.com. We also have a new facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/MissouriQuizbowlAlliance where you can follow us. All of those websites have links to free study resources, and information about pyramidal quizbowl, national championships, and basically anything else you could want to know about Missouri’s increasingly competitive quizbowl circuit.

I hope to see your team out at one of these tournaments on November 17th!

-Charlie Dees, MOQBA Fall Regional Tournament coordinator