Just wanted to point out again that Bethlehem HS and Bethlehem History Bowl Club are two separate entities.
This, indeed, is the reason why Bethlehem did not play at BrainBusters Fall this year...because I had no idea of the situation that existed at Bethlehem HS until I started corresponding with Mark a couple of months ago. Bethlehem was sent an invitation to BrainBusters Fall, as was every other MasterMinds school, but the problem is that it went to the wrong person - the high school MasterMinds coach, who has no interest in attending any tournaments -other- than MasterMinds - and as a result, I never got a response to my invitation e-mail. (One other Albany-area school, Amsterdam, *did* attend BB Fall with two teams, and we should also get Emma Willard to attend next December after their participation in the initial HSAPQ state tournament.) Bethlehem has an unusual situation where a teacher runs the MasterMinds team (and Science Olympiad, apparently his main interest), but the team members and their parents run History Bowl and non-MM quizbowl. Now that I know where to send the invites and have a personal relationship with the Bethlehem players and parents, they will most likely be regulars not only at BB Fall, but at every other good quizbowl tournament in upstate New York and quite a few in metro-NYC as well. As Paul Nelson told me when I was starting out, personal relationships are everything in quizbowl recruiting.
If I can get it together with Scott Bliss' help, We will run a tournament in Bethlehem next year for local, and perhaps some remote teams( if they will come) that will allow the other High Schools to see the value proposition you've described. If Bethlehem Plays, it may encourage some teams to travel here.
My guess is that you'd get a decent number of schools from the metro-NYC circuit who'd make the 2-2.5 hour trip simply because Bethlehem and Ithaca are playing in the tournament, and those two upstate schools have shown that they can hold their own and then some against downstate teams. Cooperstown, a very enthusiastic non-MM program who were the (distant) runners-up at this year's BB Fall, would also almost certainly bring multiple teams. The MasterMinds-only teams, at first, may be taken aback by two things - the higher skill level of these regional teams, and the accelerated pace of circuit quizbowl games as opposed to MM. Amsterdam and Geneva both had some trouble adjusting at BB Fall to readers who -weren't- going at a second-grade pace and allowing chatter between tossup-bonus cycles, but Geneva ended up going 9-1 and qualifying for SSNCT, which they're playing this weekend, so they must have adjusted eventually. What we should
also hope that they notice is the enthusiasm and work ethic (Ithaca is the only team in my region that I ever see taking notes during games, just for example) that teams like High Tech, St. Joe's, Kellenberg, Hunter, etc., show for the game, and realize that quizbowl
can be and is an endeavor that can be taken seriously, that rapid improvement is possible if you're willing to work at it, and most important, as Paul Nelson (again) likes to say at tournaments, that we'd like to see more of these sorts of tournaments in upstate New York, and that there are experienced people, both on and off these forums, who are willing to work with schools if they want more, cheaper, and I daresay higher-quality quizbowl competition than just what they're getting out of MasterMinds.
Do teams play at their own tournaments? What type of questions would we run then? For the local teams we should run introductory.... But that's not what we want to run if we want any NYC metro teams to come up to play a challenging Bethlehem team... Maybe we need two tournaments....
It's rare for teams to play a full-strength team at their own tournaments (usually either they don't participate and staff and run the tournament, or enter a "house team" full of younger and less-experienced players), but Ithaca has entered full-strength teams at both BB Falls, mostly because I've taken on most of the preparation and all of the same-day tournament direction of BB Fall (not everyone realizes this, but I am not an employee of and have no official connection to either Ithaca HS or the Ithaca City School District), and the tournament has been small enough where we've been able to staff it without having to use the actual team members for the most part. Plus, as one of the very few good quizbowl options that's been available in the past in upstate NY, not playing their own tournament would deprive IHS of one of their few opportunities to play good quizbowl without driving 4 hours, which they can't always get permission to *officially* do. Basically, if I was doing the actual TDing of the tournament, depending on turnout Bethlehem could probably put out their regular team(s) as long as there was enough parental, volunteer and coach involvement to staff the tournament properly - something you can encourage by offering staffing discounts to the participating teams. Both of the BB Fall 2013 finalists (Ithaca and Cooperstown) had their coaches serve as readers for the tournament, and this is a quite common practice at weekend circuit tournaments.
As for the question set...due to the MM A-set monopoly that I mentioned in my last post, novice questions from NAQT are probably
not going to be an option, simply because there will be major geographic exclusivity problems and MM uses -every- available A-set. The two viable options for a Bethlehem tournament next year are therefore to either commission a
novice-level set from HSAPQ (the people who write the National History Bee and Bowl sets), or run the tournament on an
IS-set from NAQT. Both are excellent question providers, so quality of questions isn't going to be a problem either way. With HSAPQ, you would be losing automatic NAQT HSNCT or SSNCT qualification spots (although teams that did well at Bethlehem but didn't qualify for those tournaments at any other NAQT event would have good arguments for wild-card spots at HSNCT/SSNCT), although PACE NSC qualification would still be in play. With NAQT IS-sets -in our particular area with the state of quizbowl as it is now-, you have no worries re: nationals qualification for any of those three tournaments, but you run the risk of the questions being slightly too difficult for the field (although this effect could and would be softened with enough regional participation from more experienced teams).
Example: at BB Fall this year (run on an IS set with mostly new-to-pyramidal-quizbowl teams), the 20 teams not named "Ithaca A" averaged 10.03 points per bonus, or exactly 33.3% of all available bonus points. A set that is difficulty-appropriate for a certain field should have a bonus conversion of anywhere from
50-65% of possible points converted. Those 20 teams also averaged 131.7 points scored per 20 tossups heard, when you want that number for the tournament as a whole to be right around
200 (with Ithaca A added in, those numbers go up to 10.61 ppb and 150.3 pp20tu, still very below-average numbers). I would expect the numbers for non-circuit-playing MM teams to be a
little higher than that, since they have some experience playing pyramidal quizbowl, but not very much.
In my case, Not only did quizbowl do a poor job of communication its value proposition, which your notes are just now starting to educate me on, I think it does a poor job of communicating its existence. I, for example did not know about QB ( outside masterminds) until a year plus of being involved with NHBB. As I was trying to get some local publicity for our team for NHBB, I spoke to the HS reporter for the Albany paper, the Times Union, who was unaware of both NHBB and quiz bowl.
It's true that we in the quizbowl community aren't as good as we should be sometimes at communicating why our sport is as great as it is and recruiting other schools to start teams and join in the fun, but in the particular case of upstate New York, I find it particularly confusing, since with MasterMinds, we DO already have a circuit of sorts of well over 120 schools that do play some form of quizbowl with good questions. It just seems "off" to me for some reason that at most only 10-15% of those schools have evinced any interest in playing more tournaments, especially ones that are comparatively very cheap (as Matt said, where else can you find a fulfilling and meaningful all-day activity for 4 talented students for $70 or less?) and just as or more high-quality question-wise. Don't get me wrong, most upstate New York public schools are hard up for money right now, but they're not -that- hard up. <shrug>
I'm guessing you try to get press coverage at your tournaments. NHBB does do press releases, but, It would be nice if the parent organizations would create and distribute nice press packages that the local teams could send to their local press to get coverage. So far, I have no Idea how to get one of the local TV stations to run a piece on our team. E-mail has not been an effective way of getting their attention. I'm guessing some nice video clips from a competition might get their interest. I'll try sending the link of Dan Yan & Eric in the Semis at the NHBB JV Bee to them....
One of the things that I (and when I say "I", I mean "my wife", who is much better at this sort of thing than I am) am trying to do for next year's BB Fall is get some form of business or corporate sponsorship for the tournament so that we can give out monetary prizes to the top teams, hopefully to be used to defray expenses for attending national tournaments. She's much more charming than I am and actually has the patience to deal with corporate bureaucracy and various other doggy-doo that makes me want to find the nearest person in a suit and tie and just start throwing haymakers at various parts of their anatomy. We'll see how that goes.
One question that I've run by a few local coaches who -do- show up regularly at tournaments is this: given that the average cost of a circuit tournament is around $75, with attendant discounts, would you prefer to pay that low fee, with the chances to pay even less with the discounts, for a tournament where your prizes will be prestige, possible nationals qualification, trophies and/or medals, and book prizes for all-stars, or would you be willing to pay a much larger fee (say, $200) for a tournament where the vast majority of the money (after tourney-related expenses) is returned to, say, the top 4 or 8 teams in the form of prize money, or entry fees for HSNCT/SSNCT/PACE NSC/NHBB, etc.? The coaches I've talked to (about 5 so far) have all said yes, they would pay the higher fee for a chance at a large payout, but they are also, as I said, regulars who willingly paid $200 a shot to play in Brooks Sanders' tournaments in the past, so they're used to paying that amount. I don't know how circuit teams in general, or new teams to quizbowl, would feel about that, and they may well answer that question differently. Possible sponsorship would add even more to the prize pool. It's something to consider, at any rate.
--Scott