First off, a big thank you to everyone who competed at, assisted with, and otherwise made our 2015 Varsity and Junior Varsity National Championships possible. This was one of the largest tournaments of any kind ever (the 123 simultaneous rooms playing on Saturday is certainly a record by a wide margin) and there are hundreds of people responsible for its success. In particular, a big thank you to Matt Jackson and Eric Mukherjee for a well-received set, to the dozens of writers who contributed to it, to Will Mantell on staff direction; Jon Pinyan, Andrew Feist, and Andrew Ibendahl on stats; Eric Huff and Nick Clusserath on buzzers and protests; and Bunnie Hadsall, Raynell Cooper, Connor Teevens, and Nolwenn Madden for their assistance with numerous aspects of the tournament over the four days it ran.
Overall, I was pleased with the way that most aspects of the tournament played out. If, as was noted above, the primary purpose of a National Championship is to crown a national champion, then I don’t think that anyone can argue with our champions in any of the competitions that ran. Oddly, for the 5th year in a row, the #1 Varsity seed won the tournament in the Varsity Bowl (and for the third year in a row, the team that had finished second in the Varsity title match the previous year came back and won!) This year, the #1 seed won in the JV Bowl, and the Varsity US History Bee and Varsity National History Bee as well. The final match between Saratoga and LASA was the tensest and most exciting match I have ever read, and I don’t think anyone who was there to watch it will forget it for a very long time.
Congratulations to all our champions and to all those who qualified for Nationals on your success! Bruce Arthur made a point upthread about how students know their history better than ever. More than any comment, I was pleased to read that, as that speaks to the reason I established NHBB in the first place. My favorite thing to tell people outside the community about quiz bowl / NHBB is that students and teams raise the bar every year. With all the declinist rhetoric one hears about the US education system, it is so heartening to see that trend contradicted in such a spectacular fashion at any quiz bowl tournament, and especially at Nationals. Clearly, tens of thousands of hours were spent learning about history and geography in the lead up to Nationals, and I hope and expect that students who competed will be able to put that knowledge to good use in the years to come.
Turning back to the event itself, though, there are certainly aspects of the tournament that can be improved upon for next year. I felt that the changes we put in place from last year (e.g. more games at the hotel, not using Mount Vernon, having the Geography Quiz Bowl prelims on Friday afternoon, moving away from single elim to the extent we were comfortable with doing so) were all major improvements, and certainly there will be things that we will look to change for next year.
In this post, I’d like to give start off an overview of what I thought worked well and what I think could use improving. Some of my thoughts will answer questions people had and address comments upthread; where needed, I’ll make subsequent posts addressing comments that I don’t touch on here. I’m going to go in chronological order here; this first post will just touch on the lead up and Thursday; I’ll make subsequent posts in the coming days on how Friday, Saturday, and Sunday went.
1. Preparations
One fix for next year, is that I will certainly look to be in the DC area for at least 2 weeks in the lead up to Nationals. This year, I only returned on Monday night from over 2 months overseas running IHBB events. Granted, 90% of the work I did in April was US Nationals related (for almost everything that doesn’t involve physically running tournaments, I can work from anywhere with a good internet connection). However, this added to the overall stress of the week for me, and our Nationals team didn’t meet together until Tuesday. Next year, I’d like to move that up to the preceding Saturday, and that should allow us to do more double checking of various aspects of the preparation and cut down on the amount of work that needs to get done in a compressed amount of time.
2. Hotel Issue #1 – Booking rooms at the Crystal Gateway Marriott
The aspect of Nationals that I was most unhappy with was preparations from the hotel. This was the fourth year of us holding the tournament at the Crystal Gateway Marriott, and the number of issues relating to the hotel arrangements was considerably larger than in past years. The first big issue was that the hotel (in contrast with past years) ran out of double double rooms, and started putting people in king rooms less than a week before Nationals. Apparently, when teams had called and said that they wanted double double rooms, the reservations staff basically said something in many cases like “I’ve noted your preference” without guaranteeing it. But the language they used clearly led teams to believe that double double rooms had in fact been booked. This is a deceptive business practice that comes from Marriott using a call center to book rooms instead of handling that at the hotel. I’ve told the hotel of my disgust about this, and have insisted that for future years, teams be guaranteed (or, conversely, clearly told the hotel is out of such rooms) their room preferences, rather than having the hotel decide this the week before willy nilly.
3. Hotel Issue # 2 – Residence Inn vs. Crystal Gateway Marriott
More problems ensued with Marriott’s booking practices when I called and made reservations for 27 suites at a nearby Residence Inn for overflow matches (due to a need for more rooms, having been told in past years that we already were using all available rooms at the Crystal Gateway, and wanting to avoid sending teams to DC en masse). The initial phone call was made as soon as I knew we would need overflow rooms. I very clearly explained exactly what we needed, that the Residence Inn (also a Marriott brand) could contact the Crystal Gateway and confirm for themselves the setup that we needed, and the sales associate then said that everything would be great. We then signed a contract with the Residence Inn, and after I returned to DC, I went down and met with the Residence Inn people at their hotel on Tuesday of Nationals week, at which point, they all insisted that things would be fine.
On Thursday morning, though, right after I had sent out the email with where to report the night before, I learned that for whatever reason, the Residence Inn had gotten cold feet, and had transferred the rooms to the Crystal Gateway. This was news to me since a) we had already signed a contract with the Residence Inn, which had known for weeks what the set up would be like b) was coming after I had spent hours planning for how we would make the Residence Inn set up work and was resulting in mixed messages to teams and c) I didn’t know how the Crystal Gateway would make this work.
Despite all that, I wasn’t overly upset, since, if it could work at the Crystal Gateway, that would avoid 50 minutes of walking for those who had to play at the Residence Inn. So on Thursday morning, the Crystal Gateway showed me how the set up could work in some additional suites. In some of these, no furniture removal was needed at all; in some, the mattress had to be moved into the bathroom (which is odd-looking, but not a major problem). Anyway, for what it’s worth, this was a very pleasant surprise, since it will allow us to hold more games at the Crystal Gateway in subsequent years than we had ever thought possible, and this bodes well for the future sustainable growth of Nationals. Of course, I am still upset over the roughly 10 hours I spent figuring out the logistics for the Residence Inn and the fact that inaccurate information went out to teams in the Wednesday night email.
4. Hotel Issue #3 – The Crystal Gateway Marriott Gives us the Wrong Rooms (Twice)
I then sent out an email as soon as I had figured out the new control rooms / meeting spots for the Saturday Bowl groups which now were at the Crystal Gateway rather than the Residence Inn. All seemed fine… until the hotel told me on Friday afternoon that of the 27 rooms we had been given for games on Saturday, about 14 needed to be switched since the hotel had forgotten to check to see if those rooms were free of guests on both Friday and Saturday nights (they had only checked one).
So then on Friday afternoon / evening, after putting my foot down as much as possible and saying that in particular, the rooms that had been designated as control rooms could not be switched since it was too late to send another email out on room switches, I had to kill another 3-4 hours trying to fix the hotel’s mistake. In some cases, the rooms did get switched that I insisted on; in the other cases, they did not but there was an available room right next to the originally designated control room, so teams could report as scheduled, and it would sort itself out on Saturday morning. This was a major headache to get the revised info out to staff, stats, and ensure that everything would be fine, but I went to bed on Friday (around 3am) thinking things were ok.
Until the next stage of the hotel’s screw up became visible when I awoke at 6 on Saturday morning. In the process of giving me a new set of rooms (when I insisted that the control rooms needed to stay), my contact at the hotel gave me a different list than she gave to the event staff that needed to set up the rooms. That resulted in many rooms not having been set up at all (and in at least two rooms, that were not affected by the switch, the set up hadn’t been done either!). Beyond that, the hotel was woefully understaffed both with event staff to set up rooms, and front desk staff to fix key issues. This led to me, Raynell, and other NHBB staff running around like crazy for several hours bringing chairs up from the ballroom to rooms, pleading for new keys to be made, and trying to troubleshoot as quickly as possible.
Now, from past years, we have learned that the schedule needs some cushion time to allow for Murphy’s law. We also had one room set up in the ballroom salons as an emergency room in advance to prepare (this is what Daniel Yan referenced in his post). Because of planning for these things, there were delays in getting started, for which we apologize, but Round 5 ended early enough even in the most problematic pools for the afternoon games to begin on time. We know that the 2.5-3 hour gap in the middle of the day can be frustrating for teams who would like to play more (though I think 10 games, which every team got this year, is a fair amount), but please keep in mind that with 123 rooms playing at once, it’s far better for us to have downtime built in to the schedule, so we can stick with the schedule as officially drawn up for the afternoon if issues arise in the morning, as opposed to getting way behind and messing up everyone’s plans. One final note: the emergency room we had set up ended up getting used for a room where the hotel had completely screwed up and gave us keys to a room which a random guest was staying in, with their valuables and clothing visible to all who walked in expecting to play! At least they weren’t getting out of the shower when the teams walked in…
I have already met with the hotel and voiced my displeasure on these matters; both they and I have made notes to ensure that these issues will not present themselves in future years. I think we troubleshot things here as best as we could; for those teams who found themselves locked out / in rooms that weren’t set up / inconvenienced with bookings / told to go to different rooms than were actually used, we apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your patience and understanding.
5. Lorenz Cup on Thursday
On Thursday evening, for early arriving teams, we held an event called the Lorenz Cup (see
http://www.historybowl.com if you want the backstory here on the name) which was an A Set mirror for teams who didn’t get a chance to play it at Regionals. We ended up with 8 teams for this who seemed to have a good time playing it. All told, this probably didn’t take more than about 3 hours of my time the entire month leading up to Nationals, and probably no more than 20 minutes on Thursday evening (mostly during the opening meeting). I’m kind of ambivalent about whether we do this again next year; on the one hand, it was hardly a time sink for me; on the other, we only got 8 teams in for it. The event itself seemed to run fine, with the exception of two teams from one school that returned back 30 minutes late from dinner for the playoff matches. Since those were 2 of the 4 playoff teams, though, we weren’t going to disqualify them.
We’ll probably take a bit of a wait and see approach to the Lorenz Cup for next year. It’s hardly a major drain on our resources, but if only a small number of teams are interested in competing this way, it begs the question of whether it’s worth it for us to hold the event.
More to follow whenever I next get some free time, either later tonight or tomorrow.