SCOP Novice at Hunter NY 10/29

[luke1865]

Calling all new players or coaches with new players on their teams: Hunter College High School ( 71 East 94th Street, New York, NY, 10128, between Park and Madison Avenues) will be hosting the sixth iteration of its annual fall novice tournament on Saturday, October 29, 2016. This tournament will use the SCOP Novice 7 set. For questions and/or concerns, email tournament director Luke Tierney at [email protected].

Eligibility

This is a novice tournament, so eligibility is limited to players in their first or second year of playing high school quiz bowl. This does not include single-subject tournaments like NHBB, National Science Bowl, and Bible Bowl. To create a level playing field, we are also barring players who have attended either PACE NSC or NAQT HSNCT. Please use your own judgement when deeming yourself a novice (e.g, if you are a middle school quizbowl veteran, playing in this tournament may be unsportsmanlike, and we highly suggest that you volunteer to moderate instead). Email us if you have any questions or concerns about eligibility.

Registration
To register for this tournament, fill out this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... g/viewform with how many teams, buzzers, and moderators you are bringing. We will try to email you back with a confirmation and an invoice as soon as possible.

Fee Structure
Registration fees are the same as last year's:
$55 for the first team from a school
$45 for each subsequent team
-$5 for each working buzzer system
-$10 for each experienced moderator

Minimum fee for schools bringing n teams = $25 x n

Further discounts (such as for travel) can be negotiated on a case-by-case basis with the tournament director.

We prefer payment through a check made out to HCHS Quiz Bowl on the day of the tournament. If this is absolutely impossible for any reason, we will also accept cash. A bucket of pennies presented on the day-of will NOT be accepted.

Question Set
The SCOP set is novice difficulty. More information including its distribution (which does not include computational math) can be found here. Click here for all past SCOP sets.

Please do not discuss the questions played at this tournament until this year's set is cleared by the writers.

Tournament Format
Tournament games will follow standard ACF rules of untimed rounds consisting of 20 tossups and 20 three-part, 30 point bonuses (without bouncebacks). There will be powers and negs (+15 points and -5 points, respectively).

The tournament itself will consist of bracketed round-robin prelims and rebracketed round-robin playoffs, the details of which will be decided and announced after the field is determined. Depending on field size, teams should expect to play anywhere from 8 to 11 rounds. We'll have trophies for top teams and book prizes for top scorers!

Registration and breakfast will be ongoing from 8:00 am to 8:45 am, with the first round beginning at approximately 9:00 am and the tournament ending at around 5:30 pm.

Transportation
Our school is located at 71 East 94th Street, New York, NY, 10128, between Park and Madison Avenues. It is very close to the 96th street stop on the 6 train line, and can also be reached by the m1-4 buses along Madison and the crosstown m96 bus along 96th. Look for the large, red castle. There is a bus drop-off area at our school on Park, and cars can park at Majestic Car Park on 94th between Park and Lexington.

Please note that Hunter is located in the center of the incredibly dense urban jungle that is Manhattan. In the past, a few teams have notified us that they encountered parking troubles during tournaments with especially large fields. We hope that such inconveniences do not detract from teams' overall experiences, so here is a list of other nearby car parks in case the curb around our school or Majestic Car Park is crowded:

Gallery Garage Corporation (>1 block away, 94th and Madison)
Icon Parking Systems (~2 blocks away, 94th and 3rd)
Icon Parking Systems (~3 blocks away, 95th between 2nd and 3rd)
Garage Management Company (~3 blocks away, 94th between 2nd and 3rd)

Food
For breakfast, we'll provide juice and bagels (hopefully, these will be the only type of bagels present at the tournament), and release teams for about an hour to explore the local eateries for lunch. We'll provide a map detailing the many nearby lunch options.

Current Field (Teams/Buzzers/Staff)
Theoretically, if provided with enough staff members, we can host up to 20 teams.
West Egg 3/0/4
Ridgewood 4/2/0
East Brunswick 1/0/0
Gotham 2/0/0
Trinity 3/1/0
Tenafly 2/0/0
House (HCHS MS) 1/0/0

[Dirty Water]

(e.g. if you are a middle school quizbowl veteran, playing in this tournament may be unsportsmanlike, and we highly suggest that you volunteer to moderate instead).

It seems odd to discourage people from playing in a tournament meant for those with little high school experience simply because they have lots of middle school experience.

[Irreligion in Bangladesh]

(e.g. if you are a middle school quizbowl veteran, playing in this tournament may be unsportsmanlike, and we highly suggest that you volunteer to moderate instead).

It seems odd to discourage people from playing in a tournament meant for those with little high school experience simply because they have lots of middle school experience.

Illinois's iterations of SCOP have a similar (though more structured) rule against highly-successful MS veterans playing SCOP Novice. The theory behind it is that the majority of MS quizbowl experience takes a form similar to "very easy HS play," so restricting "experienced players" naturally extends to certain MS players. Given that SCOP Novice itself becomes an MS set for mirroring in the same year, I think this is an uncontroversial theory; we're literally contributing to the issue, because it helps alleviate what has been a relative lull in MS question production. (Even if we didn't, the good MS teams practice on HS questions anyway.)

It seems odd, but I view it as "SCOP is an introduction to quizbowl, period" as opposed to HS quizbowl necessarily. I do encourage hosts who want to restrict successful MS players to think carefully about where they want to set the bar of "successful," and to (as Hunter's doing) invite restricted players to take part in the tournament as staff, which is an awesome way to help introduce more kids to the game.

[rhsbowl]

Can we get a field update?

[notchole]

Field update (as of October 24):

West Egg 3/0/4
Ridgewood 4/2/0
East Brunswick 1/0/0
Gotham 2/0/0
Trinity 3/1/0
Tenafly 2/0/0
House (HCHS MS) 1/0/0

If anyone has extra buzzers, we'd really appreciate you bringing them! We're still short a couple sets.
We will be emailing all teams with more information soon! Any teams adding or dropping teams must contact us by Wednesday at midnight! Thanks, and see you all soon.

[rhsbowl]

Ridgewood will be dropping one team