Tournaments With Good Questions

Stained Diviner · Post by **Stained Diviner** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 1:35 pm

We in Illinois already have had a little bit of this discussion near the bottom of page 12, but I was hoping for a more national list. This could be helpful to coaches looking for tournaments or practice materials and TDs looking for mirrors/question sources.

What high school tournaments use great questions?

Please do not list PACE or anything NAQT, as those are widely known. They belong on the list, so consider them already listed. There's also no need to list the tournaments that already showed up in the Illinois discussion because I already linked to it. (Washington University, which writes their own great questions, showed up in the Illinois discussion even though it's outside Illinois.)

You get bonus points if you know the source of the great questions.

ProsperoSMS · Post by **ProsperoSMS** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 2:46 pm

The Right Triangle Open uses in-house written questions which I would hold up against any tournament in the nation. I've found UNC and Duke to be hit-or-miss, depending on the year (although NCOAST has been better than DAF on a whole), and I've liked the Celebrity Shoot overall. For the money, RTO at Raleigh Charter has to be the top I've heard in recent competitions.

DrakeRQB · Post by **DrakeRQB** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 2:56 pm

You beat me to it, Hugh. I was about to say that RTO had an excellent in-house set. We write the questions for all our tournaments in-house, and I believe they're quite good. We had straight tossup/bonus, and RTO had a varying format.

bigtrain · Post by **bigtrain** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:39 pm

Yale, Richard Montgomery and Thomas Jefferson write good questions consistently.

Lapego1 · Post by **Lapego1** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:43 pm

I'll second the remark on TJ's questions. They have good distribution and especially this year's set had excellent subject choice for serious teams.

rchschem · Post by **rchschem** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:17 pm

Not counting the ball-busting semis and finals from the spring 2005 set. :)

TJ's and Maggie Walker's sets are regular parts of our practice files. They are always excellent.

Eric

Stained Diviner · Post by **Stained Diviner** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 11:09 pm

I'm assuming that UNC and Duke are written by the college bowl teams. Who writes the questions for Raleigh Charter, TJ, MW, and/or RM? Is it the coach, the players, or some combination thereof?

rchschem · Post by **rchschem** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 12:01 am

Raleigh Charter's questions are mostly student written; coaches write some and edit all. We also play test all of them to cull the ones we think are great but clank when read.

Eric

First Chairman · Post by **First Chairman** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 12:33 am

IIRC both TJ's and MWGS's questions are also student-produced (unless otherwise purchased).

dschafer · Post by **dschafer** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 7:58 am

TJ's fall tournament uses NAQT questions. TJ's January tournament uses entirely student-written questions.

DrakeRQB · Post by **DrakeRQB** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:48 am

I wrote almost all of our set for our tournament in February, but we're having a fall tournament this October that will have student-written questions. We started on them this week, but we're going to have to do some crazy editing. Our upperclassmen write pretty good ones, but the freshmen... yeah not so much.

quizbowllee · Post by **quizbowllee** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:57 am

I hope I don't start up an anti-UTC flame war like on the college side of this board, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how good I think that UTC's questions are at their two annual high school invites. I own the questions to their tournaments as far back as '98 and they are always very pyramidal and well-written. From my experience, they are the best questions of any tournaments we have attended in the past two years (excluding NAQT and PACE).

Granted, we haven't been able to attend a tournament at Brookwood or at Vandy yet, but I've heard great things about both.

NoahMinkCHS · Post by **NoahMinkCHS** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 8:12 pm

From what I remember, Brookwood's questions were usually good. Not a surprise. I believe they write their own, or their alumni do it.

DrakeRQB · Post by **DrakeRQB** » Wed Mar 29, 2006 9:21 pm

The Raider Academic Challenge at Richmond Senior HS (N.C.) mirrors Brookwood's tournament, and those questions are good.

We may go to Vanderbilt next fall - I heard their questions are good.

jrbarry · Post by **jrbarry** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 5:50 pm

At Brookwood, our alums and current players write our questions for BOTH tournaments we sponsor each year.