acrosby1861 wrote:Hi. I'm trying to form a History Bowl team at my school. It's currently listed as a club, but I managed to find fourteen people who were interested in doing History Bowl. The first official meeting is Tuesday and I want to start doing packets right away. I'm leaning toward using NHBB regional sets from previous years, but I'm scared that it'll be too hard and the fourteen people will get frustrated and leave. What is an ideal level of difficulty for people who are just starting out with History Bowl? Would NHBB regional sets be too hard for new people to start out with?
Also, I want to host a NHBB tournament at my school. The principal and my club advisor really like the idea of hosting, but the activities director wants to know about any potential paperwork before we can finalize anything. Does anyone know if there any paperwork involved with that?
Thanks. :)
Edit: I felt like I needed to change the subject line because I kinda went off topic from what I originally had.
I started our school's History Bowl team with a few friends and convinced our sponsor to let us host last year, so I'll try to answer these questions from my experiences. Keep in mind that situations may be different across schools.
First of all, I'd recommend starting on NHBB C set, since many people can answer those types of questions. What we do is we start on C set(and make sure to start on round 1 as well), and then gradually progress to B set, and then A set, and finally Nationals. Right now we're currently doing B set after we read C set packets for a few weeks, and I'm planning on moving to A set in a week or two. Second semester I plan to read all Nationals questions to prepare our team for that, but each school's rate of progression will be a bit different depending on how skilled the players are.
Hosting is honestly really easy after you convince your club adviser and principal to do it. That was by far the hardest step for our team. At our school our club advisor emailed Dave Madden to get the details of hosting. There might be a bit a paperwork, but from my memory, it was mostly between our club adviser and the administration; I don't recall much paperwork between NHBB and the school. The main thing is that NHBB will send you material electronically, so you just need your club adviser to print that stuff off.
If there's a quizbowl club at your school, I'd highly recommend getting help from them. At our school the two clubs always help each other out since its pretty much the same people in both clubs. The quizbowl club President directed our tournament last year, and a lot of quizbowl people who were bad at history showed up to staff.
Lastly, when starting a club, my biggest tip is just be honest. Tell why you like History Bowl and explain what it is without sugarcoating anything. The people who end up interested will be the ones committed enough to spend a ton of time studying and going to every single regional tournament as well as Nationals.
Hope that helps, and feel free to ask any more questions!