Building a Circuit

[Benjamin Knight]

In North Carolina, we have a few regular tournaments for middle school and a significant number for high school. However, I would appreciate if we had more MS tournaments. How does one go about building a middle school circuit?

[Stained Diviner]

Circuits are typically built one tournament at a time. Talk to your coach about hosting a tournament, and hosting more tournaments if you already host one. If you know other coaches, talk to them about the possibility of hosting more tournaments, or ask your coach if s/he wants to talk to them. It is also good to talk to students on other teams to see if they can get their teams to host a tournament.

Circuits vary greatly in quality and quantity--some of them have one or two low-quality tournaments a year, and that's it. Some of them have a lot of good tournaments. Usually, there is no central power structure that has a lot of control on the number of tournaments--either schools host tournaments, or schools don't host tournaments.

[alexdz]

The answer to your question seems to be twofold. On the one hand, there need to be tournaments to attend. On the other hand, you also need teams to attend them. Growing the number of tournaments AND the number of teams are both necessary to build up the circuit. In my experience in Missouri, many middle school teams started as outgrowths of a gifted or honors program and have since developed into full-fledged competitive circuit teams. Other teams start when a local high school coach helps found a program at a middle school (easier in smaller districts, usually).