#GrowTheGame - an initiative for QB you can help with!

[Joshua Rutsky]

We at Qwiz owe a great deal to quizbowl. Each of us counts our time playing and coaching among the best of our lives, and each of us are grateful to those who have shared that experience with us. The coaches we have worked with, players we have coached, and the organizations that have made this possible will always be inspirations for our own work. For this reason, we have decided that, alongside our commitment to producing the best quizbowl camps we can design and run, we have a corporate responsibility to give back to the quizbowl community. Our effort to do so is the #GrowTheGame initiative.

We believe that outreach is among the key challenges facing our game today. There are millions of students across the U.S. who will never have the opportunity to play quizbowl simply because it doesn’t exist in their school. #GrowTheGame is about giving more students access to this awesome game by starting programs at schools where quizbowl doesn’t exist.

We want to sponsor schools that want to start a quizbowl program, but face significant financial obstacles to doing so. We consider factors such as percentage of students receiving free/reduced price lunch, diversity of the student body, and geographic proximity to an existing state circuit. Most importantly this school must have a coach willing to commit the time and energy necessary to build a team, participate in regional and state competition and become an active, contributing member of the quizbowl community.

For our first sponsored school, we have chosen Sweet Water High School, a public K-12 school located in Sweet Water, Alabama. This school is in Marengo County, part of Alabama’s economically disadvantaged “black belt” of former farming communities. Nearly 60% of the student body receives free or reduced priced lunches, and over 40% of the students identify as minorities. Sweet Water had a solid quizbowl program many years ago, but economic downturns and continual budget cuts at the state level killed it off. Now, two sponsors have stepped up and are trying to restart this program.

What’s great about #GrowTheGame is that it’s an opportunity for the community to come together to spread quizbowl.

Here's how it works:

We are donating $100 to start. In addition, every day between now and May 10, we will post a tweet with the hashtag #GrowTheGame to the Qwiz Twitter account (@qwizbowl). For each retweet of one of those posts, we will donate $1 to the Sweet Water Quizbowl Team. If we hit 500 total retweets by May 10, in addition to the money, we will also donate a new buzzer system, an NAQT New High School Package, and a registration to a Qwiz Camp. In addition, Qwiz will be mentoring the Sweet Water coaches in the coming year as they build their team and become part of the quizbowl community.

We hope that you will join us in our efforts to #GrowTheGame. Working together we can do amazing things. Our hope is that Sweet Water is just the first of many schools who benefit from the collective power of the quizbowl community.

Questions? Visit http://www.qwizbowl.com/growthegame or email [email protected].