Personal Quizbowl Endgame Scenarios

[The Ununtiable Twine]

Reading MattBo's post in the Watkinsgate anniversary thread reminded me of a topic that I wanted to discuss that I don't recall having ever been discussed on the boards. I'm sure pretty much everyone who has played for at least a few years has had thoughts of leaving the game at some point and it's not necessarily easy to leave. Naturally, I think we all hope everyone can leave the game in a healthy manner and enjoy our playing careers in at least a moderately healthy way. Unfortunately, this isn't the case with a lot of our players, especially those of us striving to be the best in the game. Below, I've put some groups of questions in bold and provided personal answers to a few of them. I'm sure a lot of you have valuable input as well. I would like for these questions to be answered in a way that provides insight for those still playing to consider as they continue their careers or contemplate retirement. They're not necessarily in a coherent order, my apologies for that.

What made you leave the game? Or, if you're still in the middle of your career, what makes you continue to play the game? For those of us who can sense the end of the career approaching, what makes you continue to play quizbowl?
For one, I'm satisfied with my career as a whole. Also, as is probably the case with many other people, I'm fed up with school. You can only be in school so long before you're done. I'm at peace with the fact that my career has come to an end. It's my hope that everyone who leaves the collegiate game can find as much peace as I have when I leave.

Did you get the most you could have gotten out of your quizbowl career?
Yup, and I'll continue to contribute from time to time. I'll also continue to play open tournaments, side events, and the like.

Would taking a different approach from a competitive standpoint have prolonged your career?
In my case, the answer is no. After the end-of-the-season disaster in 2013 (or at least what I considered to be a disaster), I felt I had something left in the tank and something to prove. Although the teams I've played on haven't been as nationally competitive as they once were, I feel like the last three years of my career were worthwhile. We continued to place well at regional competitions and nationals qualification was a goal that was either met or barely missed, for the most part. I got to help a few younger players develop. I got to play against the next generation of players - I wouldn't have necessarily gotten this chance had I retired. The only thing that prolonged my career was the regret of losing in 2013, but I can't say I'm disappointed with the results.

When is a healthy time to leave? Do you regret the timing of your exit from the game? Did you play too long? Not long enough?
I've contemplated retirement on numerous occasions. Once, I even published a manifesto announcing my retirement only not to retire. I was ready to retire after last year but then I figured I would give it another go given that my teammates hadn't really had much time to develop. I wanted to give them a chance to improve enough so that we could possibly qualify for ICT or ACF Nationals. For separate reasons, neither of those things happened, however I don't regret my decision to extend my career by an extra year. As far as being in school goes, a dozen years is enough. A previous post of Gautam's resonated with me very strongly. It is time to move on. I would like to do other things with my life. A retirement where I edit a few things, play a few opens per year, and moderate a few events is most likely my future in quizbowl, as is the case with many others.

Did your decision to continue playing affect your academic or professional career in a way you wish it had not? Did it affect you on a more personal level?
Around the summer of 2011, I had a severe paradigm shift with regards to life goals. Before then, I was a mathematician who played quizbowl. After being antagonized by Watkins (egad!) and others who swore that I would never be able to lead a southern team to achieve much, let alone Alabama, I decided that enough was enough. I had something to prove to the doubters. It's at that point that I turned into a quizbowler who knew mathematics. Did this affect my potential professional career? Absofuckinglutely. Do I regret making the decision to change my ways? I mean, not really, although it did lead to my eventual demise as far as a career in mathematics is concerned. I'm amazed by those of you who finished a PhD while playing quizbowl at the highest levels for the better part of a decade or even more. In my case, I just couldn't do both, and unfortunately, I fell just short of my goals in academics and quizbowl. I'm recovering from this disappointment, however I would be lying to you if I said the road to recovery was short.

If ever, at what point did playing competitive quizbowl become unhealthy for you?
Regarding my personal playing health, I've been able to maintain a healthy playing/studying regiment that isn't constantly cumbersome. I believe this allowed me to have a bit more longevity than a lot of other players. I would imagine playing and studying extremely competitively for a dozen years straight would have profoundly negative side effects. I'm wondering how much binge studying can occur before an individual begins doing unhealthy things in his or her personal life. Studying for quizbowl is, for the most part, unnatural. Personally, I think it's kinda crazy when I read a math paper or a history book for fun in order to take a break from studying. I'm sure a lot of you feel that way too. At some point, we succumb to more natural study methods that just feel better to us from a mental standpoint, or so I believe.

I'm sure there are many questions that I may have missed. Feel free to post your own answers to these along with any additional advice for those of us who may be undecided on their future direction. I feel like this topic is one that will ultimately thrive on people sharing their own experiences, so I tried to avoid generalizing too much.

[ValenciaQBowl]

I very much enjoyed reading both Matt's and Jake's posts. I'm always interested in the "philosophical" questions underpinning our game: what does it prove? Why do we do it? What are its effects on people, both in learning and, dare I use such a term, "spiritually"?

I'm not going to address Jake's questions specifically, but I'd like to share the perspective of someone who first picked up a buzzer in 1984, long before even some of our current "grizzled vets" were born.

The college game was much different in the late 80s and early 90s. The southeast was the epicenter of the game, and most teams mocked the effort that the Georgia Tech powerhouses put into getting better; the idea of doing something much more than attending practices and periodically writing crappy CBI-esque questions to improve wasn't taken too seriously. So obviously the idea of burnout or personal toll on me or any player who wasn't Tech's Jim Dendy or Scott Gillespie (or maybe Robert Trent from Tennessee?) wasn't something to reckon with.

But the fascinations of the game certainly persisted with me, and I was fortunate to land a teaching job at a college where I could continue to coach and keep up with the game. When the game really accelerated in quality and seriousness in the late 90s and aughts, I was able to learn from that and grow as a player of open/masters' tournaments and as a coach. During the early 2000s I was a decent player and able to contribute to some good teams at Chicago Open and to cruelly dominate the weaker open circuit in Florida.

But as is beginning to happen to the generation of star collegiate players of the 2005-2012ish era, my job grew in seriousness, I got married and had a kid, and just lost time for working at my own game. Coaching my players and writing Delta Burke has certainly allowed me not to rust too badly, but obviously that kind of work doesn't help too much with the increased difficulty of the open canon. So I've watched my ppg and team win totals slowly decline at CO and suffered losses to teams whom I once could've crushed in Florida summer opens.

And you know what? It's fine! I still enjoy trying to beat better players and accept when I don't. I like hearing the questions and have come to accept watching the young whippersnappers beat me to them. And I still enjoy all these negative emotions Matt and Jake are referring to: it's fun to use spite and a mild amount of personal animus to motivate myself to get better and at least steal a couple toss-ups from some bozo I think is an arrogant jerkface! But the key is to realize that such feelings are transient and that arrogant jerkface is probably a pretty good person, so I accept their limp handshake and lack of eye contact after the match (what's up with that being so common, anyway? What y'all gonna do in a job interview??), smile and move on to the next whuppin'. Having a kid and a job will keep your quiz bowl losses in perspective, I assure you.

Anyway, there should be no "endgame." Focus on your family and friends and career and travel, but don't quit the game outright. Go read at tournaments nearby, volunteer to write for and staff various NAQT sectionals and nationals, and struggle vainly to keep up in open tournaments, even as your game (and quick recall) slowly deteriorate.

While it's certainly true that Rust Never Sleeps, at least for those who love this game, it's better to fade away than to burn out. My, my, hey, hey. See some of y'all in Chicago.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I first fell in love with quizbowl as a high school student circa 2001. Here was an activity that rewarded me for what I was already doing: reading books, paying attention in class, visiting museums in my spare time, etc. At the time, both Illinois and the league my high school played in used crappy non-pyramidal questions (I'm not sure which company wrote them), and just the stuff I was already learning through school and non-school activities plus a fast buzzer finger was all I needed to immediately add value and score points.

In 2004 I became an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Suffice it to say, the stuff I learned in high school + from random books I read was no longer enough to tread water. But college quizbowl was more canonical than random buzzer check questions, and I soon learned that I could get better by just listening to questions and writing down clues. From my freshman year at UChicago onwards, I tried to expose myself to as many questions as possible. I attended every single practice (twice a week), I played any tournament I could, even if it was an impossible one like Manu (where, as a freshman, I finished dead last in scoring). Within a year or so, I had learned so many clues by having them read to me at games/practice that I was a respectable player. Not a great player - but I was the 2nd or 3rd highest scorer on a Chicago B team that was better than most A teams in the country. We finished in the top bracket at ACF Nationals one year.

I was content. At this point, I could have taken more directed studies. I could have printed out packets, read through them, highlighted clues, etc. I could have done an analysis of "OK, this is where my team and myself are weak, I should learn those things". But I did none of those things. I had an active social life in college: when the choice was stay inside and study for quizbowl or go to the common room of my dorm and play Settlers of Catan with my non-quizbowl friends until 2 AM, I always went with Catan.

Then, in the fall of 2007, I started law school at Harvard. Things changed dramatically for me, and not in a good way. I quickly realized that I found my classes boring and that I did not fit in with my classmates socially. I cannot understate how much of a shock for me this was. For the first two decades of my life, I was the kid who loved school and loved almost all of his classes and wanted to learn even more. Then here I was at Harvard Law, and suddenly I despised my classes. I soon became the stereotypical law school "slacker" - sitting in the back of the class, not doing the readings, and using my laptop during class to do things other than take notes. I was totally alienated from everything I was "supposed" to be doing.

There was a void in my life, and the Harvard Quizbowl Team filled it. I did anything related to quizbowl I could: I noted that nobody on the team seemed to know non-classical myth or world religion, so I quickly got up to speed on those topics through systematic reading, and became quite good at them. I still read history books in my spare time: but now I read books specifically picked to fill in gaps in my knowledge, rather than just books that seemed interesting on a book store shelf. And I spent time reading old packets (made much easier due to packet archives). I edited and wrote as many questions as I could so that I would absorb new clues. This was also the time I started hanging out in the quizbowl chat room. Quizbowl was the only good thing going on in my life at this point: it was my only real hobby, it was my only real social life. And the results were there: I was soon the 2nd highest scoring player on Harvard A, a team that, while not one of THE best teams in the country, was one of the best teams in the country. New players would walk up to me at tournaments, recognize me without me having to introduce myself, and then tell me that they really enjoyed some packet I wrote and/or asked me for advice on how they could improve. In contrast, back at law school, I was being called into the dean's office to explain my low attendance, and was seeing a therapist.

I don't think I got all that I could out of my quizbowl career: I would have been a better player and had a much more storied career had I approached quizbowl in college the same way that I approached quizbowl in law school. But it required pretty serious alienation for me to take quizbowl more seriously.

Anyway, I graduated in 2010, and theoretically I was supposed to stop playing quizbowl. But when you spend 3 years of your life where quizbowl is the only thing you really care about, and the only thing that makes you feel good rather than bad, its hard to just quit. So I continued to go to masters and open tournaments. I used a loophole in the ACF rules to play several tournaments as "Georgetown University" (where my employer had sent me for a single class). I continued showing up to Chicago Open until 2012.

But I was a shell of my former self. My life was now actually going really well now that I was out of law school. I had non-quizbowl friends for the first time in three years. I discovered new hobbies that I became passionate about the way I was once passionate about quizbowl. I didn't study, and I felt myself get worse and worse with each passing year. I decided that I would retire the next time I won anything so I could claim to "go out on top". To expedite this, I arranged to play Chicago History Doubles with Hoppes, knowing that such a team would almost certainly win the tournament and allow me to retire. We cleared the field and I walked out of playing quizbowl forever. Well unless you count Modern World, which you shouldn't for many reasons.

[Galadedrid Damodred]

When is a healthy time to leave?
For me, right now.