ACE: Is it Legit?

[tksaleija]

I was looking at attending an ACE qb camp last year but the timing was too late. I'm interested again this year, but I want to get some opinions from others on its validity before I move forward. Is it a good program that encourages modern quiz bowl habits, and, if so, how?

[jesposito]

I went over the summer, and I think it was a positive experience. It's definitely not for super advanced players, but rather for players who want to make the jump to elite, or just good, but aren't really sure how. The questions are pyramidal, quality, and cover the quiz bowl canon pretty well. I think its main upside is that it teaches you how to study, mainly because of the tests it gives you everyday. It really helped me pick a study strategy that worked, and that I continue to use. The clues and facts they teach you are often deliberately repeated in questions, which is also nice. The only downside I can really see is that it might encourage memorizing facts rather than learning more in depth about the subject, but that can be easily fixed if needed. Overall, good quizbowl, good experience.

[Everything in the Whole Wide World]

I staffed an ACE camp a few years back and would highly recommend it for novice to intermediate players. The camp was professionally run, the amount of questions provided and information crammed in was quite impressive, and most of all, all the students seemed to be having fun. I would echo the above post insofar as the camp's strength seemed to me more a crash course mastery of canonical clues rather than deep looks at material, so I'm not sure if ACE is worth the cost for advanced quizbowlers. But, the camps definitely occupy a nice niche in quizbowl at large and are most certainly legit.

[troyharris]

Both my sons, Sean and Rhys, did camps. It definitely made them stronger players. The coolest thing about camp from the perspective of a parent is that it doesn't just help with quiz bowl, but it helps with all academics. It helped drive them both to study subject areas that either aren't offered in school or that they wouldn't consider taking, such as classical music history/fine arts, mythology, etc. It helped make them much more well-rounded students. Having attended myself on now three different occasions, the competition is intense, but you see how much campers grow over the week. The one word of caution would be that camp can also be a very humbling experience. A player may be one of the strongest in their specific region, but then realize that the quiz bowl world is large, and everyone at camp, for the most part, is an outstanding player. Dominating camp is a very difficult thing to do. If they can come to camp with the attitude that they are going to have a lot of fun, meet a lot of cool people, get to eat as much as they want, and have a huge quiz bowl advantage for themselves and their team over teams with no ACE campers, then they really should take on the experience. The issue we have here in New England is that there are no camps within 400 miles, which means not many New England players go.