In December 2020, quizbowl at the University of Washington was on the brink of collapse. While tournament attendance was solid, the club was inexperienced and lacked domain knowledge. When the club president unexpectedly stepped down, it seemed like our club might not have enough momentum to continue. In an alternate timeline, our club may have gone dark for a bit, just waiting for the next motivated player to come around and bring things back to life.
This is a common story in college quizbowl clubs. A team is rejuvenated when a motivated community member enters, only for it to decline when they leave. This is not as much of an issue for established quizbowl clubs, since they can rely on a steady stream of motivated players and the inertia of a long-standing club structure. But for clubs that are just getting started and may not have those advantages, this stop-and-start dynamic presents a real problem. Why is this the story of so many new clubs, despite continued efforts to address it? In other words:
Why has recent college outreach failed to create more long-lasting clubs?
This is the Big Question of this series of posts, and I will be referring back to it frequently. I will answer it by looking at five other key questions:
1. How do we get more college clubs to develop their own quizbowl communities?
2. Why has high school outreach been more successful than college outreach?
3. How do we pitch quizbowl more effectively to people outside of quizbowl?
4. How do we encourage new recruits to stay in quizbowl?
5. How do we ensure continuous effective club leadership?
Now UW is not a perfect quizbowl club, and we haven’t always followed our own guidance! But given our recent success, I would like to use UW as n example to demonstrate what effective club longevity looks like.
A Tale of Two Clubs
My short answer to the Big Question is that we get ahead of ourselves. The question we pose in outreach is often:
How do we get more colleges to contribute to the quizbowl community?
But the question we really should be posing is Question 1:
How do we get more colleges to develop their own quizbowl community?
I use "contribute" to mean sending teams to major tournaments, writing packets, and hosting things for the circuit. I use "their own quizbowl community" to mean a community that exists for its own sake, not just in relation to greater quizbowl. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but pursuit of the former can interfere with pursuit of the latter. As a case study, let’s return to UW before December 2020.
By most metrics, UW’s club was doing great. We sent multiple teams to the major tournaments. We started an ACF Winter packet. We scheduled the next edition of our high school tournament. From the outside, it looked like UW was doing everything right. We were certainly contributing!
But inside the club, it was a different story. We had a club that was primarily sustained by a single person: the president. Besides the president, there was very little knowledge about how the club operated and what it took to keep the lights on. In fact, almost no club operations were handled by someone other than the president. Club members were interested but not deeply engaged. Practice attendance was fine but not fabulous. While internal indicators were not yet at a crisis point, they did not paint the rosy picture that you would see as an outsider.
So in 2020 UW, we see a club that is meeting the first goal but struggling to meet the second. It’s contributing, but it’s not all that much of a community. The problem here is that the labor spent on contributing was labor that might have been better spent on community building at home. Ultimately, contribution and community are different levels on a club’s hierarchy of needs. A club can contribute with a minimal community for a while, and many do. We love to have those types of clubs around, and they certainly help the community in the short term! However, a club cannot stay healthy long-term without a strong community foundation.
To see an example of the opposite type of club, we can look at 2021 UW. UW sent less teams to tournaments than in 2020, we let our high school tournament lapse, and we didn’t work on any ACF packets. But internally, the club was flourishing. Club membership had nearly tripled since 2020. Engagement with the social scene of the club was high. And while we only sent four people to the official ACF Fall mirror, we hosted our own scrimmage of ACF Fall that attracted 28 participants. Even though the club may have looked like it was declining from the outside, we were much better positioned for longevity.
Both community contribution and internal community are important! But if you focus on contribution first, then you’re putting the cart before the horse. An independently flourishing quizbowl community is not just helpful but necessary for long term contribution.
At UW, we were uniquely suited to make this observation. Because there was no local scene for us to plug into, we had no choice but to focus on ourselves. Without the excitement of the circuit, we had less opportunities, but we were also able to focus on what matters most. (Later in this series, we’ll look at Question 2 from a more solutions-oriented angle.)
Teachers and Advisors
But this still doesn’t fully answer the Big Question. First of all, it’s not like internal community is completely neglected. Even if internal community is not a priority, club leaders are forced to put some effort in (lest the club become completely abandoned). But more importantly, if a lack of independent community is what dooms college quizbowl clubs, wouldn’t we expect HS clubs to fail in the same way? The outreach techniques in college are not all that different from the ones used in high school, but high school outreach has been far more successful. This brings us to Question 2: Why has high school outreach been more successful than college outreach?
Many argue that the answer is continuity. Most high school clubs have a semi-permanent teacher sponsor. Most college clubs do not benefit from a advisor like our own Mike Bentley. As a result, college clubs experience 100% turnover every four years, unlike high school clubs. When clubs don’t have anyone to preserve knowledge + structure, it is harder to keep things going.
College advisors can and do kickstart the rejuvenation of a club, and they make it less likely for a club to go dormant in the first place. So the answer (according to some) is to post more permanent quizbowl advisors at various schools.
I think this is the wrong way to go about it. First of all, most college clubs (non-quizbowl) work fine without a club advisor to keep them together. But this also saddles the advisor with way too much responsibility. Student-run clubs are supposed to be student-run! Sure, an advisor can be invaluable in helping a team get started. But if their continued presence is needed to sustain the club, then that indicates a fundamental problem with how the club is run. Of course quizbowl as a community should be willing to step in and support sagging clubs for mutual benefit, but clubs should also exist for their own sake.
The college / HS disparity is less about the continuity itself and more about the problems solved by outsourcing club leadership to a teacher. When a student or advisor runs a club, they’re usually flying blind. Not only do they have to learn how to run things behind the scenes, but they also have to learn how to curate their own community. (I use the term “curate” rather than "build" because it does a better job of capturing the part of the task that matters most. More on that in Part II.)
We talk about the first skill a lot; the key thrust of the advisor argument is that you need someone who can retain the institutional knowledge necessary to keep things going. But we don't talk about the second skill as much. And that second skill is where teachers shine, because they are experts at community curation. Not only do they have the experience of maintaining a community inside of their own classrooms, but they can also draw from the experiences of other teachers with clubs (if not their own experiences). Plus, teachers have far more incentive to focus on the vibes of their club because it affects how students view them. If a teacher is known for hosting a fun and welcoming club, then they’re more likely to be thought of as a fun and welcoming teacher. So even if a motivated student is running things behind the scenes, quizbowl clubs benefit just from having a teacher as a front-facing representative. (Not to mention the fact that teachers have a constant pool of their own students to recruit from.) My answer to Question 2 is that college clubs are less equipped to establish a strong community. I’ll look at this hypothesis more closely in Part II.
In contrast, club advisors don’t have the experience of running their own classrooms, they aren’t given a set of shared norms for hosting a club, and they have comparatively less institutional knowledge (just because of the sheer scale of a university). Sure, high school quizbowl clubs are made possible largely due to teacher involvement, but the role of a high school teacher is not necessarily one that a club advisor can fill.
Plus, even if a club advisor can fill the role of a teacher, it’s not clear that they should. College is all about becoming independent; ideally college students shouldn’t need an advisor to guide them. The more club advisors take charge of things, the less students feel connected to the operations of the club. We should see the “strong club advisor” model as a stepping stone to a healthy club state, not an end state to aspire to.
The Community Needs to Pass Down More Knowledge
Stepping in to fill the role of teachers as community builders is a difficult topic that will be covered more extensively later in the series. But the “retaining institutional knowledge” part is easier to fix. Members just need to actively pass down more knowledge that they gain from running the club.
At new clubs, we put hours and hours into writing, but how much effort do we put into pitching writing to new members? Or on a meta level, how much effort do we ensure that a club writing tradition is established for the future? How much effort do we put into finding successors? How much effort do we put into recording the steps we’ve taken as a club to make sure that our successors don’t make the same mistakes?
So many dead quizbowl clubs are ghosts. They vanish from the scene, not leaving anything behind. Out of the dead PNW clubs (Gonzaga, Whitman, and Washington State), none of them have so much as an old website, let alone public resources for running a club. There might have been knowledge privately passed down that I don’t know about, but I doubt it. If we don’t prepare the ground for the people after us, how can we expect them to succeed?
In addition, the public resources that do exist for quizbowl leaders are scattered across several hard-to-navigate websites. On the “Best of the Best” section of these (admittedly intimidating) forums, I see just one post about running a college club. I’m sure there are other resources out there, and it would be great if these could be more accessible to people who aren’t as plugged in to the community! I’ve done my best to collect some of these resources on our club website, and it would be great to see other clubs do the same.
Of course, this is not trivial! Putting together resources is tough, and there are many priorities to juggle when it comes to running a club. But making sure that your club continues eventually has to become one of those top concerns. When people ask for advice on starting or continuing a quizbowl club, we should have plenty of resources to direct them towards. If we as a community put ~20% more effort into preserving our knowledge about running clubs for the next generation, that in itself would pay huge dividends.
In the rest of this series, I’ll pass down some of my knowledge about that other problem: actually building a flourishing quizbowl community. There’s a lot to unpack from my time at UW, so I’ll start from the top in my next post: Why College Recruiting Fails.
Key Takeaways
- Often, an emphasis on contributing to the quizbowl community overshadows the community-building work that needs to be done at home. An independently flourishing quizbowl community is not just helpful but necessary for long term contribution to the greater community.
- College clubs fail where high school clubs do not because they are less equipped to establish a strong community. One of the reasons for this is that teachers are unusually well-suited for the task.
- We should see the “strong club advisor” model as a stepping stone to a healthy club state, not an end state to aspire to.
- The amount of resources for new club leaders is not enough to meet community need. Internally, clubs need to pass on more knowledge to the next generation (ideally while the old guard is still in charge of things). Externally, the community need to do a better job of making online resources easier to find + navigate.
