The Quizbowl Resource Center

David Frazee sent me a box of old quizbowl stuff. One of the more interesting things was a program from 1995 ACF Nationals, featuring some artwork; a combination welcome and birth announcement from Don Windham and Carol Guthrie; information on participating teams (including messages), officials, and editors; an explanation of the format; past ACF results; and various records of the time.

I've scanned and posted it. (It's a little hard to follow because it was a folded booklet.) Anyone who wants the original should let me know and I'll give it to them at the ICT or mail it. The first person to request it [edit: Rob Carson] will get it.

jonah wrote:David Frazee sent me a box of old quizbowl stuff. One of the more interesting things was a program from 1995 ACF Nationals, featuring some artwork; a combination welcome and birth announcement from Don Windham and Carol Guthrie; information on participating teams (including messages), officials, and editors; an explanation of the format; past ACF results; and various records of the time.

I've scanned and posted it. (It's a little hard to follow because it was a folded booklet.) Anyone who wants the original should let me know and I'll give it to them at the ICT or mail it. The first person to request it will get it, and I'll edit this post if and when it's claimed. If no one tells me they want it in the next week or so, I'll recycle it.

I'll take it!

Sidenote: The Michael McStravick on the A&M team at this event is the father of Tyler McStravick, the #2 scorer at the 2015 MSNCT behind William Golden and current junior at St. Thomas.

I love the old school ACF logo, despite the implications of pederasty.

Thanks for posting this, Jonah. There's a wealth of interesting information here, including a delightful old-timey ACF logo. It'd be nice if ACF were to put together something like this, albeit probably not in foldable brochure form.

Some things I found interesting here:

• ACF Nationals is consistently referred to as "ACF NCT" here. I wonder when that verbiage died out, since ACF Nationals stands out now as the only national quizbowl championship at any level that isn't known by an acronym.
• It's noteworthy that most of the listed teams have a coach or advisor, presumably faculty. I would imagine that this has to do with the CBI requirement that teams bring a chaperone, but it seems clear that extracurricular activities at universities were once supported much more strongly than they are now.
• Each listed team has information about how they qualified, which is interesting given that nearly two decades later ACF Nationals had no qualification requirement. In addition to qualifying through Regionals, teams could apparently qualify through other tournaments (Maryland A qualified by winning 1994 Heinrich Bowl), through a "point-system" (perhaps a predecessor of S-value/D-value/A-value or perhaps something else entirely), or by receiving wild card berths. Did this qualification system actually exist, or was it devised ex post facto after teams registered for ACF Nationals? If the latter, why was there enough demand for a qualification system for ACF Nationals in 1995 but not in later years? [EDIT: This Usenet post states that the requirements to qualify for 1994 ACF Nationals were to "finish in the top three at one of the ACF Regionals; or host a tourney with 8 schools or more; or request a wild-card (good schools with bad travel funds); or host the ACF regional; or win an ACF-registered tournament (registration done by contacting the ACF ahead of time)." I wonder when ACF got rid of the qualification procedure.]
• Each team is listed with their won-lost record for the season. Nowadays compiling such figures would be seen as pointless, given differences in tournament difficulty and the attendant frequency with which a school's A team at a tournament is not necessarily the best four players at that school, but clearly a lot of time and effort was invested into compiling those records in 1995. I wonder how many are extant today.

I do not remember this brochure but am delighted to see it (my first ACF nationals!).

Note that many of the "coaches" are actually just undergrad officers of the team (e.g. Chicago, Harvard, Maryland). Some schools had coaches (or "coaches") due to CBI but I wouldn't infer from this document that most teams back then had that kind of institutional structure/support.

I don't recall much about the qualification process but my dim memory is that the apparent formality of it was borrowed from CBI, but in practice basically anyone who wanted to make the trek to Knoxville was able to attend. I think we later did away with the formality because it seemed irrelevant, insofar as everyone who wanted to attend was permitted to do so.

The won-lost records were almost surely each team's quasi-arbitrary interpretation of how to determine such information--e.g., I see for Virginia we listed "0-0," possibly because those line-ups had never played a tournament together all year.

I really want to know about "Harmonic Divergence Bowl".

Habitat_Against_Humanity wrote:I really want to know about "Harmonic Divergence Bowl".

I have the packets from a 1994 tournament at Berkeley called Harmonic Convergence Bowl, so I assume this is a follow-up to that.

jonah wrote:

Habitat_Against_Humanity wrote:I really want to know about "Harmonic Divergence Bowl".

I have the packets from a 1994 tournament at Berkeley called Harmonic Convergence Bowl, so I assume this is a follow-up to that.

Yeah, I think I meant "Convergence", which is in the program, but not in math.

Also, the money quote is from the Princeton team.

Parts of this I love include but are not limited to:

• The "formal welcome by tournament directors" on page 3 that concludes "Have fun, y'all."
• "These records are available publicly on the Internet's FTP and WWW archives as ACFNCTRecords.txt"
• I'm not sure if the empty grid on page 13 was filled out by hand or what, but as it stands it's not doing very much to "facilitate play determination".
• The tournament format makes sure to explain how a champion will be crowned if two teams finish the round-robin unbeaten, but not what to do if there's a 2011-style bloodbath where everyone takes two losses.