Not a new team, but aiming for new heights

[sunilmohan410]

I've recently moved to an area with an amazingly active scene for Quizbowl and am in contact with a local high school for assisting with Quizbowl coaching/help. The school is one that's very academically gifted, and there doesn't appear to be a shortage of interest in Quizbowl, but their team is not one that consistently competes in the better divisions at tournaments, or qualifies for national tournaments. I'm looking to do my best to change that.

I am curious to find out what strategies I can try to employ in achieving this goal. Specifically, how do you guide a team into studying major focus areas and a variety of minor focus areas, while also effectively coaching them during practices to best prepare them for competition?

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[EricChang5]

It sounds like you already have a good starting point, and I'm glad to hear that you are interested in improving your team! Like you mention, the next step of improving your team is to start focusing on the major categories and trying to cover as much of the content as you can between your main players. Most tournaments will follow a set distribution that you should be able to find in the question set information (ex: 4/4 literature, 4/4 history, 4/4 science, etc.) and each category will also be broken down into smaller subcategories (ex: 4/4 science can comprise of 1/1 physics, 1/1 chemistry, 1/1 bio, 1/1 math/CS/other). Identifying which categories (and subcategories) each student excels at and pairing them up with people they play well with are certainly important aspects of team-building even if this means you aren't necessarily grouping your 4 strongest players. I've have many valuable teammates who may not have gotten many toss-ups but were critical for converting bonus parts on categories they studied.

In my experience as a coach and a player, my major philosophy is to encourage but not enforce. Most high school quizbowl students already have a lot on their plate (AP classes, marching band, etc. etc. etc.), and I think the stronger quizbowl players develop through the enjoyment of learning what they want to learn. In my opinion, the stronger quizbowl players develop much more on their own time than a team practice. Obviously, try to keep your practices efficient and worthwhile, but I always viewed practice as much more of a social experience where I could have fun with my friends playing a game we enjoy together more so than the main time to grind. As a coach, you have to balance this level of fun and competitiveness. I think creating a fun and engaging atmosphere of good quizbowl at practice leads to those habits forming in each players' personal study time as well. You can't necessarily force the students to be fully dedicated to quizbowl, but you can be a facilitator by providing effective study methods, practice material, and worthwhile content to study. A good coach may not be able to motivate their players, but a bad coach can certainly take away that motivation.

Some more practical things you can implement are having students go through a question database and read through a single category (ex: qbreader.org and selecting a set difficulty and category), having students write questions on topics they find interesting, having students create study guides (or flashcards) on things they see come up (or reading through already existing quizbowl study guides - there are plenty of free ones out there that are decent), or schedule scrimmages against local teams or if your team is big enough, hold an in-house tournament. Encourage your players to bring their friends to practice too (not only as a way to increase your numbers but also to make practice fun and to make people more comfortable). One fun activity my old team used to do was before each tournament, each player would create their own bingo board with each space representing a different answerline. Then if we got that answer correctly then you would check it off (if you got it incorrectly or the other team beat you to it, you wouldn't count it). This forced players to really study on a specific topic (ex: Kazuo Ishiguro or the 30 Years' War). Especially for newer players, focusing on a much smaller category and expanding from there is what I found to be most helpful in my development as a quizbowl player.

I understand that as a motivated coach hearing to "oh just let your students become better on their own" isn't exactly useful at all, but I do think you can certainly play a big role in getting those students invested and wanting to improve. When I think of what motivated me to get better, it was really that I enjoyed playing quizbowl because my coaches made it a lot of fun and took us to a bunch of competitions. They never forced us to study on our own time, but I definitely remember them showing me how to access question database or even giving me old study guides to add onto and make my own flashcards from. It takes time to develop these stronger teams, but starting early with young students and providing them the tools can start to create that culture.

I hope you can gain something from this very long response! I'm sure a lot of it is common sense knowledge but I think it's worthwhile to hear. There are plenty of people in the community with lots of experience (and much better knowledge than me for sure!) that are willing to help out if you reach out. I wish you the best of luck with your season!