The Quizbowl Resource Center

cchiego

I'm very glad that NAQT posted this. PR is definitely a place where collaboration between NAQT and the community is essential. I'm also thrilled to hear that there will be major improvements in the video/audio recorded at tournaments this year and hope that this continues in the future. Some specifi...

cchiego

One easily-predictable aspect of worksheets was that there would inevitably be a worksheet on "This Day in History," usually drawn directly from the History Channel website (back when it focused on actual History, so very long ago). That could be a guaranteed perfect score. Probably my &qu...

cchiego

At my school, we have a Knowledge Bowl club and we only got into last year. I have noticed that other schools have at least 15 members in their Quiz Bowl or Knowledge Bowl clubs and they also seem to have a loyal member base. Our club attendance is 8 plus or minus 7, so sometimes it's just me, but ...

cchiego

I love quizbowl, I've dedicated years of my life to it, but it's a pretty boring spectator sport. It's boring for me to watch people play quizbowl (unless there is a very animated player on one of the teams, then it's fun because it would be fun to watch that person do anything) and I imagine it's ...

cchiego

The content of the article is mostly very good. I hope it was an editorial decision and not Ken Jennings' to call us Jeopardy's minor leagues (I don't know in what other games the minor leagues would be substantially more difficult than the major leagues). This is the key problem with quizbowl in p...

cchiego

Bumping this post because based on another thread there is a very odd "they knew what they were getting into" attitude towards new/occasional attendee teams in quizbowl from more experienced teams and players. For many--perhaps the majority (still!)--of schools with some kind of quiz bowl ...

cchiego

I just wanted to not that two of the three examples above are not great: 1. a team at Hunter SCOP Novice (which was in fact intended for new teams/schools both in difficulty and teams, although surprisingly good teams have played recently despite the eligibility rules) and 2. a team that chose to p...

cchiego

Morristown-Beard School 2/0/0 Why is a school that last competed at a pyramidal event in 2014 signed up for a pre-nationals tournament loaded with some of the top teams in the country and held on a college set? [EDIT: They have apparently played a couple of times more recently, but only on IS-A set...

cchiego

NSC 2011 had all kinds of surreal experiences and images. Getting from the official hotel for the staff to the tournament required a huge number of people to pile into a minibus from a local HS driven by a teacher volunteer who didn't seem to have expected being conscripted into this and didn't know...

cchiego

"Doing outreach" doesn't have to be that difficult/time consuming. In Nolan's case, I'd recommend simply asking the coaches of the local Masterminds schools (there appear to be at least 16 or so in the direct Syracuse area based on the NAQT website) if they'd be interested in having an exp...

cchiego

One of the best things to do would be to create an advisorship position for quizbowl and make that part of a professor's service to the college. This is not just having an advisor for the club like any random club, but rather a position that the college/university makes it a point to fill with a pro...

cchiego

Another thing that I’m going to add is that if you do decide to run the tournament (which I commend you for), you may have to prevent yourself from being pushed over by the complaints of coaches and parents, adults to whom high schoolers would normally be deferential. Give them a fair hearing, but ...

cchiego

How acceptable would it be for me, the captain of a high school team, to direct an NAQT tournament? As there are relatively few tournaments in my area of the country, and my school, which has historically been relatively strong, has had some recent difficulty recruiting new players, I would like fo...

cchiego

Please pay attention to which schools are signing up for your tournaments and make sure that the field is appropriate to their abilities. Be honest with teams beforehand to avoid huge mismatches that drive away newer teams and players. If a new school or an infrequent attendee wants to come to a tou...

cchiego

I think there should be a 2018 edition, especially for Washington. There are more tournaments sprouting up, as well as commited teams in the form of Lakeside, Odle and Interlake. I would be very cautious about upgrading Washington State at this point unless there's a sudden explosion of not just ne...

cchiego

In the short term, your next best bet is honors colleges, honors programs, or any kind of interdisciplinary program. Quizbowl unfortunately doesn't have a real "home" department in a university, so it would be hard to make anything happen at a departmental level unless you can find some fo...

cchiego

This happened, but had to be held outside the planned room in the lobby instead so there wasn't an opportunity for video. Some excellent discussion and detailed historical examples of what not to do when hosting ensued. I'm attaching a copy of the handout that we went over to this thread for anyone ...

cchiego

I will bring my 1080p webcam and record it from at least one angle; if people who are more experienced with audiovisual stuff would like to bring a device to record (I have been told we will not have access to the room's AV equipment for understandable reasons), I'm happy to outsource it to them. If...

cchiego

I am pleased to announce a "How to Host a Successful Tournament" workshop at HSNCT. The event is tentatively scheduled to take place in Imperial Ballroom A of the Marriott at 8:30 PM on Saturday, May 26th . The workshop is free and open to anyone interested in hosting a successful quizbowl...

cchiego

The livestreaming was a great idea and improved a good bit on last year's Periscoping, but I do have a few suggestions to make it look more professional. There are a not-inconsiderable number of people interested in watching matches, but when the livestream is jumping from match to match and platfor...

cchiego

I want to emphasize that I'm not advocating any school to not compete in MABL or It's Ac because of pyramidal. Rather, I think many schools that only compete in the former don't realize how similar the latter is, both in terms of academic competition ethos and, like I said, question content. There ...

cchiego

Firstly, I think that It's Academic questions in recent years have become more and more quizbowl-ish in that their canon seems to intersect more and more with the pyramidal canon, especially in playoff rounds and later (this seems to be borne out by the fact that we won last year instead of a team ...

cchiego

Likely because you'll get players or coaches who go "WHAAAAT" and yell and disrupt the match if you neg them without some kind of explanation or seeming sympathy that their answer was close. This has happened to me several times, including at nationals before. Players may think that modera...

cchiego

But beyond that, there are many coaches that prefer to leave the actual running of the club to the students- in Darien for instance, our coach is very busy and as such students are responsible for registering for tourneys, running housewrites, organizing tourney logistics, etc. Many programs in my ...

cchiego

Maybe it is worth looking at what the difference between how a Chicago or UC Berkeley manages it compared to an average school that may flounder a bit? It's really hard to compare two universities that tend to get massive bumper crops of high school players each year to other schools that don't. Bu...

cchiego

This is obviously something that helps, but as it is college quizbowl isn't maximizing the value of the existing pool of college players. Consider last year's rising freshmen contact list . Look at the number of colleges that are represented, and consider that the vast majority of them don't have q...

cchiego

College quizbowl is really bloated with grad students, old open players, and players who are undergrads but are already quizbowl veterans. Most of these people are great volunteers and are really nice people, but I worry that they take up a lot of oxygen at every event and club meeting. I would lov...

cchiego

Powers are great. Conor's post summed up the advantages nicely. It's a way to demonstrably reward players for depth of knowledge. For specialists in particular, a 2-0-1 statline looks and feels much better than a 2-1 statline with identical buzzes. I'd even say this is more important on harder sets ...

cchiego

It might be worth reconsidering why there was a "state championship" tournament that included 0 teams from outside of Middle Tennessee held on the exact same day as 30+ TN teams competed at a tournament in Memphis and a few weeks after a dozen teams played in East TN. FWIW, West TN current...

cchiego

Major props to Caltech for hosting a high school tournament for the first time in awhile and getting so many new schools from the LA area to come. Hope that these schools had a good time and got linked into the larger SoCal network.

cchiego

My high school (White Station) attended the Beach Ball Classic several times in the period that it ran a quizbowl-style competition from 1998 to 2003 when they unfortunately stopped the quiz bowl component. The quizbowl/Jeopardy-ish component was called "Academic Olympics"; it may have bee...

cchiego

Chris Chiego sent me a list of NJ schools that do bad quizbowl back in the summer of 2016, but I've sadly never gotten around to contacting them because our tournament fields have always filled up relatively quickly on their own. A fairly easy solution to this problem is to email all the new school...

cchiego

A few questions I have: 1. To what degree do central organizations help, like the PA Coaches one, and should that be part of our aims? (even if its simple stuff like a staffer database) 2. How do we coordinate most effectively with each other and with new schools? 3. Since many NJ schools' institut...

cchiego

It's pretty incredible that I don't think there's been an event in NJ with a novice bracket or a novice-only tournament in the past few years. Princeton did split standard-competitive this year, but that's it. not to take away from Rutgers and this tournament, but there are plenty of smaller novice...

cchiego

In the interest of trying to actually get schools to like pyramidal quizbowl and not go back to the massive modified Jeopardy shadow circuit in NJ, perhaps it would make sense to encourage a school that is making its quizbowl debut (Lyndhurst) to attend a more difficulty and field-appropriate event....

cchiego

I'd avoid "true quizbowl" or "national format quizbowl" or even "NAQT quizbowl," all of which I've seen used in derogatory fashion by people who think all these good quizbowl traits are the work of Meddlesome Outsider Troublemakers (tm). If you're trying to reach more t...

cchiego

Our full wrap-up of Quaker Fall Open on GPQB is available here. This is our first attempt to add some post-tournament interviews into our coverage, so let us know what y'all think.

cchiego

and it's important for people to do the digging into the finances and see who might have an interest in preventing good quizbowl in an area. I missed this comment from Chris in one of the responses above. This is absolutely a major part of what is going on in upstate New York with regards to Master...

cchiego

I'm curious about why you think St. Joe "seems to be in a state of hibernation", though. We've attended either HSNCT or NSC every year since 2008, and we have won Rotary State (NAQT) for the past five years. This is because I mixed y'all up with the 3 other St. Joe's from around the count...

cchiego

No clear way to ensure that teams who attended (and the host) can keep copies of the questions, but can't pass them on to others. (This is the sort of problem that no DRM I am aware of really does a good job with, and it's generally believed that perfect DRM is impossible.) Can it then be the offic...

cchiego

I'll leave it at that, since the politics of Oklahoma quizbowl don't matter to many people outside this state. No, I'm glad that y'all brought this up and shined some more light on it. There's definitely a profit motive in a number of cases for keeping bad quizbowl that goes beyond just cheap quest...

cchiego

First of all, I would like to make one thing clear: quizbowl doesn’t necessarily have a cities problem. 10% of Americans live in our 20 most populous cities. Keeping this statistic in mind and using the PACE NSC as an example, it follows that a field of 96 teams should have around 9-10 teams from t...

cchiego

Just adding that George Washington was definitely at HSNCT last year, they went 4-6. It was their first time there since 2014 though. Its also worth noting that while basically only GW regularly attends HSNCT, several high schools in West Virginia send teams to NHBB nationals annually, which while ...

cchiego

I feel like the ratings value state organizations perhaps too highly. This may be the political scientist in me, but one thing I've seen over the years is that institutions matter. You can go into a bad quizbowl area and run a bunch of good pyramidal tournaments in one year, but if you don't get so...

cchiego

I was pleased with the responses to the first thread on this topic in 2015 and I hope that this updated list as of summer 2017 will prove useful in pointing out areas where good quizbowl has proven successful and where good quizbowl still has a ways to go. Again, I define "good quizbowl" a...

cchiego

There will likely be people who played all kinds of similar competitions in high school (it looks like Bowdoin draws mostly from Massachusetts, New York, Maine, California, and Connecticut), so you may want to include not just Quiz Bowl but also MasterMinds, High School Quiz Show, and perhaps just &...

cchiego

It is also possible for a coach to find themselves in a situation where they don't have female players at tryouts. I've always wondered if try-outs themselves might in themselves dissuade or cut many people who would make great players. During the year that I coached a high school team, we had a si...

cchiego

My question is "what can we do to make that not the response?" Go into areas that don't have pyramidal MS quizbowl right now. Work to change IESA's question source (I know, this could be a decades-long project, but see if you can get into local leagues and such at first). Go into Northern...

cchiego

What can we do to repair this relationship? Well, let's see, USABB is: -Copying the NAC strategy of bribing the top teams to play worse competition and claim to be "national champions." -Running 14 TU matches (!!) and claiming it's just as legit as regular quizbowl (and charging basically...

cchiego

The Southeast Education Service Center's quiz bowl page does not appear to resemble anything like pyramidal quiz bowl. The rules say questions are worth between 5 and 25 points, there is no mention of bonuses, and the practice questions they link to (which, unfortunately, do not seem to exist) incl...

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