The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Minnesota High School Novice Tournament (MHSNT) has now been scheduled for March 24th. The tournament is written and edited by Minnesota with packet submissions by Saint Paul Central and St. Thomas Academy.

We are seeking mirrors across the country; if you are interested in hosting a mirror contact Eliza at quizbowl at umn dot edu. The set is available to be mirrored til whenever (preferably by the end of spring semester).

Difficulty: The tournament is designed to be an easy fall tournament for new players, and questions were written with average freshman and sophomore players in mind. We want to encourage new teams and younger players to start (and continue) playing Quizbowl by not making the first tournament of the year too challenging. This is not an explicitly novice tournament, and is somewhere between novice and an easy high school set.

Distribution:
1/1 American Lit
1/1 British Lit
1/1 European Lit
1/1 World or Other Lit
1/1 American History
2/2 British or European History
1/1 World History
1/1 Physics or Computer Science
1/1 Chemistry or Math
1/1 Biology or Ecology
1/1 Earth Science or Astronomy
1/1 Painting
1/1 Music
1/1 Other Art (sculpture, architecture, jazz, ballets)
1/1 Myth
1/1 Philosophy and Social Science
1/1 Religion
1/1 Geography or Current Events
1/1 Trash or Other
1/1 Tiebreaker (lit, history, or science)

Eligibility: Only high school students can play this tournament. Although the tournament was designed as a novice tournament, older players are encouraged to play as well as a refresher tournament after the summer. Experienced players may want to consider not playing this tournament for the benefit of the field.

Location: This event will take place in Blegen Hall. Check-in runs from 8:15-8:45 and rounds will begin at 9:00.

Registration: If you would like to register a team for this tournament, please contact me at [email protected] before March 22nd.

Costs and other discounts:
Base fee: $50
Buzzer discount: -$5
Moderator: -$10
Travel: -$10 if over 100 miles by Google maps
Solo players and rogue teams: $10/player
New to Quizbowl: -$10

Mirrors:
Harding 9/24
Cedar Shoals 10/29
Detroit Catholic Central 10/22
Berkeley 12/3
Kirksville 2/18
Rockford Auburn 1/7
Tuscumbia (Waynesville) 1/14
Hanover 2/18

For those curious, this is being primarily written and edited by undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota (Eliza, Gaurav Kandlikar, Lauren Johnson [who is actually a grad student], Robin Heinonen, and others). Andrew Hart, Bernadette Spencer, myself, and possibly Rob Carson and Gautam Kandlikar will be offering feedback and a final look over, but will not be writing questions for this.

Hey, I talked to some Minnesota people privately about this but I haven't seen any change in plans, so I want to point out that a set like this should really have a much wider window of use. The vast majority of teams will never play a September event, and a lot more won't have the schedule to support an October mirror of this site either (Missouri doesn't start until Oct. 15th and we already have a full calendar up until the end of the month, for example). This is a really poorly chosen date window and this set would do a lot more good to reaching novices and inactive teams if you were to extend it to being usable for the whole semester at least.

I agree with Charlie on this, and I don't anticipate it being an issue--high school sets, especially sets like this which will not feature many teams traveling outside their geographic areas, are easy enough to feature many mirrors at different times. Sorry I didn't get a chance to bring this up earlier, Charlie.

Fixed. The mirror frame is now September 3 to January or whenever, with no specific set end date. I would recommend though that teams host a mirror earlier in the year though, since it is a novice tournament and designed for new players.

We still have only one (tentatively two) mirror sites for this tournament. If schools are reluctant to host a mirror because of concerns about difficulty, question quality, or selection of answer lines, they can email me and I can give them more specifics and they can take a look at a more-or-less complete packet. Obviously, this does not apply to schools that might potentially play the tournament.

Although this was originally intended to be a novice tournament designed for 9th and 10th grade players, it has been recommended to me that I let people know it is slightly harder than a true novice set. It is somewhere between novice and an easy high school tournament, as the availability of answer lines for true novice sets is small. That said, it is still appropriate for 9th and 10th grade students or players who are new to quizbowl.

Hey, we are hosting this. How many packets are you guys writing?

There will be twelve packets of prelims and two packets of finals of similar difficulty.

There will now be a mirror site in Michigan at Detroit Catholic Central High School. We are still seeking mirrors in any states besides Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Arkansas, and Minnesota. If you're interested in mirroring the set or have any questions about it, email me at [email protected].

Have more teams signed up since the last update?

Yeah, I forgot to add STA to the list. Thanks for the reminder though - I'll send out a follow-up email tonight to coaches/teams encouraging them to attend.

As is reflected in the original post, this tournament has been postponed/rescheduled for a date that is yet to be determined. There was a lack of interest in a tournament this early in the year, as many schools have not yet started their season. We hope that in rescheduling for a later date, more teams will be able to have access to the set.

Eliza - I got your email about mirroring this set, and tried to email you twice about it, but neither email went through. Would you please email me a sample packet? We at Rockford Auburn are definitely interested, but want to see a packet first. FYI the email addresses I sent to were the suac one and the quizbowl at umn dot edu one.

Here's some stats from this set:

Harding: Combined stats
DCC: Combined stats
Cedar Shoals: Combined stats (I know there's a few errors, but I don't have the SQBS files for this.

If you're still interested in mirroring this, feel free to contact me at kand0032 at umn dot edu or Eliza (her email is in the original post).

If you played on this set and have any comments, please email me. I'd be really happy to hear what teams thought of the questions.

Edit: added Cedar Shoals stats

This tournament has been set for March 24th, which is now reflected in the original post along with other pertinent information.

Field:
St. Thomas Academy (2-3)
St. Paul Central
Minneapolis South (2)
St. Agnes

St. Thomas Academy A cleared the field to win this tournament.

Stats are available here:

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournament ... all_games/

This set is posted here.

Did any of the questions I submitted end up in the final set?

mtimmons wrote:Did any of the questions I submitted end up in the final set?

I believe so! They didn't all make it into one packet or without editing, but I'm pretty sure several of them ended up in the set in some way. I had already written on some of the answerlines you picked, so that affected the number of questions that we used. Most likely your questions would be found in the last packet along with submissions from STA.