Georgia 15-16

[CSQuizJags]

GATA has begun to set the calendar for the 15-16 season. If you'd like your event added to this list (and subsequently the online calendar), please email gataquizbowl at gmail . com and we will do that over the summer.

August:
15-
22-
29-

September:
5- LABOR DAY WEEKEND
12- GATA State Coaches Meeting at Mary Persons HS
19-
26-

October:
3- GATAF and Flowery Branch (North) and Dublin (South)
10- SAT
17- WAC at Walton
24- Greg Trandel Memorial Bulldog Brawl at Cedar Shoals
31- NEGA History Bowl at Cedar Shoals

November:
7-ANGST at UNG (tentative), Collins Hill MS
14- MSFIT II at Marist
21- BISB at Brookwood
28- THANKSGIVING WEEKEND

December:
5- MS Jag Bowl at Cedar Shoals (SCOP MS mirror)
12- JV/Novice Jag Bowl at Cedar Shoals, Quizkitten at Bainbridge
19-

January:
9- SAV CDS Tournament, WIT IV at Marist
16- Dorman Cav Challenge, Quizcat at Bainbridge
18- MLK Day History site TBD
23- SAT
30- GATA Winter at Mary Persons (South) and site TBD (North)

February:
6- NAQT ICT Weekend
13- Collins Hill JV
20- UGA Varsity event
26- Region 8-5A tournament at Flowery Branch
27- GATA MS State at North Gwinnett, NAQT CCCT in Atlanta

March:
5- GATA JV State at Ola
12- NHBB State (tentative) site TBD
19- GATA V State at Flowery Branch
26- EASTER WEEKEND

April:
2- Jag Bowl X (GSAC Mirror)
9- ICT weekend?
16- GATA JV and V Super Six
23- NHBB Weekend in DC
30- NAQT SSNCT in Chicago

May:
7- NAQT MSNCT in Atlanta
14-GATA Board Meeting and Elections (2016-18 term)
21-
28-HSNCT in Dallas

June:
4-
11- Munson Memorial Hybrid
18-

[AKKOLADE]

Can you guys please track PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of your tournaments this season? Pretty please?

[1992 in spaceflight]

Can you guys please track PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of your tournaments this season? Pretty please?

To go off of this: Is there anything that the rest of us can do to help facilitate tracking of stats better? Would a comprehensive guide help matters, or is this more of a cultural change that needs to happen over a few years span?

[MitchAlday]

Can you guys please track PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of your tournaments this season? Pretty please?

To go off of this: Is there anything that the rest of us can do to help facilitate tracking of stats better? Would a comprehensive guide help matters, or is this more of a cultural change that needs to happen over a few years span?

Hello, all -

I'm serving as GATA's secretary and general PR person for the state, and I'd like to offer some insight into the way we at GATA run our tournaments. Perhaps that would help us all gain some common ground in this matter.

First off, GATA hosts the following tournaments over the course of the year:
GATA Fall South
GATA Fall North
GATA Winter South
GATA Winter North
GATA MS State
GATA JV State
GATA V State

At each of these tournaments, we rely on coaches, former players, and faculty members of the host school to serve as moderators and student volunteers to serve as scorekeepers. Typically, the tournament host will be a person who is affiliated with the host location. Their responsibilities will include taking care of copies, check in, set up, take down, clean up, lunch, and trophies (and possibly a couple of other minor issues as they arise). The tournament director will typically be a GATA Board Member in the North or me in the South - whose responsibility will be taking care of logistics, staffing, tournament structure/scheduling, and stats.

Typically, we have had very lopsided participation between the North and South fields in the non-State tournaments. Georgia is just a geographic conundrum because Atlanta is so heavily populated (maybe 60 quiz bowl teams competing within a half hour's drive of one another) and the rest of the state is so large (maybe 40 more teams competing within a 7-hour drive of one another).

All of this is to say that our scorekeeper can typically enter in the stats for the GATA North tournaments in a timely fashion if s/he forgoes entering individual stats or the manual entry for bouncebacks in SQBS. Additionally, this is assuming that our (typically student) volunteers (in search of service hours) actually fill out the scoresheets correctly. I can typically enter in both of these sets of data in a timely fashion for the GATA South tournaments, but that's mostly because our fields are generally a quarter or so the size of the North locations. This year, we're planning to host the GATA South tournaments in a little more central-to-north-of-central location (i.e. Macon and slightly-north-of-Macon) in the hopes that we'll even out the fields a little bit. If we can even the fields, then we might be able to provide individual stats at our tournaments; if not, the we won't. Either way, we're going to have a combined field of approximately 80 teams, which will be 40 games per round and 10 players per game. That means that we'll have to enter data for approximately 400 players every 30 minutes (at least for the prelims) at 2 locations, which in turn means that we'll be entering data for about 7 players every minute while simultaneously settling protests or finding a working buzzer system or replacing a reader.

In the grand scheme of things, tracking "PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of [our] tournaments" is not really one of our highest priorities, but to answer the second (and honestly much more helpful post), a guide is not necessary. We know how the program works. Data entry is just a bit tedious for our abilities. Additionally, we are not fundamentally opposed to the "culture" of stat keeping that is suggested/prescribed/dictated by PACE/HSQBrank/Morlan, et al., but we won't break our backs to embrace it wholesale, either.

I think the thing that could be done to help facilitate the tracking of stats better would be an improvement in the SQBS program itself. (Something along the lines of Abacus?) It would be nice if stats could be recorded in an app (ipad, maybe?) during real game time and compiled somehoworanother in another location. I envision a simple layout that has a screen of two opposing lists of players. Kid buzzes. Scorekeeper touches that kid's name. Screen pops up that says (+15) or (+10) or (-5). Scorekeeper touches the appropriate value. Screen proceeds to bonus. Scorekeeper touches appropriate value. Next tossup. (Has anyone seen GameChanger for real time baseball scoring?)

Surely we have some tech-savvy folks lurking around here, don't we?

Please feel free to contact me (jmitchellalday at gmail.com) if anybody would like to discuss the original question or building apps further.

[tabstop]

At each of these tournaments, we rely on coaches, former players, and faculty members of the host school to serve as moderators and student volunteers to serve as scorekeepers. Typically, the tournament host will be a person who is affiliated with the host location. Their responsibilities will include taking care of copies, check in, set up, take down, clean up, lunch, and trophies (and possibly a couple of other minor issues as they arise). The tournament director will typically be a GATA Board Member in the North or me in the South - whose responsibility will be taking care of logistics, staffing, tournament structure/scheduling, and stats.

Typically, we have had very lopsided participation between the North and South fields in the non-State tournaments. Georgia is just a geographic conundrum because Atlanta is so heavily populated (maybe 60 quiz bowl teams competing within a half hour's drive of one another) and the rest of the state is so large (maybe 40 more teams competing within a 7-hour drive of one another).

All of this is to say that our scorekeeper can typically enter in the stats for the GATA North tournaments in a timely fashion if s/he forgoes entering individual stats or the manual entry for bouncebacks in SQBS. Additionally, this is assuming that our (typically student) volunteers (in search of service hours) actually fill out the scoresheets correctly. I can typically enter in both of these sets of data in a timely fashion for the GATA South tournaments, but that's mostly because our fields are generally a quarter or so the size of the North locations. This year, we're planning to host the GATA South tournaments in a little more central-to-north-of-central location (i.e. Macon and slightly-north-of-Macon) in the hopes that we'll even out the fields a little bit. If we can even the fields, then we might be able to provide individual stats at our tournaments; if not, the we won't. Either way, we're going to have a combined field of approximately 80 teams, which will be 40 games per round and 10 players per game. That means that we'll have to enter data for approximately 400 players every 30 minutes (at least for the prelims) at 2 locations, which in turn means that we'll be entering data for about 7 players every minute while simultaneously settling protests or finding a working buzzer system or replacing a reader.

In the grand scheme of things, tracking "PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of [our] tournaments" is not really one of our highest priorities, but to answer the second (and honestly much more helpful post), a guide is not necessary. We know how the program works. Data entry is just a bit tedious for our abilities. Additionally, we are not fundamentally opposed to the "culture" of stat keeping that is suggested/prescribed/dictated by PACE/HSQBrank/Morlan, et al., but we won't break our backs to embrace it wholesale, either.

I think the thing that could be done to help facilitate the tracking of stats better would be an improvement in the SQBS program itself. (Something along the lines of Abacus?) It would be nice if stats could be recorded in an app (ipad, maybe?) during real game time and compiled somehoworanother in another location. I envision a simple layout that has a screen of two opposing lists of players. Kid buzzes. Scorekeeper touches that kid's name. Screen pops up that says (+15) or (+10) or (-5). Scorekeeper touches the appropriate value. Screen proceeds to bonus. Scorekeeper touches appropriate value. Next tossup. (Has anyone seen GameChanger for real time baseball scoring?)

Surely we have some tech-savvy folks lurking around here, don't we?

Please feel free to contact me (jmitchellalday at gmail.com) if anybody would like to discuss the original question or building apps further.

There are a couple of these scoresheet-like online apps running around in the software section, as I recall (Wustl was one, and I think there was another that was based on Google sheets), so I bet contacting those authors can get you somewhere, assuming you have online capabilities onsite during the match.

(Although: seven students = one game, more or less, and one game/minute in SQBS strikes me as a pretty reasonable pace. Yes, bad scoresheets take longer.)

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

you tell 'em mitch! A state of similar size and with a similar situation in having a large city where most of the teams play things (Illinois) also agrees, and as we all know, the IHSSBCA has completely foregone keeping accurate individual and PPB stats as seen on their website!

Esp since it's too hard to teach people to do the simple task of filling out a scoresheet

[TheDoctor]

you tell 'em mitch! A state of similar size and with a similar situation in having a large city where most of the teams play things (Illinois) also agrees, and as we all know, the IHSSBCA has completely foregone keeping accurate individual and PPB stats as seen on their website!

Andrew's sarcastic tone aside, a lot of the IHSSBCA's stats get done because we offer our sites the option to send me the scoresheets and have me enter them into SQBS after the tournaments are over, a service that I offered to GATA earlier today.

[cchiego]

Mitch, it's not just for rankings purposes--when the HSNCT and NSC draws are being set up, it's hard to accurately seed teams if you have few or no accurate PPB stats on them. Individual stats can also be a useful way to figure out why a team didn't have a good performance and discount it accordingly if a top player was absent or the A team was split into A and B teams or whatever other mitigating factor. In general, GA teams may be at a higher risk of being "malseeded" at nationals or even other invitationals out-of-state compared to teams from other states that have more extensive stat records.

[AKKOLADE]

In the grand scheme of things, tracking "PPB correctly at more than, like, 4 of [our] tournaments" is not really one of our highest priorities, but to answer the second (and honestly much more helpful post), a guide is not necessary. We know how the program works. Data entry is just a bit tedious for our abilities. Additionally, we are not fundamentally opposed to the "culture" of stat keeping that is suggested/prescribed/dictated by PACE/HSQBrank/Morlan, et al., but we won't break our backs to embrace it wholesale, either.

Right, so: scare quotes around culture and blowing off my request as unhelpful aside, here's the deal - there is no "culture." I'm "dictating" or "prescribing" nothing. PACE has nothing to do with this conversation. HSQBRank is run entirely by me.

There are a couple of reasons I asked GATA to track stats at their events. Obviously, having more complete stats for the rankings would be nice*, but there's two better reasons for it.

One is for seeding purposes for tournaments, including but mostly national championships since I'm sure that TDs in Georgia have a good idea as to how teams stack up against each other. When HSNCT and NSC are seeded, the lack of specific information for Georgia teams makes it more difficult to seed them.

The second is for the history of the game. As it stands, most tournaments don't do any kind of write-up after the fact. This leaves the statistic report to tell the history of the game. In five years, most people can't recall many specifics of a day's events, and trying to gather a oral history is time consuming and prone to inaccuracies. Memories fade. People forget exactly who was good and how good they were.

The fact that the GATA's method of PR after being asked to do the same thing a vast majority of tournaments already do is yell about the associated tedium of having a person input stats in between rounds and request people code another piece of software for you, when a perfectly acceptable one already exists, is pretty telling.

*Given that people on the top secret Georgia forums have complained about my rankings not accurately projecting teams from Georgia, though, I do want to say this: the one and only way I could do this better is if your tournaments actually tracked PPB.