The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is the general announcement for the VCU Last-Minute Tournament, a high school academic quizbowl tournament to be operated by the quizbowl team of Virginia Commonwealth University and held at The Collegiate School in Richmond on Saturday, February 23 from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM. This is an event for those teams who were interested in attending the canceled Cavalier Open at UVa and now need another tournament on that weekend. It may also serve as a suitable warm-up for VHSL States on the following weekend.

This tournament will use NAQT IS-74. In accordance with NAQT policy, it is your responsibility to consult http://naqt.com/assigned-packet-sets.jsp and make sure that you have not played IS-74 at any prior events and do not plan to play it in any future events.

The top 15% of the field will qualify for the May 23-25 NAQT High School National Championship Tournament in Chicago. The tournament will also be affiliated with the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence, and provide an opportunity for between two and four teams to qualify for PACE's National Scholastics Championship, which will occur at George Mason University on May 31 & June 1.

The tournament is, however, open to everyone--teams who are not interested in attending nationals, and teams who have already qualified for nationals, are welcome to participate alongside those schools attempting to qualify.

We will not be using clocks; rather, we will read the first twenty tossups of each packet with bonuses. We will be using all other NAQT rules, including power tossups.

LOCATION, DIRECTIONS, PARKING: The tournament will take place at the Collegiate School. The room to meet in will be announced shortly. Registration will begin at 8:30, and the first round will begin as soon as possible after that. Please arrive by 8:30 to guarantee that you do not miss the start of gameplay.

-You can use "103 North Mooreland Road" for your map software, or use the directions page linked above. Park in the school lot.

FIELD SIZE: Because of the short notice for this tournament, which impacts our ability to gather staff, we are initially capping the field at 16 teams. Teams beyond the A and B team from a single school will be put on a waitlist along with teams beyond the 16th who wish to register. If we do not get enough A and B teams to fill the field, or if we are able to expand the field size by recruiting more staffers, we will allow waitlist teams to join the field in the order that they were placed on the waitlist.

FORMAT: If we use a 16-team field, the tournament format will be three rounds of card-passing swiss pair, which will create two evenly strong brackets of eight, who will engage in seven rounds of bracketed games. The champions of each bracket will play in a final of up to two games. The format will be adjusted for larger field sizes.

Rounds will proceed from shortly after 8:30 until the end of the tournament at about 3:30, and there will be a 60-minute lunch break midway through the day.

REGISTRATION AND FEES:
-The fee structure is as follows:
Base fee: $70 per team (i.e., $70 if you are bringing one team, $140 if you are bringing two teams).
Buzzer discount: $5 off school's total fee for each fully functional system (control box and eight activators all work)--no limit to # of systems you can bring
Staff discount: $15 off school's total fee. This could be a coach, parent, student who is not playing, etc. Team-provided staffers will keep score for various games not involving the team with which they are affiliated. Volunteer staffers must stay through all the games in order to receive credit for their school. There is no limit to the number of staffers you can bring.
Minimum fee: The minimum fee is $0 (you can bring enough buzzers and staffers to eliminate your entire fee via discounts, but you cannot have a "negative fee.")
-The registration deadline is February 20.
-To register, post in this thread or mail me at weinerm @ vcu dot edu with the number of teams, buzzers, and staffers you want to bring, and an email address where you can be contacted with details. Feel free to forward this announcement to any schools that you think would be interested in attending. Because of the short notice, there will be no snail-mail announcement for this event; e-mail and this board will be the only methods of communication.

METHOD OF PAYMENT: To pay your registration fees for this tournament, please bring either cash, or a check (institutional or personal) made out to Andrew Alexander, who is the Quizbowl at VCU treasurer. Do not bring checks made out to Matt Weiner, to VCU, to "quizbowl," etc. We cannot use them and you may be asked to pay out of pocket if you bring an unusable check. Because of the short notice on this tournament, it is not possible to deal with purchase orders in time for you to bring payment to the event. If your school absolutely requires that you use a purchase order, please contact me and we will work out how to proceed.

DELINQUENT PAYMENT: Teams who still owe us money from last May's tournament will need to bring a check for the total amount owed, PLUS this tournament's entry fee, if they are to participate. Other teams who do not pay on the morning of the tournament, and have not cleared this with me in advance, will be charged a $25 penalty and will have two weeks to pay their total amount before we start mailing letters to your school about it.

TEAM & ROSTER SIZE: There may be a maximum of six players on one team's roster, though only four may play at one time. There is a substitution opportunity at halftime of each game.
-Each player may appear on only one team's roster throughout the day--no switching from the B team to the A team, etc.
-Teams may also play shorthanded with only three players. Teams consisting of one or two players may not play without my express prior permission.

FOOD: Neither breakfast nor lunch will be provided by the tournament. We will provide a list of suggested eateries for the lunch break.

Post here or mail me if you have any further questions. I'm looking forward to seeing this tournament happen on February 23.

Matt Weiner
Tournament Director, VCU Last-Minute Tournament
[email protected]

Registered Teams so far (last updated 2/18):

Cave Spring
Clover Hill
Collegiate A
Collegiate B
Dorman A
Dorman B
Douglas Freeman
Georgetown Day A
Georgetown Day B
Gonzaga
JR Tucker
Maggie Walker A
Maggie Walker B
Rappahannock
Thomas Jefferson A
Thomas Jefferson B

Maggie Walker is in with 2 teams (more if space is available)

Collegiate School also wishes to register 2 teams.

Cave Spring would like to register 1 for now. Possibly a 2nd one later if there's room. Bringing 2 buzzers. Thanks for hosting this tournament!

Rappahannock County would like to be signed up with one team. We have one buzzer system, although we could bring two, but the second one can act rather silly sometimes. We may be able to bring a staff member. I'm not sure yet. But this staff member would prefer to be a reader, if possible.

My coach will likely be emailing you within the next couple of days.

Dorman will be there with 2 teams and 2 buzzers.

J. W. Robinson Secondary (VA) will probably attend (...I need to talk to my team this afternoon to confirm, but save us a spot until further notice). We will bring 1 team & 1 buzzer set.

Important notice: Due to lack of rooms available at VCU on short notice, the tournament has been moved to The Collegiate School, which is found at 103 North Mooreland Road in Richmond's West End, about 10 miles west of the VCU campus. Otherwise, all details will remain the same.

Directions to Collegiate's main campus may be found at http://www.collegiate-va.org/podium/def ... px?t=21950 . Feel free to e-mail me or post here if you have any questions about this.

TJ would like to register two teams. EDIT: and waitlist one. Might waitlist more if we get enough interest.

Regarding our deliquent payments and other things like that, our treasurer will email you.

Clover Hill would like to register one team. We will furnish one buzzer system.

It looks like team member schedule conflicts will prevent Robinson from attending. :-(

For Rappahannock County, 1 team officially, 1 buzzer system officially, and no staff members.

Yo, I was just wondering if you got my email (I'm from TJ). Not to be a pest, but we need that registration info for Tuesday to show the finance office at our school. We have a delinquent payment for last year's VCU tournament (for which we had 2 teams signed up).

Pending confirmation of attendance from JR Tucker and GDS, who were just moved off the waitlist, the above field of 16 is now closed. There is one more team still on the waitlist, plus a few potential C teams, who will be contacted if anyone else drops out.

The meeting location at Collegiate for Saturday will be the cafeteria in Memorial Hall.

Is 'Madison' James Madison up here in Northern VA or Madison County, occasional purveyor of fine tournaments at UVA?

It's option three: a transcription error caused by me taking registration for two tournaments at once. They will be coming to our May event, but have not in fact registered for this weekend. Thus, another team is in off the waitlist.

Congratulations to Thomas Jefferson A for winning the VCU Last-Minute Tournament. Dorman A took second, and Dorman B was eliminated by TJ A in a play-in game for the final.

Following round 10, TJ A and Dorman B played a one-game playoff based on their equal 6-1 records in the bracket, which TJ A won. TJ A and Dorman A then played a weighted final, in which Dorman had a one-game advantage based on Dorman's victory over TJ in the morning card-matched rounds. TJ needed to sweep two straight games to take the title, which they did.

Stats for the three card-matched games, seven bracket games, and three playoff games can be found at http://hsquizbowl.org/lmt/lmt_standings.html . There was some great top-to-bottom play by all teams in this event, as you can see at that link, as well as a seriously competitive final reckoning, with no team losing fewer than two times. Thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to Joan Barnes for setting up the rooms at Collegiate, and to our guest staffers Andrew Feist, Dan Goff, and George Berry as well as the Collegiate and Tucker volunteers.

Insanely strong tournament for such a small field. In the Christina Rosetti bracket, the top 5 teams (out of 8) each had over 20 PPB. Only three or four teams had less than 15.

Holy schnikes... and this is on timed NAQT questions!??

Untimed, twenty tossups per game.

I just wanted to say that this tournament was awesome, one of the best we've been to. It was definately a great warm-up for states on Saturday.

I was a little surprised (happy surprised) that I finished 3rd in individual scoring. I was also amused when TJ A negged 8 times against us. That has never happened to us in a match before.

Ah yee, I am proud to announce I had 5 of those negs. Representin' those negative fives right here...

I concur that this tournament was awesome - true, I am shamelessly biased in favor of NAQT questions, but for such a small field put together at the last minute the tournament really turned out great.

Yeah, great job with this tournament. It was a lot of fun and a real competitive field. I wish we would've gotten individual stats for TJ B, but whatever. It's all good. (The names were a bit ridiculous)