SCIENCE! (5/16/09) at UC Irvine

[cvdwightw]

An official announcement went out today to the SoCalHSQuizbowl Google Group. It's pretty long, so I've summarized the relevant information in this post.

The Southern California Invitational Expecting National Championship Excellence! (SCIENCE!) will take place on the campus of UC Irvine on May 16, 2009. We hope to have staffers from most area college clubs helping us out. If you are a collegiate club member and available to staff that weekend, let me know. We will reimburse cost of parking and a standard mileage reimbursement for one car per college that helps staff, as well as split 50% of the profits in proportion to number of staffers provided.

Question set: We will use HSAPQ PACE#2. At some point HSAPQ is going to make HSAPQ PACE#1 available for free download; teams are encouraged to download that set to get a feel for the length, difficulty, and style of the questions. All teams will receive a paper copy of the questions, contingent upon HSAPQ's consent to release the questions to participating teams (I do not anticipate this to be a problem).

Divisions: We will be using two divisions. All teams that either have qualified for HSNCT or NSC, or are attending on a wild card or standby bid, comprise Division I. All other teams are in Division II. You may register a team in Division II and transfer that team to Division I upon qualification or acceptance of a wild card bid.

Base Fee:
$85 for the first team
$75 for the second team
$65 for the third and subsequent teams

Discounts:
-$10 for teams that have qualified through tournament play for either HSNCT or NSC. This does not apply to teams attending on a wild card or standby bid, unless they have qualified for whichever tournament they are not attending. Teams that have qualified at multiple tournaments, but have received only one bid per tournament, only get one discount; however, teams that have received multiple bids for a tournament can apply the discount to that many teams.

-$10 for a fully functional buzzer system: must have a working control box and four working buzzers on each side, yadda yadda, you know the drill, just make sure the thing works before you bring it.

-$15 for an experienced moderator
-$5 for an experienced scorekeeper
Because we are anticipating getting college staffers, we reserve the right to stop offering this discount at any time (though we will not rescind any discounts offered prior to that date).

Penalties:
+$20 for showing up to the tournament without either paying or having coordinated in advance how you are paying us.
+$15 for withdrawing after the registration deadline of May 11

Minimum fee: $55 per team (e.g. minimum fee for a school bringing two teams is $110; for three teams, $165, etc.)

Payment: We will accept cash (preferably exact amount) or some form of check made out to "College Bowl Club at UCI." Don't make checks out to other people or institutions, as we may or may not be able to use them, and it results in a hassle for both us and you.

Networking: We hope to use the traditional down time between the end of tournament play and the beginning of the awards ceremony as a question-and-answer session for seniors interested in continuing their quizbowl careers at the next level. If seniors are staying local for college, we will try to set up informal meetings with a representative of that college's club.

Registration/Questions:
All registrations and questions about the tournament go through me. My e-mail is dpwynne at gmail dot com. Registration should definitely contain the name of your school, the name of your coach or contact, and how many teams in each division, buzzers, and staffers you are bringing. I will be taking care of the qualification discounts, so no need to figure that out right now.

[cvdwightw]

This post is reserved for field updates. Note that the field cap is 32 teams, but we do not expect to hit that cap. NorCal teams willing to make the trip are encouraged to come down, as are any outside-of-California teams that are crazy enough to fly out here for the tournament just weeks before nationals.

Officially Registered:
Division I:
Torrey Pines x2
Edison
Arcadia
North Hollywood
La Jolla x2
San Dieguito

Division II:
Tustin
Edison
Rancho Alamitos x2
Arcadia
San Dieguito x2

Division Unknown: Carlsbad

Expressed Interest, but not officially registered:
Rancho Bernardo (1+)
La Jolla D2

Staffers:
Irvine:
Dwight
Ray
Luna brother tag team
(certainly more)

San Diego:
Auroni
(more?)

UCLA:
Ian
at least 1 car of people

Outside:
Charles Meigs

[ihavenoidea]

Dwight, might you be interested in collaborating with Maryland for their spring tournament and using the set here?

[cvdwightw]

Nah, I've already gone ahead and ordered PACE #2.

[cvdwightw]

Field update: we are up to two teams with a little over a month to sign up. So sign up, people!

[chemistryguy]

Count on two teams from Edison, one in each division, and thanks for hosting again.

Coach Cabrera

[cvdwightw]

Field update above. Registration officially ends May 11, so you have a little over two weeks to sign up still.

[cvdwightw]

Field edited above. Unless I get registrations/drops this afternoon, this is likely to be the final field. If you are a quizbowler in the area and would like to help staff, my offer to split profits between the clubs still stands. Please contact me as we are likely to need you.

[Auroni]

Darwin and I are driving up to staff this set.

[Golran]

I'm having some trouble getting some people from here to come down, namely anybody over 25 that can rent a car, but I found a train that gets in at around 8:30 AM. What time would the tournament be starting, and would anybody be able to pick me up at the train station? I could probably find a bus down to the campus but google says it takes around 1 hour to get from the train station to Irvine's campus.

[cvdwightw]

I'm having some trouble getting some people from here to come down, namely anybody over 25 that can rent a car, but I found a train that gets in at around 8:30 AM. What time would the tournament be starting, and would anybody be able to pick me up at the train station? I could probably find a bus down to the campus but google says it takes around 1 hour to get from the train station to Irvine's campus.

We will finalize issues at practice tonight. Suffice to say that the tournament will not begin gameplay until sometime after 9. Where exactly is the train station? I have a hard time believing that it is an hour away by car (I can see by bus), seeing as I can probably make, e.g., the San Juan Capistrano station in ~40 minutes on a Saturday morning, and I'm sure there are closer stations.

[Golran]

I was looking at the public transport from the Irvine Metrolink station that takes an hour, where as by car it says around 18 minutes. It looks like the station is just northeast (<.5 mi) of where the 5 and 405 meet, saying 9 miles away by car to University Club.

[Joe Romersa]

Check in is at 8:30, gameplay starts at 9:00, yes?

oh, and is it in humanities hall?

[P3nguinP0wered]

Hey Ian,

I can give you a ride from the train station if you need it. Plus, I'm going to UCLA after the tournament so if you want a ride back, that's fine too. Let me know...y1fu AT ucsd.edu

Darwin

[cvdwightw]

This tournament is NOT in Humanities Hall. I am waiting on exact room confirmation in the Social Sciences area before sending an official meet at place X at time Y announcement.

[cvdwightw]

In case people check this board before their e-mail:

UCLA people: I need to know if you are coming down and if so how many of you there are.

Staffers: I sent you an electronic scoresheet (which does most of the adding for you). Please let me know if you'd prefer this or a set of paper scoresheets (unfortunately we can't run the entire tournament electronically as each participating school gets a paper copy of the questions).

Staffers/Teams: Please do your best to keep within-question chatter to a minimum. At 35 minutes a round, we're looking at ending gameplay around 6, and that's right on the border of late for some teams. If we can get that down to 30 minutes a round, that would greatly improve efficiency of the tournament.

Staffers/Teams: We will start registration at 8:30 in Social Science Lab 270. We will begin our rules and staffers meetings at 9:00 with gameplay hopefully starting by 9:20.

[gyre and gimble]

This was a great tournament, and a great intro for everyone, hopefully, into PACE style gameplay. I felt that although we had to drop some rounds from the schedule, the tournament was very well run, and I want to thank Dwight for thinking of and running it. I feel like without Dwight's efforts, hs quizbowl in socal won't get any better for the next few years at least.

I had lots of fun, but wasn't paying attention to the question distribution so I don't really know what to say about that.

I wish RB and santa monica, as well as Arcadia's seniors, could have been there; it would have made the tournament much more competitive and, naturally, more comprehensive of our little, isolated circuit.

PS - when will stats be up?

[Joe Romersa]

Are stats coming out soon?

[cvdwightw]

Are stats coming out soon?

I have stats complete except for the Arcadia - San Dieguito Division II 2nd place game, which Ian will be sending me sometime today. Once that's in, I'll send full stats to Ray to post on the club website sometime this week. I might be a bit off with games played for some of the teams that substituted players in and out during the middle of matches - we used entirely electronic scorekeeping, and I didn't provide a good way for scorekeepers to indicate where people subbed in and out.

Brief Results:
Division I: Torrey Pines (9-1) won the tournament, with La Jolla A (8-2) in second. San Dieguito and North Hollywood tied for third. Top scorers were Stephen from TP with what I have as 156.98 PPG (might be off by a few points in either direction), "The Trout" from North Hollywood (86 PPG), and "Kaisuopai" from La Jolla A (81 PPG).

Division II: Tustin (7-1) put in its claim as the best area team not to qualify for a national tournament. San Dieguito (7-2) defeated Arcadia (6-3) in the second place tiebreaker game. Top scorers were "Bo" from Carlsbad (103.75 PPG) and "Selway" from Tustin (100 PPG).

Thank you to all teams for participating, and to all staffers who made it possible.

[Joe Romersa]

Is the UCI QB page down?
http://www.clubs.uci.edu/qbc/
^thats the link, right?

[cvdwightw]

Is the UCI QB page down?
http://www.clubs.uci.edu/qbc/
^thats the link, right?

Yes, the club website is down; we are aware of that and working to fix the problem. If I get some time I'll try to upload stats to Scobonet soon.

[cvdwightw]

Sorry for the delay. When we went to upload stats to our website, we discovered that the site no longer exists. We are working to correct the problem.

For now, stats can be found at http://results.scobo.net/SQBS.aspx?org= ... =standings.