ACF Regionals Mid-Atlantic @ the University of Virginia

[Matthew Bonnan]

The Academic Competition Club at the University of Virginia is excited to announce that it will be hosting the mid-Atlantic site of 2015 ACF Regionals on January 24. I will be directing the tournament and can be reached at [email protected].

Location and Logistics:

The tournament will most likely take place in New Cabell Hall. For parking, there is a free-on-weekends lot just south of New Cabell Hall. Using the address 583 Brandon Avenue, Charlottesville, VA should get you pretty close to it. Otherwise, teams can park at Scott Stadium and follow this map to get to New Cabell Hall.

Registration:

To register for the tournament, fill out this form.


The following information was copied from the ACF Regionals Global Announcement, which can be found here.

Qualification system
Starting this year, participation in ACF Regionals in January will be the major component of the qualification procedure for ACF Nationals in April. Teams will be ranked based on their performance at Regionals according to a publicly-available "A-value", with some provisions for host bids granted at ACF's discretion and autobids for being the overall winner or Undergraduate champion of a sufficiently large ACF Regionals site. See the post below from ACF Communications Officer Stephen Eltinge for further details.

Packet Submission:
Every team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2013 is required to submit a packet in order to play in Regionals. Please note that, like last year, this requirement also applies to eligible high school teams. Further information can be found at the ACF Packet Submission Guidelines. Unlike this year's ACF Fall, 2015 ACF Regionals will not allow teams to submit half-packets or partial packets.

The submission schedule for this tournament is as follows. In order to meet any particular deadline, your packet must be in our inbox by 11:59 pm PST on the stated day. (Note that these dates are Saturdays, not Sundays.)

No packets before November 1, please.

November 29: -$50
December 13: -$25
December 27: no penalty
January 3: +$25
January 10: +$50
After that: +$10 for each additional day you're late. Teams that are required to submit a packet and do not submit one by January 17, 2015 will not be allowed to play ACF Regionals.

Note: Though these deadlines are earlier overall due to the shift of ACF Regionals' place in the schedule, participating teams should take note that this year's earliest submission deadline corresponds to Thanksgiving break and the no-penalty deadline corresponds to Christmas break.

Please submit your packet to [email protected]; the actual email with attached packet should include the phrase "[name of school + A/B/etc. if applicable) PACKET" in the subject line.

Distribution:

The distribution for this tournament will be the same as last year's ACF Regionals, which varies slightly from the required 24/24 distribution on the ACF website.

Literature 5/5 (Note that ACF only requires 1 world literature question in this whole 5/5)
History 5/5
Science 5/5
Religion, Mythology and Philosophy 3/3
Fine Arts 3/3
Social Science 1/1
Geography/Current Events: 1/1
Pop Culture: 1/0 or 0/1
Your Choice / Any Academic Category: 1/0 or 0/1

Teams who clearly fail to fill out the distribution properly will have their packets returned to them and be instructed to resubmit a properly-distributed packet.

Packet Penalties

We have clear guidelines on what your submissions can or cannot be, with information on penalties for flouting the guidelines. Please follow them. Cases of incorrect formatting, or prohibited question types will result in fees; in particular, plagiarism will be penalized with hefty fees and possible sanctions. The editors also reserve the right to send back any egregious cases to be fixed by the team in question rather than charging fees, so be sure to do it right the first time.

A few friendly reminders:

Please follow the processes and guidelines laid out by the editors and ACF.
Don't talk about your submitted questions with anyone else until the editors tell you it's okay. If your school is sending multiple teams (A, B, etc.), each team must keep the contents of its own packet confidential within itself. If sites of ACF Regionals 2015 are run on a date other than January 24, 2015, we will set up a private subforum for discussion and expect teams to hold off on public discussion until the last site is completed.
Please follow recent past iterations of ACF Regionals, particularly the 2011, 2012, and 2014 versions, for an idea of what your submissions should look like.
If you think a particular topic you want to write on is too hard, it probably is. In general, err on the side of writing something easier. Take a look at Andrew Hart's regular difficulty primer on the ACF website for more guidance.
I will be maintaining a 7-line cap on tossup length and a 2-line cap on bonus part length in the final set. While it is okay to submit questions which are somewhat longer than the expected final length, with the idea that editors will cut them down, don't go overboard. If you're submitting tossups that are longer than nine lines or so for this tournament, you're doing it wrong.

Fees

Base fee: $120 for one team from a school, $240 for two teams from a school, etc.
Buzzer systems*: -$5 each
Staffers: -$10 each No maximum.
Travel: -$10 per 200 miles traveled one way
International**: -$20
New to ACF teams***: -$25
New quizbowl teams****: -$75

* No discount for broken buzzers; no maximum.
** For teams representing schools located in a different country than the tournament host.
*** For schools which haven't played an ACF tournament between September 2012 and August 2014; having anyone on your team(s) who has played an ACF tournament prior to the 2014-15 competition year invalidates this discount.
**** For schools which did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament since September 2012; having anyone on your team(s) who has played a regular collegiate quizbowl tournament prior to the 2014-15 competition year invalidates this discount. May be combined with new ACF team discount for a total new-team discount of $100.

[The laptop discount has been eliminated. Staffers are expected either to bring a device with them which is capable of displaying Word documents and PDFs, unless they get explicit confirmation from hosts that the site they are attending will be using printed paper packets.]

As with other ACF tournaments, payment will be centralized. Teams will pay their entry fee directly to ACF prior to playing the tournament, and ACF will pay host fees out thereafter. For more questions about payment, contact ACF treasurer Jerry Vinokurov.

Field (buzzers):

Liberty 2 (2)
Maryland 2 (1)

We hope to see you all at UVa in January!

[t-bar]

The registered field for this tournament is available at this link.

[Matthew Bonnan]

Prelim stats

[Matthew Bonnan]

I'd like to thank all of the teams and staff for making this tournament possible.

Maryland A defeated UVa (house) in an advantaged final to take 1st place overall. Duke was both our undergraduate and DII champion.

Combined stats can be found here.