The Quizbowl Resource Center

0

You could try doing some middle school competition next year if you can get a couple more 7th and 8th graders interested. Otherwise, you could do some high school novice tournaments. If you practice and you can find a couple of okay teammates, you should play at an acceptable level. Also, competing in tournaments is a good way to improve, although there may be people more qualified to tell you how to improve, and there are already several threads dedicated to that in this forum. And even if you don't want to do tournaments, start a team and practice.

Don't just look inside MA for tournaments. E.O. Smith High School in Storrs, CT, just outside Hartford, hosted a middle school tournament as well as a high school tournament. Uconn (in Storrs as well) hosted a novice tournament this year. Yale hosts a couple of tournaments a year. All of these places should be within driving range. This year's high school schedule can be found here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... 47&t=14524. Next year's should look fairly similar.

MA's circuit is growing a lot recently. The state will probably have at least 10 tournaments during the next year (minimum): 2 at AMSA, 2 at MIT, 2 at Harvard, 1 at Lexington, 1 at Northeastern, 1 at Williams, etc. Also, most MA teams go to 2 Yale Tournaments, EO Smith Tournament etc. I think our school went to at least 10-15 tournaments this year, and are planning to attend the same number (if not more next year). If you are planning to start a team and are looking for more insight on Massachusetts based competition, feel free to ask me a question. Does your school participate in HS Quiz Show?

Also, if you are interested in history bowl there are 3 tournaments during the year in MA/close to MA as well.

0

Lily wrote:In the school, there is a huge club that hosts Latin- and classics-themed quizbowl events (certamen), so do you think I should ask the people who run the club if they could possibly help me start the quizbowl team, since they already have experience in quizbowl-type games?

One of our members, who did certamen in high school, started playing quizbowl this year and immediately dominated classics-based questions (and others!) at even the college level—I imagine this would be a great source of people to recruit, if nothing else.

In addition to the above mentioned areas, you might also ask around your teachers for students they might recommend for various strong-points e.g. literature, music, art, geography, history

0

vinteuil wrote:

Lily wrote:In the school, there is a huge club that hosts Latin- and classics-themed quizbowl events (certamen), so do you think I should ask the people who run the club if they could possibly help me start the quizbowl team, since they already have experience in quizbowl-type games?

One of our members, who did certamen in high school, started playing quizbowl this year and immediately dominated classics-based questions (and others!) at even the college level—I imagine this would be a great source of people to recruit, if nothing else.

To reinforce this, I played certamen in middle school and then transitioned to quizbowl in high school, although I still do certamen. I've even played the guy Jacob is talking about here and got absolutely slaughtered by him, so I can attest to how certamen is a good source of recruitment. National high school certamen questions about myth, history, and literature also tend to be at the college regular difficulty for quizbowl, so if you can get a certamen veteran generalist on your team, then you're pretty much set for Greco-Roman myth, classical history, classical lit, etc. One caveat is that certamen isn't very pyramidal, but adjusting isn't too hard.