new advisor/team - Florida

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dellis
Kimahri
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Joined: Thu Feb 22, 2018 2:00 pm

new advisor/team - Florida

Post by dellis »

I was an assistant coach for our academic quiz team this year - sort of learning the ropes. In our schools history, we've only ever competed at a tournament called the FACCS Brain Bowl. We are a private Christian school - FACCS is an accrediting organization for Christian schools in Florida. I'm taking over as the coach for the team next year and I want us to compete in tournaments that could qualify us to compete at a national level. Is there anyone else in Florida willing to share some information with me about how to be successful in doing this? Are there leagues we can join and compete in regularly - would we just have to seek out multiple tournaments every year? This is all new to me.

Thanks!
-Daniel Ellis
Trinity Christian Academy, Jacksonville, FL
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El Salvadoreno
Rikku
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Re: new advisor/team - Florida

Post by El Salvadoreno »

The best place to start would be NAQT.com which will qualify one's team for both PACE and HSNCT. You can also look through the Mirrors Thread to see whether an independent set is being mirrored near you. These will only qualify you for PACE, however.
Ricky "Slick Rick/Rico Suave" Rivera
Carmel Catholic- Class of '17
Notre Dame (Mendoza)- Class of '22

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Aaron Goldfein
Wakka
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Re: new advisor/team - Florida

Post by Aaron Goldfein »

I'm not familiar with FACCS Brain Bowl, but on these boards we are big fans of pyramidal quizbowl. Most people feel that these sorts of questions reward academic knowledge much better than your short "buzzer beater" type of questions. You can see packets from old tournaments here. This should help you get a feel for our format and is also a great study resource.

Generally speaking, quizbowl is rarely played in leagues. Most quizbowl is played on Saturday tournaments where a team will play ~10 rounds, with each match running about half an hour. Unfortunately there is not a lot of quizbowl being played in the Jacksonville area. Here's an NAQT tournament being run in Tallahassee on Saturday, and there are quite a few more being run in Atlanta and South Florida.

There are two high quality national tournaments for high schools, the NAQT High School National Championship Tournament (HSNCT) and the PACE National Scholastic Championship (NSC). Both are excellent and use a very similar format of questions. To qualify for HSNCT, you have to finish in the top 15% of a tournament running NAQT questions. To qualify for NSC you have to finish in the top 15-25% of any tournament running pyramidal questions.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have.
Aaron Goldfein
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Carnegie Mellon ('14)
alexdz
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Re: new advisor/team - Florida

Post by alexdz »

Hi Coach! Glad to see you found our community here.

One thing I might suggest is, if you're looking to get involved in more of a league-style format to help transition your team to the more typical Saturday tournament style, is to host some small four-team events at your own school. We've had some success with a set-up like this in Missouri, and it has helped get several new teams started who now attend and host pyramidal Saturday events. It would require a bit of work on your part to set this up, but many of us here on the boards would be pleased to help you out with the logistics and finding appropriate questions to play on.
Alex Dzurick
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Owner/Editor, SAGES Quizbowl Questions
Middle school teacher, Rohan Woods School
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South Callaway '08 -- Mizzou '12 -- Illinois '17
SCMS coach '12-'13 -- EFIP coach '20-'21 -- RWS coach '22-present
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MSchnippert
Lulu
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Location: Maclay School, Tallahassee, FL

Re: new advisor/team - Florida

Post by MSchnippert »

Daniel,

The local competition there is Brain Brawl, which is finally using NAQT packets after many years of being house-written junk. That's run by the school district, but last I checked, the local private schools were eligible as well (last I recall, Kenny, Bolles, Episcopal, and Snyder all did). There's also a tournament at Mandarin HS run by the coach there. It's posted at http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/5164/ for more info.

Hope that helps!
Matt Schnippert
Brain Bowl Coach
Maclay School
Tallahassee, FL
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