New team at Ole Miss

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mharper1
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New team at Ole Miss

Post by mharper1 »

Ole Miss has revived its quiz bowl program and is looking for tournaments around the South to attend this fall...or tournaments that offer substantial discounts for long-distance participants. Hopefully we'll attend ACF fall and NAQT sectionals at Alabama, but I'd hate to take a group of freshmen to ACF for their very first tournament.

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Meredith Harper
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Susan »

Hi, Meredith--

Two tournaments that don't seem to be on your list are the Early Autumn Collegiate Novice tournament held at Shorter College on October 2nd and the Early Fall Tournament mirror at Georgia Tech on October 23. While both of these tournaments are intended to be suitable for novice players, the Early Autumn Collegiate Novice tournament in particular is aimed at players who have very little familiarity with collegiate quizbowl to help usher them into competition. If you can possibly get a team together for that, I think it would be a terrific experience for your players.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I'd hate to take a group of freshmen to ACF for their very first tournament.
I'm curious, why is this? When I was a freshman I went to every ACF tournament on the calendar without thinking twice.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:
I'd hate to take a group of freshmen to ACF for their very first tournament.
I'm curious, why is this? When I was a freshman I went to every ACF tournament on the calendar without thinking twice.
Not to in any way endorse that belief, I would assume that there is some presence leading to the reformation that is still in that outdated mindframe that used to be all the rage about ACF being "IMPOSSIBLE" or a transfer from another program that is still in this mindset. While it is still a fundamentally wrong opinion, its a totally understandable position for one to find themselves to have. There are still teams, sad as it sounds, that will see ACF Fall and be so blown away by it that there natural instinct is that its impossible and every game will end 15-5.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Out of curiousity, what kind of questions are you practicing on? Even just a few weeks of practicing on past versions of an upcoming tournament (such as EFT and ACF Fall) can make you much more prepared for it, especially if you're just starting out.

Write down answers you don't know, look them up, etc.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by mharper1 »

@ Susan: Thanks for the suggestions! I will put them on our calendar.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by mharper1 »

@ Charlie, George, and Bruce: to answer all of you, the team is less than a week old, and is mostly freshmen. I want to give them a little practice with college-level questions before heading off to something like ACF. Not that ACF is impossible for a freshman team, but you have to know what to expect, and it's a big jump from high school-style tournaments.

I'm working through the Stanford packet archive now with them.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Important Bird Area »

See also the quizbowlpackets.com archive, which has a bunch of tournaments that aren't on Stanford's site.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

mharper1 wrote:@ Charlie, George, and Bruce: to answer all of you, the team is less than a week old, and is mostly freshmen. I want to give them a little practice with college-level questions before heading off to something like ACF. Not that ACF is impossible for a freshman team, but you have to know what to expect, and it's a big jump from high school-style tournaments.

I'm working through the Stanford packet archive now with them.
You definitely don't want to scare freshmen off, but it's also possible to make the opposite mistake: read questions that are too easy, resulting in little improvement among your players. Then, when they get to real tournaments, they will be scared away there when they're unprepared.

ACF Fall is one of the easiest tournaments of the year. There are maybe a small handful of events easier than it (mostly "Novice" tournaments). You should definitely start practicing on past ACF Falls sooner rather than later.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by cchiego »

Great to hear that Ole Miss is getting an active team!

As the other responses have indicated, reading ACF Fall is probably the best way to get them used to quizbowl. Even better, have them take notes on questions they missed from reading old ACF Falls and they'll almost certainly end up seeing most of those answers again this year, which is a good way to help encourage learning. ACF Fall usually doesn't completely scare people off- in the past I've seen high retention after taking people there (in fact, exposing new players to tournaments is often a positive thing for encouraging retention).

If y'all need to raise money by hosting high school tournaments, there's a fairly large, quasi-insulated high school circuit you can draw from in the Memphis area as well as plenty of more active circuits in the Nashville and Northern Alabama area (as well as possibly a nascent one in the Jackson, MS area, largely thanks to St. Andrews). If you do host a high school tournament, you should be able to attract a decent field. College-wise, the closest active teams would probably be Harding and Alabama, but Millsaps and Hendrix seem to be becoming more active and Rhodes sometimes ends up with a team.
Last edited by cchiego on Mon Sep 20, 2010 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Ethnic history of the Vilnius region »

I would also like to welcome Ole Miss to the circuit. About once a month I send out the Southeastern Quizbowl Newsletter. It's an e-newsletter that has the latest tournament announcements and results from throughout the south, including Mississippi. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, feel free to contact me at ericd25 at hotmail dot com and I'll start sending it to you.

I'll also jump on board the ACF Fall bandwagon. I work with the South Carolina academic team. Very few of those players had much if any quizbowl experience prior to college, and I found ACF Fall tournaments to be ideal for giving them a great foundation of knowledge for quizbowl (and beyond!).
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by mharper1 »

Thanks for the encouragement to attend ACF; I was concerned about team morale, but you've all made excellent points for focusing on ACF as a way to retain players and challenge a new team.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Skepticism and Animal Feed »

Good packets to practice on probably include:

2009 Delta Burke: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... DeltaBurke

2009 Minnesota Undergrad Tournament: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/09mut.zip
2008 Minnesota Undergrad Tournament: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/mut

2009 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... CFFall2009
2008 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/fall2008/
2007 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2007
2006 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2006
2005 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2005
2004 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2004
2003 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2003
2002 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2002
2001 ACF Fall: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... _fall/2001

2009 EFT: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... %20EFT.zip
2008 EFT: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/eft3/
2007 EFT: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/eft/2007
2006 EFT: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/eft/2006

2008 VCU Novice: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/zot2008

2008 Illinois Novice: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... ovice/2008
2007 Illinois Novice: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... ovice/2007
2001 Illinois Novice: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... ovice/2001

Watch out for "EFT", it can be a bit hard, but is still one of the easiest tournaments of the year.

These packets are just drawn from http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com, which is the finest quizbowl archive currently in existence. I'm sure there are other good packets for novices somewhere out there.

What you should NOT be reading are high school questions.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

Wherever the Best of the Best thing is now, Bruce's post just now totally should be in it
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Cheynem »

I'm going to be a mild contrarian and say that quality high school questions (HSAPQ sets, well written housewrites, perhaps NSC) are okay to read in some situations. If you have novices who are completely new to quizbowl, reading a few high school packets might be helpful and provide a strong foundational basis. You definitely don't want to linger on them, though, but reading a quality high school packet for perhaps the first few practices would not strike me as a bad thing. For starters, the point of the first practices is to basically see if people like quizbowl, which is to say, if they don't like the basic game or idea of it, it doesn't really matter what you read (I'm not saying read trash or stupid stuff--you know what I mean). Secondly, a complete novice quite frankly is going to do pretty poorly at Fall or EFT or MUT. A high school packet helps to serve as a transition in many cases from "barely playing Knowledge Bowl" to "playing ACF Fall." I agree that at a certain point, the high school packets have to be put away.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by DumbJaques »

I am equally excited to see Ole Miss on the circuit - please feel very encouraged to use the forums/people who post here extensively as a resource for building up the program.

As other people have touched upon, it's my opinion that when you're beginning a team you can pretty much choose your own mindset without a significant consequences to recruiting/retention. Quizbowl, especially in a place where there aren't several urban areas across multiple states clustered within a few hours of each other, requires you to really enjoy doing it. Questions being marginally easier are not going to generate that kind of enthusiasm - it's more about how you run the club, if people are interacting and having fun and a bunch of other stuff. Obviously nobody is advocating running questions that nobody knows any of the answers to, but for a person who's just coming in a solid, collegiate novice set like the ones Bruce listed (which will absolutely prepare you for college play) is not going to scare off a person who would otherwise be an active and enthusiastic member of the team if exposed only to high school sets or sheltered from tournaments (I doubt such people actually exist).

I also agree with Mike in that many high school sets do the same thing college novice tournaments do, and are fine to practice on. At Maryland, we try to run tossup-derbies on relatively easy NAQT IS sets with some frequency during the beginning of the year - it encourages buzzing and more rapidly builds tossup-follow ability, and you obviously need answers a lot of people have heard of to do those things. My recommendation is not to switch away from your mindset of providing the appropriate introductory environments (as you seem to be doing), but rather to not view it as an either/or kind of deal. I'd tell pretty much any team to go to pretty much every tournament they can attend, but just be realistic about expectations. Tell people a tournament is coming up that will be a notch tougher than X packets you've been reading (ask the editor what past sets you might read to get a bearing on the tournament's difficulty), but that you're getting a squad together anyway. For a lot of new people, there is not a world of difference between the actual experience of sitting through 12 rounds of novice and 12 rounds of regular difficulty - people still buzz on the things they know. Unfortunately, sometimes you see new teams inherit the assumption that there is a big difference, and then it becomes much harder to change the mindset even when the team/players are more than ready to handle harder questions.

Random note: To my knowledge, there aren't any non-novice ACF events on the calendar this year until February, so that's not going to be a big concern either way. Most of the tournaments in the fall are either geared heavily toward new players (ACF Novice, ACF Fall), pretty accessible (EFT), or not at all overly prohibitive for a new team if you've been reading some regular packets for a few months (Thunder, in December). There is no new team or set of new players I wouldn't want to send to ACF Novice, ACF Fall, or EFT (or MUT and similar events in the spring).
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Gautam »

Cheynem wrote:I'm going to be a mild contrarian and say that quality high school questions (HSAPQ sets, well written housewrites, perhaps NSC) are okay to read in some situations. If you have novices who are completely new to quizbowl, reading a few high school packets might be helpful and provide a strong foundational basis. You definitely don't want to linger on them, though, but reading a quality high school packet for perhaps the first few practices would not strike me as a bad thing. For starters, the point of the first practices is to basically see if people like quizbowl, which is to say, if they don't like the basic game or idea of it, it doesn't really matter what you read (I'm not saying read trash or stupid stuff--you know what I mean). Secondly, a complete novice quite frankly is going to do pretty poorly at Fall or EFT or MUT. A high school packet helps to serve as a transition in many cases from "barely playing Knowledge Bowl" to "playing ACF Fall." I agree that at a certain point, the high school packets have to be put away.
Yeah, as I understand it, MN quizbowl has been using this approach on a mix of played-quizbow-before and not-played-quizbowl-before freshmen this year, and it's done a better job of making the first couple of practices a more enjoyable experience for all. Also, we've been mixing in ACF Fall packets as well. It's not like you need to keep reading several hundred HS packets before moving on to ACF Fall - you can as well have a session wherein you read 2 HS packets, 1 ACF Fall, and 1 EFT (pyramid, see.) Maybe in the subsequent week you can have 1 HS, 2 ACF Fall, 1 EFT and so on, and phase out HS stuff in maybe a month or two.

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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

Frater Taciturnus wrote:
Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:
I'd hate to take a group of freshmen to ACF for their very first tournament.
I'm curious, why is this? When I was a freshman I went to every ACF tournament on the calendar without thinking twice.
Not to in any way endorse that belief, I would assume that there is some presence leading to the reformation that is still in that outdated mindframe that used to be all the rage about ACF being "IMPOSSIBLE" or a transfer from another program that is still in this mindset. While it is still a fundamentally wrong opinion, its a totally understandable position for one to find themselves to have. There are still teams, sad as it sounds, that will see ACF Fall and be so blown away by it that there natural instinct is that its impossible and every game will end 15-5.
This post is highly misinformed. Highly. The poster doesn't keep up with the news.
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

DarkMatter wrote:
Frater Taciturnus wrote:
Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:
I'd hate to take a group of freshmen to ACF for their very first tournament.
I'm curious, why is this? When I was a freshman I went to every ACF tournament on the calendar without thinking twice.
Not to in any way endorse that belief, I would assume that there is some presence leading to the reformation that is still in that outdated mindframe that used to be all the rage about ACF being "IMPOSSIBLE" or a transfer from another program that is still in this mindset. While it is still a fundamentally wrong opinion, its a totally understandable position for one to find themselves to have. There are still teams, sad as it sounds, that will see ACF Fall and be so blown away by it that there natural instinct is that its impossible and every game will end 15-5.
This post is highly misinformed. Highly. The poster doesn't keep up with the news.
What are you talking about?
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Re: New team at Ole Miss

Post by The Ununtiable Twine »

Ukonvasara wrote:
Frater Taciturnus wrote:
Not to in any way endorse that belief, I would assume that there is some presence leading to the reformation that is still in that outdated mindframe that used to be all the rage about ACF being "IMPOSSIBLE" or a transfer from another program that is still in this mindset.
What are you talking about?
I don't know what I am talking about. I would hope that this has become clear over the years. I am obviously full of shit.

edit: I had to fix the [/quote]. oops...
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