2019 NAQT SCT: February 9

[Important Bird Area]

NAQT is pleased to announce the sites for its 2019 Sectional Championship Tournaments, to be held February 9.

Queen's
Harvard
Colgate
Rutgers
Virginia Tech
Auburn
Florida
Michigan
Northwestern
Missouri
Minnesota
Rice
Colorado
UC San Diego
UC Berkeley This site will take place on Sunday, February 10.
Washington This site will take place on Saturday, February 16.

Last updated 2/6; snow --JTH

[Important Bird Area]

Registration is now open.

[Bensonfan23]

Could we get some confirmation of exactly which regions are still to be determined that you expect to have sites? I assume Texas is one of them, considering that the closest site to us right now is more than a 12 hour drive away, but some confirmation would be appreciated for planning.

[Important Bird Area]

Texas is indeed one such region; we also expect to add 1-2 sites in the Upper Midwest and perhaps an additional Mid-Atlantic site.

[CPiGuy]

Does NAQT anticipate the addition of further Midwest sites, and if so, do you have a timeframe for their announcement?

[Important Bird Area]

Does NAQT anticipate the addition of further Midwest sites, and if so, do you have a timeframe for their announcement?

We do anticipate at least one more midwest site, but we do not currently have a timeframe for announcing those.

[mjoy]

We do anticipate at least one more midwest site, but we do not currently have a timeframe for announcing those.

Any update?

[Important Bird Area]

Not yet; I'll post here when our sites are finalized.

[Important Bird Area]

Added our Twin Cities site at the University of Minnesota.

[Important Bird Area]

And one more midwest site at Northwestern.

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

Having sites at Northwestern and Michigan both strikes me as not the best idea, especially given that Northwestern SCT's Division 1 had 6 teams from 3 schools attend, at least one of which the Michigan site is more convenient for. It's roughly a 4 hour drive between the two, and all the teams that would be best served by a Northwestern site already had one within easy driving distance (Chicago and Northwestern at Michigan, Illinois at Missouri or Michigan, Wisconsin teams at Minnesota, Indiana teams at Michigan). I'm personally skeptical that D1 team density is high enough to support this many sites at above 4-team field sizes, but am willing to be convinced otherwise if NAQT has an especially compelling rationale for Northwestern hosting.

[Cody]

What teams does NAQT expect to go to Northwestern that aren't served by Minnesota, Missouri, or Michigan?

[Important Bird Area]

Last year's field sizes:

Youngstown State: eight Division I teams, ten Division II teams
Northwestern: six Division I teams, eighteen Division II teams
Missouri: three Division I teams, seven Division II teams

(Removing the state-of-Michigan teams from last year's field at Northwestern: five Division I teams, twelve Division II teams.)

[Cheynem]

A number of schools in those fields already registered to go elsewhere for SCT (Illinois and Purdue, for one).

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

A number of schools in those fields already registered to go elsewhere for SCT (Illinois and Purdue, for one).

Subtracting MSU and Illinois from last year's Northwestern SCT D1 field leaves just 4 Chicago teams, which doesn't sound like the most optimal field to me.

[setht]

I didn't help at all with (or pay almost any attention to) SCT site selection this year, so I may be way off base here. But thinking about it now, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have sites at Northwestern and Michigan this year, given what happened last year. Here's my thinking:

On the one hand, I'm pretty sure there is no (Midwestern-ish) location from which a team would need to drive more than 5ish hours to get to Michigan, Mizzou, or Minnesota, and would need to drive fewer than 4.5ish hours to get to Northwestern. (Like, I believe it is mathematically impossible.) So looking only at drive times, once we announced the Michigan/Mizzou/Minnesota sites, I don't see a need to add a site at Northwestern.

On the other hand, last year we had sites at Mizzou, Carleton, Northwestern, and Youngstown. The only changes this year are Carleton -> Minnesota and Youngstown -> Michigan. Nobody complained last year that the fields were too diluted. By my count, if we zapped this year's Northwestern site and split up the teams from last year's field between this year's Minnesota, Mizzou, and Michigan sites based on driving times, we'd expect Mizzou to gain 3 teams, Minnesota to gain 6, and Michigan to gain 15. Let's look more closely at the Michigan site.

Michigan currently has 8 teams signed up that I imagine will stick with the Ann Arbor site. I'm guessing that Purdue's 3 teams currently signed up for Michigan will switch over to Northwestern—and actually, Purdue only had 1 team last year, so if we zap the Northwestern site my estimate is 17 additional teams at Michigan just from zapping. Given that we don't have a site in Youngstown this year, I assume Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Wright State, Edinboro, and Robert Morris will all shift to Ann Arbor. Ignoring fluctuations in club size, that's another 10 teams. So I would project ~35 teams at Michigan if we zap Northwestern.

And I assigned Northern Michigan (3 teams last year) to Minnesota, but Google Maps says they'd have almost identical driving times to Michigan and thus might choose to go there instead. And perhaps UIUC (3 teams last year) would prefer to drive an extra half hour each way and join the huge field at Michigan, rather than go to Mizzou. And we can't ignore possible fluctuations in club size, or new/additional teams (e.g. perhaps Youngstown will send a team [or multiple teams!] to Michigan, since they're not hosting this year). I assume most clubs will not follow Purdue's lead in tripling the number of teams they send to SCT this year, and probably any fluctuations will mostly cancel out, but I would not feel confident in saying "Michigan will not have 40+ teams' worth of interest if we zap the Northwestern site."

In contrast, I would guess that Northwestern will get ~22 teams, and Michigan will get ~21 (or a bit more). (And ~22 teams will have shorter drives, of course.)

There are a lot of teams playing SCT in this area of the country, which is great. At what point do we say "hey, SCT site X in this team-dense region is projected to get a huge (possibly unmanageable?) field, we should add a second site not too far away and have two good-sized sites"? Obviously this is strongly affected by how many rooms hosts can reserve and (competently) staff--in fact that's probably going to be the determining factor in most cases--but ignoring that for a moment I would have guessed that "site X might break 40 teams; adding site Y is projected to result in ~20 teams apiece at X and at Y" would be a generous benchmark for splitting into two sites (site-okinesis!).

[Cheynem]

I don't dispute any of that, and I'm not totally opposed to a large number of SCT sites. I do think that the late announcement of these locations complicates matters entirely though--there's only a couple of weeks until SCT--would some of the schools who already made plans to go farther away have changed their minds if they had known about the Northwestern location?

[setht]

I don't dispute any of that, and I'm not totally opposed to a large number of SCT sites. I do think that the late announcement of these locations complicates matters entirely though--there's only a couple of weeks until SCT--would some of the schools who already made plans to go farther away have changed their minds if they had known about the Northwestern location?

Sure, I agree that it would be best to have all the sites figured out earlier, but that's not always possible. And I would imagine that some schools already started making plans and may now want to change plans. But there's still plenty of time to alter plans and switch registrations from one site to another, for teams that want to do that—my understanding is that teams have until February 4th to confirm registration, which is 25 days from now. Hotel reservations can presumably be canceled with no charge at this point.

Am I missing something that's going to cause problems for schools that started making plans for Michigan/Minnesota/Mizzou, and now might want to switch to a Northwestern plan?

[John Ketzkorn]

I don't dispute any of that, and I'm not totally opposed to a large number of SCT sites. I do think that the late announcement of these locations complicates matters entirely though--there's only a couple of weeks until SCT--would some of the schools who already made plans to go farther away have changed their minds if they had known about the Northwestern location?

Am I missing something that's going to cause problems for schools that started making plans for Michigan/Minnesota/Mizzou, and now might want to switch to a Northwestern plan?

I've yet to get a chance to talk to Brad about this one, but the way our student resource funding office works, applications have to be submitted before certain deadlines which are usually 1-1.5 months before the event, so it's likely we won't be switching locations despite the announcement of the Northwestern site.

[awb3]

Are there any updates on sites in Texas?

[Important Bird Area]

The Texas SCT will take place at Rice (which completes our set of sites for 2019).

[CPiGuy]

Am I missing something that's going to cause problems for schools that started making plans for Michigan/Minnesota/Mizzou, and now might want to switch to a Northwestern plan?

Aside from the issue Bradley raised, many schools (us included) have to submit a budget by the beginning of the semester. We can change ours, but it's a huge pain. Other clubs can't change their budget at all. It's really important to have a tournament of this level of importance announced by the end of December for that reason.

[Important Bird Area]

Quick reminder that registration for many of our SCT sites closes on Saturday, February 2nd. Teams that have not yet registered for SCT are encouraged to do so in the very near future.

[A Dim-Witted Saboteur]

Is there any word on the status of the Brown site? I've heard it was cancelled, but whatever that status is, it would be nice to get word from NAQT on it.

[Important Bird Area]

The Brown team has informed NAQT that they are unable to reserve rooms for next weekend. We have begun the process of reserving rooms for the New England SCT at Harvard; I expect a formal announcement of the change tomorrow once the Harvard administration formally confirms rooms for Saturday.

[Important Bird Area]

The new site for the New England SCT has been confirmed: the tournament will take place at Harvard.

[Important Bird Area]

The Northwest SCT site at the University of Washington has been postponed until February 16 due to inclement weather.

[Important Bird Area]

I've created a private forum for discussion of the 2019 SCT question set; select "2019 SCT discussion" from your user control panel to request access.