2022 ACF Regionals Global Announcement (January 29, 2022)

[TaylorH]

Hello everybody. This is the official announcement for ACF Regionals 2022, which will take place on January 29, 2022. It will be head edited by myself (Religion, Philosophy, Auditory Other Fine Arts, and Music) and subject edited by Jaimie Carlson (British and European Literature), Ganon Evans (Visual Other Fine Arts, Geography, Pop Culture, and General Knowledge), Alex Hardwick (World Literature and Linguistics), Nick Jensen (World History, Biology, and Social Science excluding Linguistics), Arjun Nageswaran (American History), Grant Peet (British/Commonwealth, European, and Other History), Graham Reid (Chemistry), Jonathen Settle (Physics, Other Science, and Current Events), Chandler West (American Literature and Painting/Sculpture), and Annabelle Yang (Mythology).

Format

We hope that ACF Regionals can be held in person wherever possible. However, we acknowledge that many schools are uncertain about the possibility of allowing large events due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, it is possible that some mirrors of ACF Regionals will be held online, and we will work to create the most authentic and engaging quiz bowl experience possible under these circumstances. We will continue to post updates as we learn more.

Online Qualification Considerations

The ACF membership is currently actively discussing whether or not potential online mirrors of ACF Regionals will serve as qualifying tournaments for 2022 ACF Nationals. It is at this time unclear as to whether or not all regions will be able to host a Regionals site in person. If all sites are able to safely host in person in January, then ACF Regionals will act as the method of qualification for Nationals, as it has in pre-pandemic years. If the situation requires some or all Regionals sites to be online, then a separate qualifier may be devised for Nationals qualification.

Registration

Teams must fill out the centralized ACF registration form to register, which can be found here: https://forms.gle/4D4gUwZ1a7uKf9hA8

Staff must fill out the staffer registration form, which can be found here: https://forms.gle/duddCiY37pQWc5PQ9

The field sheets for each of the sites can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Packet Submission

Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quiz bowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2020, is required to submit a half-packet. If you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet, please email us at [email protected]. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.
* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

If your team is obligated to submit a half-packet or wishes to do so, please email [email protected] by January 2, 2022 to receive a half-packet distribution. Emailing to request a half-packet does not constitute registration for ACF Regionals, which will be set up after sites are announced.

In an effort to reduce the number of submitted questions that cannot be used for distributional reasons, the editors may include suggested subtopics along with your half-packet distribution. For example, if the social science editor has received many economics questions already, but few anthropology questions, you may see a note like “We suggest that you write this question on an anthropology topic” in your distribution. Teams who abide by these suggestions are more likely to see their questions used, but they are not obliged to write on the suggested subtopic if they do not feel comfortable doing so.

The submission schedule is as follows:

November 16, 2021: -$50

Cambridge A
Claremont Colleges
Cornell A
Cornell B
Cornell C
CWRU A
CWRU B
Harvard A
Lambert HS
MIT A
MIT B
MIT C
NCF A
Penn State A
Stanford A
Tennessee
UBC A
UCSD A

November 28, 2021: -$25

Berkeley A
GWU A
GWU B
James Madison A
Johns Hopkins A
McGill A
Minnesota A
Northwestern A
Oklahoma A
Oxford A
Oxford C
South Carolina A
UNC A
UNC B
Yale A

December 12, 2021: -$0


Duke A
Florida A
Georgia Tech A
Georgia Tech B
Gettysburg A
Indiana A
James Madison B
Liberty A
Liberty B
Maryland B
McGill B
Minnesota B
Northwestern B
NYU B
Oxford B
Purdue A
Rutgers A
Rutgers B
VCU A
Waterloo
Yale B

January 2, 2022: +$25

Amherst
Brandeis A
Cambridge B
Carleton A
Columbia B
Duke B
Edinburgh A
Kentucky A
Kenyon A
Maryland A
Ohio State
Princeton A
Virginia A

January 9, 2022: +$50

Chicago A
Columbia A
CMU
Florida B
Illinos A
Iowa A
Michigan A
NMU
Texas A&M
UNF
WUSTL A
WUSTL B

After January 9, 2022, teams will be required to pay an additional $10 per day their packet is late. Teams that have not submitted a packet by January 16, 2022 will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

The submission discounts and penalties – but not the schedule – may differ for teams attending sites outside of the United States, and will be detailed on the relevant site's forum post.

In order to meet a deadline, you must submit your half-packet to [email protected] before 11:59 PM Pacific Time on that date. Half-packets should be submitted in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format. Please do not submit packets as pdfs. If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editor. Teams should email in their submissions separately and should not collaborate on packets; i.e., a school’s A team and B team should not write two half-packets together. However, if anyone who works on a packet or has access to that packet ends up playing on a different team (e.g. if someone originally intended to be on your school’s B team instead plays for your school’s A team) please let the head editor and your local TD know as soon as possible.

Fees

Fees and discounts for this tournament are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
New to quiz bowl discount: -$100
Shorthanded discount (1-2 players): -$75
Staffers: –$15 per staffer. Staffers must register with ACF in advance and affirm that they have completed ACF’s moderator training (note: staffers who have not completed the training may scorekeep).
Buzzer discount (per buzzer): -$10
Travel discount (per 200 miles traveled one-way): -$10

The new to quiz bowl discount is intended for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 2020, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

Distribution

The distribution for this tournament will follow the standard ACF distribution, as laid out here.

Accessibility

This tournament is intended to be close in difficulty to Regionals 2021. While writing submissions, please keep the following in mind:

-Around 50% of tossup answerlines should be on things that can be tossed up at ACF Fall or below.
-The remaining tossup answerlines should be on things that could be tossed up at Regionals difficulty (“three dots”). If you do not know what sort of answerlines this entails, I encourage you to look at ACF Regionals questions from recent years to get a feel for them. You should feel free to submit tossups with unconventional answerlines that are still accessible, but tossup answerlines themselves are usually not the place for “canon expansion.”
-Easy parts for bonuses should be genuinely easy, gettable by around 90% of teams. However, try and avoid “curved yellow fruit” style bonuses that don’t reward knowledge and can actually obfuscate an answer.
-Hard parts for bonuses should be genuinely hard, but gettable by around 10% of teams. That 10% is important – but a Regionals hard part is not a Nationals hard part. It may be canon-expanding, but should still be something someone with an interest in the bonus topic could organically know, rather than an ultra-specific detail or some random piece of arcanum.

Tossups this year will be capped at seven lines, 10-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Please do not submit tossups that run into the ninth line or are shorter than six full lines. Bonuses do not have explicit length limits, but try to keep things concise and only add extra clues when they are meaningfully necessary.

Submissions that flagrantly disregard the length or difficulty guidelines will be sent back to teams and will be considered unsubmitted for the purposes of packet discounts. If you would like to request an extension for your deadline, please submit your request and explanation to [email protected].

Hosts

If your school would like to host a mirror of ACF Regionals, you will need to submit a bid to host. Information on submitting a bid will be posted here in the coming weeks.

If you have any questions about hosting, contact ACF’s Mirror Coordinator, Theresa Nyowheoma, at [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines and the updated guidelines for hosting online tournaments if the mirror is to be online.
Mirrors will by default be regional. If any sites end up being online, ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2022 ACF Regionals in the following regions:

Lower Mid-Atlantic: UNC
Southeast: Vanderbilt
Florida: Florida
Great Lakes: Kentucky
North: Minnesota
Northeast: Brown
South Central: UT Austin
Eastern Canada: Toronto (online)
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Penn State
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Stony Brook (online)
Midwest: Chicago
Overflow: Nebraska (online)
UK: Warwick

Further Questions

If you have any further questions, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Thanks!

[TaylorH]

Update on this set’s editors: Chandler West will be editing American Literature and Annabelle Yang will be editing Mythology, taking over for Auroni Gupta. We thank them, and the rest of the set production team, for their flexibility.

[JA01]

I sent an email requesting a half packet distribution last week, but have not received a reply. I’m just wondering if the message sent through.

[TaylorH]

A reminder that the -$50 packet deadline is in one week unless I gave your team an extension on this deadline because of me not seeing emails. The editors would also be happy to receive packets before the deadline if they are ready. Getting your packet in early will not only give you a larger discount but will also increase the likelihood of your questions being used in the set.

[TaylorH]

Also a note of clarification for those working on packets: assigned questions on "European/Candian/Australian History" can and should include questions on the history of the British Isles.

[tnyowheoma]

Hi everyone, the bid form for ACF Regionals is now open! Bids will be accepted until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, November 26, with sites set to be announced the following Wednesday, December 1. Registration for teams will open soon after bids are announced.

Jan.14 edit: the qualification process for 2022 ACF Nationals has been updated, and with it this post. Please read Michael's post in this thread for the most up-to-date policy.

[TaylorH]

Reminder that the first packet deadline is tonight. Get those packets in!

[TaylorH]

The opening post has been updated with the teams that made the -$50 fee deadline. If your team believes they should be on this list and is not there, please contact me.

[TaylorH]

Reminder that the second packet deadline for -$25 is tomorrow. If you finish your packet early, it helps the editors out a lot for you send it as soon as it is complete rather than waiting until the last possible minute.

[tnyowheoma]

Hi all, here to announce that registration for teams and staffers for ACF Regionals is now open! Teams can register here and staffers can sign up here; team registration will close on Monday, January 24, 2022 at 11:59 PM Pacific time. Feel free to send questions about registration to me at [email protected].

[Edited out the call for more hosts, thank you to every school that sent in bids to host 2022 Regionals :) ]

[TaylorH]

Reminder that the -$0 deadline is tonight.

[kearnm7]

Hi everyone, the bid form for ACF Regionals is now open! Bids will be accepted until 11:59 PM Pacific time on Friday, November 26, with sites set to be announced the following Wednesday, December 1. Registration for teams will open soon after bids are announced.

ACF is still allowing for in-person and online sites for 2022 Regionals. Hosts of in-person and online sites can still send in wildcard bids for ACF Nationals without fielding a house team. However, only teams who attend in-person Regionals sites will be able to qualify by A-value. Teams without in-person Regionals sites close to them will be able to apply for a wildcard bid. The process for ACF Nationals qualification is written out here on ACF's website. Prospective hosts (and teams) and welcome to email me at [email protected] with any questions.

Due to the current course of pandemic, ACF is altering the aspects of this policy that pertain to Nationals qualification. ACF will allow online Regionals mirrors to operate as full qualifiers for 2022 Nationals, functioning identically to in-person sites. Winners of online sites and winners of the undergraduate championship at online sites (presuming at least four total undergraduate teams from at least two total schools are present) will earn automatic qualification to ACF Nationals, with all other participating teams being entered into the A-value list for at-large qualification. The full details on ACF's Nationals qualification policy are available here.

Players at online sites of Regionals will be required to follow ACF's new integrity policy for online play, which can be read here.

Please direct any questions about Nationals qualification to me.