The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello all,

I'm a freshman at Mercer University in Georgia. I was just wondering if there was a precedent for teams in the South attendin tournaments particularly in the Northeast.

Thanks in advance.

You can attend any tournament you want--I should think that nobody will actively prevent you from travelling long distances in order to play an event that's really far away. If there's a more local site for that particular set of questions, though, it'd be advisable to just go there, since you'd save money on transportation costs. The only situation in which you might conceivably get yelled at is if you ditch a local tournament in order to play a faraway event using the same questions and as a result that local site doesn't have enough teams to have a fun tournament, although that's a case-by-case sort of thing.

Back in the day, Florida State attended a couple tournaments at Princeton.

Outside of the usual national tournaments, Alabama played the main site of Penn Bowl in 2011 and the main site of QUARK in 2012.

You can basically go play anywhere you would like. When I was at WKU we once drove 9 hours to Virginia for a tournament basically because we wanted to go to DC on our Fall Break.

Obviously for your club's budget and sustained involvement, staying closer to home has some benefits. I know that Penn Bowl, ACF Fall, and (if what I've been told turns out right) Missouri Open will have good hosts in the Southeast who will draw strong fields this year. Unless you're engaging in quizbowl tourism then I wouldn't make a habit of traveling all over the country to play tournaments, since the experience is mostly the same given the above conditions.

I live and work in the greater Orlando area, and through my job I sometimes rack up enough frequent flier miles that I've been able to burn them on quizbowl events (on occasion). For Penn Bowl, I'm doing this to attend Minnesota's mirror; in the past, I did something like this to go to Boise State.

Previous UF teams (before I got there) had a large enough budget, plus whatever they had earned from hosting / writing tournaments, that they traveled for regular season events on the West Coast and probably the Northeast (I'm pretty sure they went to Stanford for Cardinal Classic once; and I vaguely think they went to Penn for some iteration of Penn Bowl).

If you're at Mercer, then USC, UGA, UF, GaTech, and UCF / Valencia will all be reasonable drives for tournaments if you wanted to stay relatively local --- but ultimately, how far you travel for a non-nationals event is going to be some function of budget, schedule, convenience, and how interesting the final destination is to you. If it works out that you can go to the more distant sites and see teams outside your geographic region (and correspondingly meet new people), I'd wholly encourage it.

Thanks to all of you for the quick, copious, and helpful responses. Our team/club has been vaguely dormant for a while, and I want to help revitalise it.

We're Northern only culturally, but y'all are more than welcome to head up to Chapel Hill for ACF Fall.

JTakang21 wrote:Our team/club has been vaguely dormant for a while, and I want to help revitalise it.

If you need support in getting the program going, this forum certainly will have plenty of folks willing to share advice on all of the essentials --- from player improvement to better question writing to organizational logistics, etc.

Incidentally, I'm about 95% sure Mercer came to a Delta Burke tournament at Valencia back in the day (Chris Borglum, correct me here...).

Not to steal Ryan's thunder, but UF is also hosting ACF Fall and will be a much shorter drive for you. But if your heart is set on going north, Chapel Hill is a fine option.

And sort of related to my previous comments --- the opposite is also true: it's not unheard of for northern teams (or individual players) coming south for tournaments. For this past VCU Open, Chicago's Athena Kern traveled to the Valencia mirror here in Orlando; and from what I remember, Jordan Palmer, Aayush Rajasekaran, and some other misc. Canadian folks have ventured to these parts, as well.

Indeed, a nice guy named Nate Swann brought teams to a couple Delta Burkes and MUT mirrors in 2012-13. Nate was actually a residential housing director of some sort, if I recall. Don't know if he's still there, but if so, he might know if there are some buzzers sitting in some closet somewhere.

If you ever want to come to a tournament hosted at Carleton University (in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) I'll let your team play for free. I'll also do everything I can to find your free accommodation on the couches of our club's members. My only request is that you bring some fresh pecans with you.

Canadians love Georgians.

As a recently reborn southeastern team ourselves, we'd love to chat about recruitment, practices, and travel with you, maybe even in person in Athens at Penn Bowl on October 24th.