Collegiate quiz bowl teams appear to exist at most elite, large private universities, most state flagships, and then a few other schools here and there. Schools in those first two categories tend to have larger recruiting pools, graduate students who can maintain the "institutions" and structure of a club, etc. Due to their recruiting pools, strong institutions, and graduate students (who don't have to be great at quiz bowl to still contribute), these schools tend to fill most of the spots at nationals, and most or all of the spots in the top 25. These are also the teams most likely to compete at any given tournament: At Michigan Winter @Harvard, 2/11 teams (Bowdoin and Amherst) don't fit this category. At its Rutgers mirror, that would be just Seton Hall and Millersville (2/12), which were both solo teams. If we want to improve the size of the college circuit, and increase retention, we need to focus on what we can do for these under-represented schools, whose existence will also make it easier to run novice or low-difficulty events and thus maybe retain more players at current programs as well.cchiego wrote: ↑Sun Mar 22, 2020 8:43 pm The Issue: Building Up More Competitive College Teams
Karthik's post really hits at the key underlying issue here, which is what happens to people who don't go to schools with strong, well-established quizbowl programs like Berkeley, Columbia, Chicago, Maryland, Michigan, Penn, Stanford, UVA, Yale, Illinois, Chicago, Minnesota, etc. Yes, a few supremely dedicated people will continue to play, but a national quizbowl circuit shouldn't be only for the most supremely dedicated and it's often very hard to build up and leave a successful new program through just one dedicated player. The problem is that the HS to College "funneling" mechanism (as Eric M. implied earlier) will generally put the most motivated HSers at the same small set of colleges and make the task of those who go to other places in building up a competitive team a lot harder. Not only is it harder to learn and get competitive if you're also trying to simply get a club up and running, but there's less motivation to stick around and put time into studying if you don't have multiple other people interested in putting in the time. There are too many college programs that just don't exist, get stuck in trivia/trash land, have poor leadership that turns off prospective players, etc.
Thinking back to my own undergraduate experience at Georgia, we were never better than a 15-20ish-rank at DI ICT, but we did have great regional rivalries with Florida State (now, sadly, seemingly dead), Alabama, and Florida that made tournaments competitive. It also helped that we had a big team with plenty of interested long-distance drivers, many people interested in helping to lead it and fund it, and a good collection of motivated-ish A-teamers who all covered key parts of the canon. Had there not been this unique confluence of people and opportunities at the right time, I doubt I'd have played more than a year. And even then this proved fragile once the original core group graduated. I do think that challenging nationals can be a good experience for teams who *also* have a strong team base and competitive regional competitions to help build them up to the challenge. Plus teams may have preferences for ICT (we certainly did--the shorter questions helped losing to Chicago A go by quickly and it felt good to nab a power rather than a 10 against a top team) or ACF Nats, which is why having both of them as options is good.
One Possible Solution: Institutional Existence/Continuity for Helping Motivate Players to Improve
This is, as others have said before, one of the reasons grad students can be vitally important to teams in keeping institutional continuity; short of there being actual coaches who are involved like at Northern Michigan, Liberty, and many of the CCs, college teams need guidance and support (I think these examples also speak to the potential that pretty much every college has to build a solid team--if only we could convince more faculty members and institutions to support this!). Sure, you will have some top players emerge on their own (or grad students who move) at various programs around the country, but those programs often won't last and it can be very difficult to build a team around one strong player when you have a bunch of other new players (which can lead to mutual frustration on a team). I don't think it's surprising that the college-only players mentioned earlier in this thread pretty much all came out of established programs where they could tap into expertise and motivation from their fellow team members.
I'd like to see more ways to be able to extend this kind of guidance and motivation to more players, especially graduating HS seniors, in the future beyond assuming that it is incumbent on individual players to commit to "getting good" on their own. Some ideas: meetups at HS Nationals (or virtually) between HSers going to the same college and current players there, more ways for organizations like NAQT and ACF (or perhaps regional orgs?) to "check-in" with prospective teams and players periodically, planning on (optional) social activities like grabbing dinner with other teams at regional events, especially new teams, holding more workshops on team-building and running a team well, etc.
Tournaments and The Distribution of Difficulty and Recognition Opportunities
The other thing is that there are a decent number of accessible-ish tournaments out there now; you can build a respectable schedule of novice-friendly events with Collegiate Novice, ACF Fall, DII SCT, and SUN/MUT. This is, however, incumbent on having enough teams in a region willing and able to host and attend these events to make them a success and not just 4 team triple-round-robins. Other proposals like converting hard HS sets into easier college sets are a good idea to make use of scarce question-writing/editing abilities and things like ACF Winter and more EFT-ish difficulty events are all solid developments too. That said, there's a huge amount of writing and editing work that is done at far "below-cost" by many current and former players who like higher-difficulty events, so it does make sense to keep their interests in mind as well and not assume tournaments will just be written and edited out of nowhere.
The key here then is to do what some previous posts in the thread have mentioned and try to figure out more opportunities for recognition and competitive play short of nationals for more players and teams. Echoing some previous comments, I think seeing Regionals and SCT as actual regional competitions and not just qualifiers for the *real tournament that matters* would be one way to help, though it'll take some experimentation to figure out ways to keep unified regions going consistently and strike a balance on the appropriate difficulty. Other things like beefing up the UG championship recognition at more events (which is easier to do if you have more teams), adding things like newcomer of the year, club admin of the year, mentor of the year, etc. for regions would help as well. Building up regional circuits will also have the salubrious effect of making these regional championships (and other tournaments on the regional circuits) more meaningful and give top HS players making the transition to college more opportunities for meaningful recognition short of the still-difficult-to-break-into national top-10.
Here are a few things people have talked about, including some thoughts of my own, as a soon-to-be-outgoing club president at a small school:
1. Increase access to regular-minus or novice tournaments.
I like playing regular-difficulty (2 to 3 dots) tournaments because they fit my skill level; I’m not overwhelmed by either the competition or the question material – but the rest of my team is not about to play one of those events without me. Still, they’re a solid team on D2 SCT, ACF Fall, and novice sets; if they played EFT as well, I’m sure they’d net 11-12 ppb (not a bad figure). More importantly, they enjoy playing quiz bowl, could probably continue to play ~5 tournaments a year after I graduate, and probably aren’t that different from students at tons of other schools without active programs. However, they do/will enjoy the distinct advantages of knowing about the existence of these tournaments, and where to find more of them, as well as the advantage of having a team in the first place.
Chris is right that there are a lot of tournament-hosting and question-writing strains that this can create. However, it’s worth noting that ACF Fall, EFT, and other easier sets tend to attract more teams, and thus should generate better pay for writers/editors. Beyond that, teams not capable of hosting tournaments should offer what they can in terms of staff to lighten the load for host schools, and graduates/community members should do what they can to ease the burden as well.
I do believe that having 4 sub-EFT tournaments is an appropriate amount (run Fall in October, novice in November, SCT in Feb., SUN in March/April, and that’s a great schedule for a new or casual team). If teams want to play more, EFT is not necessarily that huge of a step up, especially considering it tends to attract a larger, less experienced field than many similar tournaments. However, these tournaments need to be mirrored across the country (I know that happens for Fall and SCT, but not always for novice and SUN/FST) and teams need to be aware of them! I don’t believe I received a single email advertising a tournament that wasn’t SCT or Novice this year, and we should not assume that all teams check the forums. It would be immensely helpful, at a minimum, if NAQT allowed/strongly encouraged teams to provide a contact email that is publicly available.
As a quick aside, experienced players need to stop playing ACF Fall. Players who have competed at nationals need to not play ACF Fall! Teams that have a pretty good chance of qualifying for nationals need to not play ACF Fall! This seems to mostly be a northeast/New England problem, but my point stands regardless.
2. Encourage these teams to "scale up" and give them something to compete for.
If a sub-circuit revolving primarily around sub-EFT tournaments isn’t ideal, offering a “regional championship” or a “conference championship,” etc. on a regular-difficulty set is going to sound more attractive to a lot of teams than the “Michigan Winter Tournament.” If ACF Regionals wants to fill this role, it should probably be a little more accessible than it currently is, but “nationals qualifier” and “regional championship” make sense as a pair (additionally, more teams playing Regs would probably allow some easing of the packet sub requirement). Giving teams a goal to achieve is likely going to make them work harder, and may make them try more tournaments around the difficulty of that competition.
Furthermore, even players on currently-average collegiate teams don’t necessarily have anything to compete for – maybe a nationals bid, but attending nationals if often not a consideration for teams that qualify. This is something that can work for everyone, not just teams that can struggle at or above regular difficulty.
As another quick aside (since it probably merits a separate discussion), ICT Division II is a great goal for a lot of these smaller programs, but as it stands it’s mostly a tournament for former high-school stars on the up-and-up rather than the culmination of a longer career.
3. Connect high schoolers with these programs, and with one another.
Over 1000 students attend HSNCT every year, and a large proportion of those are seniors, many of whom are at least considering playing in college but may have questions about commitment, question difficulty, starting a team, etc. A “college quiz bowl panel” would probably generate pretty decent interest, and similar programs can attempt to connect people who are attending the same school, bolstering existing teams and hopefully contributing in some form to the creation of new teams. Just in New England, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that Dartmouth and Northeastern, both reasonably large schools that have a pretty decent chunk of people from NAQT’s contact lists, don’t have active teams, and connecting graduating seniors with one another might help to make that change.
4. Talk to players, gather information
Ultimately, the players who read and post on the forum (or the Discord) are those most likely to start a team, play the full slate of tournaments, play nationals, etc. We’re not going to meaningfully expand the college circuit, or retain new programs, without reaching out to high schoolers and current college teams about what the college circuit and organizations like ACF can do for them. That being said, if there are high school seniors on this forum who weren’t, or aren’t, dead set on playing collegiate quiz bowl, we as a community should welcome their input (people at less-established programs should obviously chime in as well).
5. Actually do these things:
I’m going to do my best to make a NESCAC Championship (Hamilton, Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Amherst, Williams, Tufts) happen next year, and try to talk to some of the nascent New England programs about participation in some of the lower-difficulty tournaments. It will take more than just me, though, to establish some of the other ideas that have been brought up.
