Germantown Fall Invitational (Germantown, TN) 12/7/13

[cchiego]

Germantown High School will be hosting the Germantown Fall Invitational (GFI) on December 7th, 2013 and would like to invite your team to attend. GFI will serve as a qualifier for the 2014 NSC national championship tournament and will use the JAMES question set (pyramidal questions with powers), which has been certified as "exemplary" by the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (PACE) .

GFI is intended to be a smaller tournament (since it is also an SAT date) and field size will be limited to [edit] 18 teams. We will initially limit each school to 2 teams, depending on interest.

Fees and Discounts:
$65 per team
-$5 per working buzzer system
-$10 per 100 miles driven (one way)

Format:
[edit: modified by field size, see last post below] All teams are guaranteed at least 7 rounds. We will have two prelim brackets of 8 teams each, with the top 2 teams from each prelim bracket advancing to a championship playoff bracket where the top 4 teams will play a round-robin among themselves to determine the final standings. Teams not making the championship bracket are welcome to play up to two consolation rounds. We expect to be finished with the prelim rounds by 2 PM at the latest (aiming for earlier) and the tournament will be over by 4 PM for all teams. Individual book prizes and team trophies will be awarded and live statistics will be kept using SQBS.

Rules:
Though we are not using NAQT questions, we will use standard untimed NAQT rules with the exception of players having 3 seconds rather than 2 seconds to begin their answers after buzzing in.

Note:
We are still planning on hosting our originally scheduled Germantown Academic Team Tournament [EDIT] sometime in February, likely moving to Feb. 1st due to ACT and MUN conflicts.

Field Update (17 out of 18):
White Station (2)
St. Benedict (2)
ECS (1)
Bolton (2)
Brighton (2)
MUS (2)
Houston (1)
Collierville (2)
Cordova (1)
Itawamba (3)

[cchiego]

We are closing in on our field cap. If there are any teams from further afield who are interested in attending, please let us know ASAP since we've gotten enough interest to fill up our field if these teams all commit to coming.

Also, on the very outside chance that there are other teams around with competent moderators capable of reading pyramidal questions at a decent pace, please let us know! That's the only way we'll get enough moderators to expand the field since we're missing several of our seniors for the SAT.

[gimmedatguudsuccrose]

Would it be too late to express interest in attending?

[cchiego]

We've expanded to 18 total, but that's going to have to be our field cap (we'll aim at 24 for our Feb. 1st tournament).

If Farragut can confirm one team, then that will be the final spot.

New format for 18 teams:
Morning Round-Robin between 3 balanced brackets of 6 teams each. Afternoon rebracketing with 1 championship bracket of 6 teams that will play 4 rounds (morning result against team in same group carries over) and a final if necessary, plus 3 consolation brackets of 4 teams each that will play 3 consolation playoff rounds. Plan is to have the consolations done by 2 or 2:30 and the finals done by 3:30.

[cchiego]

We are monitoring the weather and will be dependent on the decision of the Shelby County Schools board as to whether or not we can run it this weekend. If classes are cancelled or dismissed early on Friday, then we will unfortunately also have to cancel activities on Saturday.

If we are forced to postpone, we will likely try to reschedule for January 11th. The good news is that on that date we should have fewer conflicts and could probably run a larger field size of 24 teams. Yes, we are aware that USN has a tournament in Nashville the same day, but considering the lack of overlap in the fields, the 3.5 hour drive, and the difference in formats/questions, I think both tournaments will be able to do fine.

I will post here and email all currently registered teams if we do have to postpone.

[cchiego]

Cancelled due to alleged impending ice storm.

Jan. 11th is also out as a date now due to the massive All-West Band auditions, which will decimate our field and reader group. I am open to other suggestions, but the calender now looks full until Feb. 1st, which is our other previously scheduled date.

Look now for another tournament in March/April at some point.