Funding in High School Quiz Bowl

[Al Hirt]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, so I'll leave the board admins to decide that, but I was just wondering how most teams that play pyramidal quiz bowl (mACF or NAQT) get funding for quiz bowl (or better yet, how teams got their BoEs to give them funding).

My school doesn't give us a dime (as you could probably infer from the purpose of the post), so we end up paying for all tournaments out of our own packet. This year, we'll end up paying something like 150-200$ out of our own pocket per person over the course of the year so we can attend as many tournaments as possible. Is this reasonable or common, or something abnormal in the world of quiz bowl?

(One of the reasons for the prices stems from the general costs of the metro-NYC area, but even so, it's a bit much).

[High Dependency Unit]

Our team funded nationals last year by getting sponsors. Another way to fundraise would be to host a tournament, if you have enough players willing to volunteer. Oh, and this issue might be common in some areas. We are also in the Metro-NYC area, and our school has never given us $$$, and never will give us $$$ (but the football team gets a jumbotron). And including a trip to NSC, my projected personal quiz bowl cost for the year is $700.

[Corry]

I probably paid $1500 total to attend History Bowl Nationals, HSNCT, and about 11 regular-season tournaments last year. This is probably not a normal example, but yeah, my high school definitely did not give us enough money.

[High Dependency Unit]

Did Arcadia do any sort of fundraising?

[Corry]

Did Arcadia do any sort of fundraising?

Yes, we ran two quiz bowl tournaments and I ended up selling fruit snacks (fundraising ugh) twice that year, for both the quiz bowl and history bowl team. We probably raised about $3000 total for the two teams last year, though I would have to check with my co-captain for specifics. However, since Arcadia registered three teams to HSNCT and two teams to History Bowl Nats, and we have to fly from California to the east coast rather than drive, even $3000 was not nearly enough.

[The Stately Rhododendron]

Ask your SGA, or your school's boosters, for money.

[zachary_yan]

Some restaurants do community fundraising along the lines of "mention this thing" to the cashier on a certain date and x-percent of your purchase goes towards that organization. In our case it was Buffalo Wild Wings and they're known for doing this at every restaurant location they have, but I'm sure even if there's a restaurant or store that's not known for doing this they might be able to help you out. Whatever the case we ended up pocketing a couple thousand dollars.

[JTakang21]

Has anymore run a QB team vs. Teacher game during school as a fundraiser? If so, do you have any tips on to plan such an event and please feel free to share your experiences. Thank you!

[Sniper, No Sniping!]

Has anymore run a QB team vs. Teacher game during school as a fundraiser? If so, do you have any tips on to plan such an event and please feel free to share your experiences. Thank you!

User was reminded to enable a signature. --Mgmt.

How do you run this as a fundraiser if it's an event taking place during the school day?

[Corry]

Has anymore run a QB team vs. Teacher game during school as a fundraiser? If so, do you have any tips on to plan such an event and please feel free to share your experiences. Thank you!

I ran one of these events for Arcadia's history bowl team last year. We sold about 100+ tickets at $2 apiece, and it was actually a lot of fun.

The whole event lasted about 45 minutes, and took place on a Wednesday afternoon, immediately after school ended (we just choose a random day that worked with everybody's schedules). We reserved a large lecture hall at our high school that could seat about 120 people, and set up a buzzer system up front. We recruited 5 history teachers to play on one side, and a couple of members from our history bowl team to play on the other.

I regret to admit that we did not use pyramidal questions for this competition. As fun as pyramidal questions may be for participants to play, I think we can all agree that 8-line questions from PACE NSC are not really that fun for audience members to watch. The lecture hall had a big-screen projection system in the front of the room, so we decided to make use of it by running a Jeopardy-style competition instead. We used this app (I think) to make 3 rounds of pseudo-Jeopardy history questions, and project them onto the big screen in the lecture hall.

I hosted the event. The lecture hall had a microphone system and everything, so we tried to give it a bit of a "game show" feel, in line with what you see on Jeopardy. Go up, do a 10-minute bit, and crack a few jokes about your APUSH teacher's hair. It works out pretty well.

In case you're wondering, the teachers won. Our history bowl team had a $3000 lead over them going in the Final Jeopardy round (yes, we seriously used dollars as points, and yes, we seriously had a Final Jeopardy question), but they lost it all on a question about Sicily (apparently my team's Robert Guiscard knowledge is not very strong).

Overall, it's not the most effective fundraising method out there. We made $200+ with literally no overhead, but considering the fact that Arcadia's history bowl team has over 20 members, we could have done the same thing by just forcing each member to sell 20 fruit snacks (in fact, we also hosted a fruit snack fundraiser later that month). Also, the success of a fundraiser like this depends on a lot on your team's personal circumstances and investment in the effort. I think I personally sold like 30 tickets for the event, a fact that was made easier by the fact that our school had over 3600 people. But either way, it was really really fun. So there's that.

Here was the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/145474645619488/

[jonpin]

Way back when I was a student, BCA Quiz Bowl did a similar thing. We wrote our own questions, which even by the standards of then were probably terrible, mostly taken from various trivia-based board games my parents own (anyone else heard of "I Bet I Know"? surprisingly pyramidal in its question structure!), and held an intramural tournament a few days after school for a modest entrance fee. We had a separate students and teachers bracket, and then a finals match where the teachers predictably slaughtered. This has the added benefit of also exposing new people to quiz bowl in a fairly painless setting.