DMV Circuit Discussion, 2023-2024

[cemeterysummoning]

With the start of the season approaching quickly, this seems like an appropriate time to begin the discussion. Feel free to reply with any thoughts about the circuit this year, strengths, up-and-coming teams (), and the like.

[not_arwen]

all the teams are 100 percent rad good luck to everyone

[cemeterysummoning]

Unfortunately, I was unable to be there for the first regular tournament of the season (Centennial). But I did notice some things from stats:

Churchill returns with Kevin Peng and Alvin Guo, who are now Cracked and Scary Seniors. They have Aaron Zhou, Colette Kendrick, Key Li, and Ranbir Narula, among others, who are all really dedicated. Given how well they did in PACE this past year, and the fact that 3/4 of their A team is returning, they'll probably be a force to withstand this season.

On RM A, we saw Nam Dang, who is destroying everything so far (both at JHU Novice and at Centennial). He's crazy good, especially for a freshman, and he seems to be a pretty solid generalist on regs and lower sets. RM A, again, returns 3/4 people from last season, so they have their work cut out for them. I'm excited to see what happens in regular season tournaments this year.

Georgetown Day receives Haughton Neppl from Cooper, who was already a really strong player (see: MSNCT and any other tournament they played last year). They also have returning players in Ben Hellman and Henry Fragle.

Saint Andrew's returns all of their players this season, which is pretty exciting. I know that Anwen and Ethan are working hard (CQAP represent?), and I have no doubt that everyone else in their club will follow. I think SAES is pretty good at scaling to difficult content, so I'm excited to see what they do with some of the more challenging sets to come this year.

I'll do a brief plug of my own team. I'm really proud of all three of our teams for getting as far as they did at Centennial this time around, even as Blair C was (unfortunately) short handed. The week beforehand, we reached third place at PHSAT XXX, playing some of the more competitive teams in the Northeast circuit. I think we have a pretty strong, solid and dedicated base of players this time around.

By no means is this a complete list, and I'll probably have a better idea of the circuit in a few months.

[QOHS]

We've been disappointed as the number of tournaments locally continues to dwindle. Further disappointed that the number of teams competing in those tournaments continues to dwindle. But as a coach of a public, non-magnet school, I get why many schools don't want to spend their saturday getting destroyed by centennial, TJ and RM over and over and over. I wish I had a solution to this problem. But the local circuit used to be so lively and bustling. Hoping those days aren't gone for good!

[cemeterysummoning]

We can't bring back "those days" without concentrated efforts with respect to outreach and tournament running. RM and Centennial have, at present, done what they can to run newer tournaments on IS-A or otherwise mACF novice sets, and they have reached out to many newer teams that haven't seen as much activity since COVID. I'm not sure what calling out these teams specifically in your post was meant to achieve.

[nicole.]

We've been disappointed as the number of tournaments locally continues to dwindle. Further disappointed that the number of teams competing in those tournaments continues to dwindle. But as a coach of a public, non-magnet school, I get why many schools don't want to spend their saturday getting destroyed by centennial, TJ and RM over and over and over. I wish I had a solution to this problem. But the local circuit used to be so lively and bustling. Hoping those days aren't gone for good!

I think the death of It's Ac Baltimore is starting to be seen. Many programs existed to play in that, and they did a quiz bowl tournament or two on the side. However, with the loss of the TV Show, if a team isn't as competitive, the incentive to keep the program alive is fading, and sadly, these effects may be hitting the circuit. As the good teams get better and the lesser teams drop out of the circuit, not sure what can be done here besides stronger marketing efforts (and even then that's hit or miss depending on the circuit)

[hexadecillion]

We've been disappointed as the number of tournaments locally continues to dwindle. Further disappointed that the number of teams competing in those tournaments continues to dwindle. But as a coach of a public, non-magnet school, I get why many schools don't want to spend their saturday getting destroyed by centennial, TJ and RM over and over and over. I wish I had a solution to this problem. But the local circuit used to be so lively and bustling. Hoping those days aren't gone for good!

I'm unsure of where the idea that tournaments and fields are shrinking comes from.

A selection of 2019-2020 tournaments (before the pandemic):
2019 Johns Hopkins Fall Invitational (15 teams, 7 unique teams)
2020 Johns Hopkins Winter Invitational
(19 teams, 11 unique teams)
2019 RM Winter Novice (28 teams, 14 unique teams)

In total, there were seven tournaments in the cut-short 2019-2020 season, nine in the 2018-2019 season, and 11 in the 2017-2018 season.

A selection of 2023-2024 tournaments:
2023 Johns Hopkins Fall Invitational (28 teams, 17 unique teams)
2023 RM Winter Novice (18 teams, 10 unique teams) I will admit that novice tournament fields have shrunk somewhat, with last year's novice tournament also only having 23 teams.

So far, there have been six tournaments in the DC area this year, and there are at least four more in the future, making a total of 10. Fields have mostly remained consistent, with the proportion of unique teams staying the same. From what I can tell, the DMV circuit is stable, with a good balance of skill levels across schools and teams.

[Arabidopsis failiana]

Here's some information that I will provide that will hopefully add to the discussion. UVA hosts a high school tournament each fall on an IS set, the Cavalier Classic. Here are the attendance figures for those tournaments for the past decade from naqt.com:

2014: 28 teams, 16 schools
2015: 28 teams, 16 schools
2016: 36 teams, 22 schools
2017: 38 teams, 21 schools
2018: 42 teams, 21 schools
2019: 22 teams, 13 schools
2020 (online): 31 teams, 18 schools
2021: 21 teams, 12 schools
2022: 14 teams, 7 schools
2023/2024: no tournament held yet, although I believe only around a dozen teams were signed up for the original tournament date in fall 2023 before it had to be cancelled.

Of course, it's hard to draw significant conclusions from these data alone, considering that the date of the tournament changed, the amount of effort put into outreach probably varied, the amount of staff available varied and could have limited the field for some iterations of the tournament, and so on. I'm not going to add up the attendance of every tournament in the whole DC metro area for 10 years. But it is clear that fewer schools and fewer teams have come to this tournament in the past few years, and as far as I know it's not because they're all electing to go to some other non-VHSL tournament instead. You can look through the results pages and see the names of lots of schools that haven't gone to any similar Saturday tournaments in years. What was being done differently five or ten years ago to make quizbowl more appealing?

[a Joe]

It may have gone unnoticed, but Poolesville just won the Keystone Cup, a 53-team event in Eastern Pennsylvania! Quite a showing for a traditional History Bowl/Scibowl powerhouse. Definitely a team that has taken a step beyond up-and-coming.

[QOHS]

We can't bring back "those days" without concentrated efforts with respect to outreach and tournament running. RM and Centennial have, at present, done what they can to run newer tournaments on IS-A or otherwise mACF novice sets, and they have reached out to many newer teams that haven't seen as much activity since COVID. I'm not sure what calling out these teams specifically in your post was meant to achieve.

I wasn't "calling out" those teams. Rather, I was mentioning them to help make my point. It certainly doesn't mean that I "hate" any of the teams mentioned, as some seem to think. The point that I was making, is that those teams (and in general magnet schools and private schools) have a significant advantage and often field much stronger teams. Because of this, the experience for most new, or middle-of-the-road teams is just getting whooped over and over by magnet schools. It's not something most people want to spend a whole day doing, nor do they want to drive an hour to do it. Take that at face value. Every team should be as strong as they can be. There's nothing wrong with RM, TJ, Blair, Centennial, Charter, Maggie Walker or any other school being really good. However, if the discussion is "how do we get more teams involved?" take it from this veteran coach who talks with lots of other coaches...this is the primary reason teams have been disappearing from our circuit, as well as the primary reason it's hard to get a new team to come back. My two cents. The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent the opinions of my employer, etc etc. No one is being attacked. Competitive games and a variety of schools is the key. Playing a magnet school's A,B,C and D teams and losing all of them isn't a fun day.