What got you into Quizbowl?

[David Riley]

I have "tryouts" every year for freshmen to ascertain who will be potential starters. I usually don't need to cut freshmen; they will cut themselves if they find the activiity isn't for them.

[Lapego1]

they will cut themselves if they find the activiity isn't for them.

[Gautam]

they will cut themselves if they find the activiity isn't for them.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh

[KGeee]

I played in elementary, but the program wasn't known to me in jr. high/high school, so I stopped in sixth grade. I was forced to play due to the full scholarship and its requirements at Langston.

Quite the exciting story...

[David Riley]

You're cut, too, shhhhhy!

[Judson Laipply]

I did KMO in 6th grade at Bro Fox Latin School which is connected to Kellenberg High School. It happened to coincide with the tryout test, so I took it but didnt finish. The next year, I took the test and finished 31st out of about 100 people with 32 spots in the second round. However, I had a "mandatory" band thing the same day, so I couldnt try out again. Then the next year, I did well on the test, got onto kellenberg D and went to a Tournament at Yale.

[Auroni]

I really wish my school would cut out the stupid "tryout" crap. most of it's our terrible local format.

For decent, pyramidal quizbowl, anyone who wants to try should be allowed to.

[David Riley]

Well, I can't speak for your coach, but I know many coaches who have "tryouts" because, if you have a general p.a. announcement, or some such, you will get a lot of people to show up who want an activity such as quiz bowl on their transcript but won't make much of a contribution to the team.

Since pyramidal questions are a new concept to middle-schools around here (see another forum for a discussion of that), I break them in with short-answer questions but am very clear that those days of quiz bowl are fast becoming extinct among competitive teams. That's one reason I said above that they cut themselves ; I don't have to do it.

As it is, those who aren't really dedicated or unwilling to work often leave after one or two meetings anyway because they get the "deer in the headlights" glaze when they hear the (subjects of the) questions.

And Torrey Pines has a tradition of great teams, so your coaches are doing something right.

[sunh]

Also you don't want too many people at practice if you don't have enough buzzers.
My team doesn't have tryouts, but attrition does its job unless we suddenly have a jump in parent volunteering. Then more kids stay around because more of them can attend tournaments.

I started doing real quizbowl my freshman year in high school. I joined after getting an e-mail from the coach. I did fake quizbowl since 5th grade. I joined after hearing announcements.

[Auroni]

And Torrey Pines has a tradition of great teams, so your coaches are doing something right.

I think we're pretty new to the whole pyramidal thing, so our [only] records are from chip and PAC. I don't want to have to force them to quit doing their local format, but I'll try to provide more opportunities to do pyramidal stuff. They seem to prefer it anyway.

[Auroni]

Also you don't want too many people at practice if you don't have enough buzzers.

we usually set ourselves up so that if that happens, two people can share a judge buzzer.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

I always looked up to my older brother so i emulated him a lot. There was an academic competition called the Texaco Star Challenge (now sponsored by Comcast) in Delaware that ran for middle-school-age kids; we went to a private Catholic school for K-8 so it was for 6th-8th grade. He did it and seemed to have fun, so i did as well for those years. Yes, now i realize that it was a -funded QU enterprise, but it was a good first step. I just kept going into high school especially when the team started to be awesome when i was a freshman and sophomore. Our coach at the time was completely ignorant of the fact that you need to BUILD a team, not just focus on the top four all the time... they were really good so it made some sense, but after them, the talent level dropped off dramatically.

Anyway, on being a coach.

I was a longterm substitute at CR starting in October 2005, and the team actually didn't exist. Interest had fizzled, and the previous coach was very busy teaching all day with no planning period, and two small boys to take care of. So halfway through the year the school gets an e-mail from Comcast asking us if we're going to have a team. The teacher who was pegged to do it asked me if i wanted to instead (i wasn't even on school payroll, just the state sub pay), but i gave it a shot. We had an incredibly talented team of 4 seniors who, unfortunately, were not that motivated and consistently underperformed. It was probably a large part my fault because i wasn't really ready to prepare them and they likely suffered from it. Nevertheless we started the program again after 2½ years of hiatus, so was happy for that alone.

[Angry Babies in Love]

Partially the book "Braniac" by (Ken Jennings) and partially the fact that I have competed in some sort of academic competition since Kindergarten (Spelling Bee, Knowledge Masters, GeoBee). I'm just uber-competitive and not athletic.

[Maxwell Sniffingwell]

I'm just uber-competitive and not athletic.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have that answer.

[theMoMA]

I'm just uber-competitive and not athletic.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have that answer.

Speak for yourself, I'm an Olympic-caliber table tennis player.

[Saiem]

I'm just uber-competitive and not athletic.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have that answer.

Speak for yourself, I'm an Olympic-caliber table tennis player.

He is on the 'roids. It shows.

[Auroni]

I'm just uber-competitive and not athletic.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have that answer.

Speak for yourself, I'm an Olympic-caliber Wii tennis player.

[at your pleasure]

It came up in a email right before my freshman year, I decided to try it, and things sprialled from there.

[David Riley]

Hey, 22 out of 24 ain't bad....I wish I had that many try out each year!

[rylltraka]

One of my sixth grade teachers was putting together a team for the local Brain Bowl competition (I'm not sure how far it reached, but at least across Southern Oregon), and I guess she asked a lot of the honor students in her class about it, including myself. It was divided by grade, so we had 6th, 7th, 8th grade teams, all separate. We practiced a bit, had actual buzzers, and won three of our five matches that year, punctuated by long drives in a van to other rural schools many miles away.

What I recall most is beating the 8th grade team in an exhibition, in which my older brother was on the other team.

[chemqueen2]

My freshman year, the only freshman on the team at the time just told me I would show up to practice once. (That's how we do most of our recruiting...) I had nothing better to do, so I kept doing so for a while. By the end of the year I was hooked.

[btressler]

Off topic:

We just had our tryout over two afternoons. 41 new students participated, and 29 return from last year. You guys would be mega-pissed at us if I showed up to a tournament with 70 students. So regrettably I cut 30. I do feel bad about having to turn away good kids.

On topic:

The current iteration of Jeopardy! started airing when I was like 8. I remember getting a Final Jeopardy right that all three (adult) contestants missed. My parents were amazed.

Regrettably, Pennsylvania does not have as much quizbowl and what does exist is largely dependent on local TV formats. So though I always wanted to participate, I didn't get the chance until college.

[Ringil]

A friend got me into it my junior year :)

[Sonic the Hedgehog and the Fox]

I remember, I was in the 8th grade, when a teacher from the high school came down to my Social Studies class to sing the praises of the quizbowl team. I put my name down on a list, and didn't hear anything else, until two girls approached me at cross country practice. (Yes, I ran cross country for a veeeery short while.) They said something to the effect of, "Ms. Meek's being hunting for you!" I started going to varsity practices, and the rest is clichèdly history.

[JackGlerum]

We just had our tryout over two afternoons. 41 new students participated, and 29 return from last year. You guys would be mega-pissed at us if I showed up to a tournament with 70 students. So regrettably I cut 30. I do feel bad about having to turn away good kids.

I dream of the day our program is competitive enough that we have to cut kids, let alone 30. Too bad that you had to turn people away, but that's awesome that you have to do that.

[AKKOLADE]

You guys would be mega-pissed at us if I showed up to a tournament with 70 students.

You are so, so wrong.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

You guys would be mega-pissed at us if I showed up to a tournament with 70 students.

You are so, so wrong.

My dream is to play Charter Q. Don't take that away from me!

Also, how on Earth do you get 70 kids to show up?

[at your pleasure]

My ultimate fantasy is watching Charter GΓ versus Whitman Gג

[btressler]

Also, how on Earth do you get 70 kids to show up?

1) I will place primary blame on our middle school tournament. We now bring in kids in grades 5-8 once a year. Then some of them end up on my team. Before the tournament I would get 4-6 new students a year. There was an immediate uptick right after the first event.

2) Friends pull in friends. Do not underestimate the value of peer pressure.

3) Students took one of my classes, ask about the menagerie of the trophies in the back. Then they get interested.

4) Remember we are a math and science magnet school. Other academic teams have to do tryouts as well, including math team and science olympiad.

Here is what the middle school tournament looks like:

http://www.charterschool.org/clubs/acad ... stions.php

(Yeah, sorry the format is modified Chip because the original idea was act as a precursor for the high school television tournament and get kids interested in joining other HS teams too. But in my defense, the fourth quarter tossups this year are probably going to be standard length instead of short. And I promise I have less trick questions than Chip.)

If you would be interested in obtaining this year's set of questions for your own tournament, contact me and we can discuss whether the price is cash or something else. Cash is good because we desperately need to replace ailing buzzers. The set should be done by January 1.

[cvdwightw]

And Torrey Pines has a tradition of great teams, so your coaches are doing something right.

I think we're pretty new to the whole pyramidal thing, so our [only] records are from chip and PAC. I don't want to have to force them to quit doing their local format, but I'll try to provide more opportunities to do pyramidal stuff. They seem to prefer it anyway.

Heh, just saw this. Actually, Torrey Pines has been doing NAQT format since before my first tournament in April 2000. They and Edison are I think the two schools that have been consistently good at the local level since NAQT moved into town (Santa Monica started playing regularly in 2003 or so; RB started playing in 2004 or 2005; Hart and Arcadia have had occasional down years).

Anyway, to keep this on topic and refrain from speculation about when Charter breaks the record for most teams at a tournament (several years ago someone posted on this board about having seen a Dunbar K, which I think is still the record), I'll provide a long, somewhat rambling explanation of my time in quizbowl:

When I was in 6th grade, our elementary school had a sixth grade Academic Pentathlon team. I have no idea how they managed to divide elementary school kids into "Honors", "Scholastic", and "Varsity", but they did. When I went to middle school, a bunch of people from other elementary school 6th grade teams, plus myself, formed the core of the 7th and then 8th grade Academic Pentathlon teams. We did all right. It was fun, not as fun as MathCounts, but still fun.

So I decided to do Academic Decathlon in high school. My first semester, I didn't join - I think I was a little intimidated. But Orange County also has a frosh/soph "Octathlon", where they take out the entire interview and economics events and some parts of the other events, in the spring. I remember placing a letter in the coach's school mailbox about joining, though I think that might have been my dad's idea. First Tuesday of second semester I showed up to the first practice, and at some point in that quarter I got hooked on Academic Decathlon.

Maybe it was that day, maybe a couple practices later, I don't remember exactly, the coach (also the quizbowl coach) says something about quizbowl. Everyone on the quizbowl team was a junior, and she was looking for some new people. I figured I was kind of good at trivia, so I showed up to a lunch practice.

At this point, and I'm dead serious, this is going to sound hilariously outdated to you, we were practicing on Trivial Pursuit cards. Well, I got about five questions during that first practice (which, I guess, wasn't bad for being completely new to buzzing), and got invited to join the B team at an upcoming tournament. It just happened to be the NAQT State Championship at Caltech. I remember being intimidated by Torrey Pines, in their matching black dress shirts, holding and studying their binders of practice questions. I remember getting mauled by Edison 375-0 in my fourth match. But, I finished with something like 20 points a game, and had a whole lot of fun even though we finished with something like 2 wins and a whole bunch of losses.

Shortly thereafter we had Anteater Bowl, which was a vestige of the old local Kiwanis Bowl that John Gose used to run; I don't remember anything about the tournament except that I was one of 7 people who went. Two weeks after State Champs, there was a tournament at Pasadena Poly; one of the regular A team people couldn't go and I was asked to take his place. I still scored about 20 points a game, even though I was playing with A team regulars. At this point, I started thinking that not only was I good at this, it was a heck of a lot more fun than Academic Decathlon.

A little while later I got a phone call asking if I wanted to join the team at nationals. Now this was a big thing, because we had never been to any kind of nationals before, and I think that I was invited to go because it was that Pasadena Poly tournament that qualified us; anyway, we had no rational idea of what to expect. I honestly don't remember why, but I declined the offer to go to ASCN (we got stomped by Kevin Roth and Eisenhower, lost two more games, and finished near the bottom of the pack) but accepted the offer to go to HSNCT.

This is what I remember about my first HSNCT: we beat Checotah, OK in our first HSNCT match ever, crushed a team from somewhere in Iowa, got crushed by Edison, played someone from New Jersey and must have beaten them because we took 3 losses and I know who all three were to, and gave up over 600 points to the Riser-led Riverdale. I got absolutely confused when Vinita Kailasanth (and her eventual-third-place Eleanor Roosevelt team) complained before our match because the NAQT Random Schedule Generator had made them play DCC and State College before lunch (Notably, I had no idea who this "DCC" and "State College" were, or that they were supposed to be good. We were there because we had qualified to be there, and we honestly had no idea who any of these legendary teams were). We won our final prelim game because Torrey Pines didn't show up (we played an exhibition match against a team from Georgia and got crushed) to finish 5-3 and out of the 16-team triple-elimination playoffs (Okay, so that's seven of the teams on our eight-team schedule, and I unfortunately can't remember team #8). I buzzed with "Auschwitz" for "Austerlitz" on like the first or second tossup of our Round 10 game (a loss to Hart), the team finished 24th and I scored just under 20 ppg in something like 6 full matches and 4 half-matches. We watched some part of the finals series between the Mikanowski-led State College and the Weiner-led then-Governor's School, though I don't remember whether it was the 430-395 upset or the 625-170 beatdown or both.

I remember plenty of stuff about the other three years too, but I really think it was those three tournaments that hooked me.

Oh yeah, and this is a story for some other time, but I scored a grand total of 3 ppg at the first college tournament I ever played (unless you count the combined HS/college tournaments at UCLA and UC Riverside my sophomore year. I'm pretty sure I still have a 1-0 lifetime record against Wesley Matthews due to one of those tournaments).

(minor edits)

[Auks Ran Ova]

"Auschwitz" for "Austerlitz"

Hey, we did the opposite of that in a CO bonus. It was quite unfortunate.

[Kaisuopai]

My QB history feels so inferior. :| In freshman year, I heard about La Jolla's Academic League (San Diego local league) team and showed up basically because I was Asian and wanted college application padding. The team was divided into Freshman, JV, and Varsity at the time, so I ended up playing on the Freshman team, and answered about three questions in-game the entire season (6-7 games). And then our coach left at the end of the year for a rival school. >_<;

I basically forgot about QB for half of my sophomore year, but in spring a classmate told me to go to JV tryouts, and I guess I did decently in AL-style playing, because I made the team. I was still not entirely interested in QB until the senior captain grabbed a bunch of us JV players to make a team B for a NAQT game at Arcadia High. I don't remember our records or how many games we played, but at that NAQT match I fell in love with the junior captain, and proceeded to dedicate the rest of my sophomore and junior years to QB so I could be on team A with him. That was the start of my actually taking QB seriously, and because of it, I've developed a bit of a bias towards the NAQT format. :D Anyway, I found that I was actually decent at QB, studied drastically (binge-read ACF packets), and became senior captain this year. That is all.

-Kai

[David Riley]

This is the first time I've ever heard of romance causing someone to STAY in quizbowl...

[Kaisuopai]

orly? Funny thing is, none of our players have been dragged off by overdemanding relationships yet. Although I think that says more about our team last year than it does about the overall issue of romance splitting quizbowl teams. D:

-Kai

[ExcessStrausses]

I was a timid little incoming sophomore (from a school that hadn't even heard of quizbowl), and I knew I wanted to join some sort of academic club. It came down to either speech & debate or quizbowl, and I chose the tiny team the administration hated over the giant, rich one they loved. But hey, I think it was a good choice.

[You Know]

At the open house for 8th graders, the Academic team is sequestered off in some room upstairs, but I managed to find it in the last 5 minutes of the open house. I answered a question right and decided to come back. And I did.

Not a great story, I guess.

lol same. Me and Isaac were both pretty good, but I left at the beginning of the school year, so he became vastly better than me. I came back one time and beat two people, left again, then last year, during the second quarter, me and Isaac had 6th period chemistry together, and he talked me into it....agian.

[Diocletian]

When I was an incoming freshman, I went to a club night at our school, took a flyer from one of the seniors, went to practice and never left.

[Whiter Hydra]

When I was an incoming freshman, I went to a club night at our school, took a flyer from one of the seniors, went to practice and never left.

Am I the only one who read that as "night club"?

[TheCzarMan]

When I was an incoming freshman, I went to a club night at our school, took a flyer from one of the seniors, went to practice and never left.

Am I the only one who read that as "night club"?

No, you are not.

[Sonic the Hedgehog and the Fox]

When I was an incoming freshman, I went to a club night at our school, took a flyer from one of the seniors, went to practice and never left.

Am I the only one who read that as "night club"?

No, you are not.

I've gone to other schools and seen advertisements for "club night" and have misinterpreted it. Once, however, there was a nightclub: it was a discotheque night.

Edit: Substance and apologies.

[Nine-Tenths Ideas]

When I was an incoming freshman, I went to a club night at our school, took a flyer from one of the seniors, went to practice and never left.

Am I the only one who read that as "night club"?

Actually, I just keep picturing him eternally competing in the first practice he ever went to, not allowed to leave.