We are excited to announce BHSAT (Ball So Hard Academic Tournament), a nationals-minus level open tournament produced by the BHSU team and to be mirrored in the spring of 2023.
The tournament will be jointly head-edited by Matthew Bollinger and Rob Carson, and will be subject edited as follows:
Matthew Bollinger (Euro Lit, Euro/Brit History, Music, Philosophy)
Billy Busse (Science)
Rob Carson (US/Brit Lit, Painting/Sculpture, Myth)
Auroni Gupta (World Lit, Other Fine Arts (Visual), Other Academic)
Dylan Minarik (Mixed/Other History, Other Fine Arts (Auditory), Computer Science)
Tejas Raje (US/World History, Current Events)
Ryan Rosenberg (Social Science, Geography)
Morgan Venkus (Religion, Pop Culture)
Alex Damisch and Andrew Wang will also be contributing as writers.
The set will consist of 14 packets of 22/22 regulation questions, adhering to the following distribution:
4/4 Literature
- 1/1 US/Canada
- 1/1 UK/Aus/NZ
- 1/1 Euro (includes ancient)
- 1/1 World
- 1/1 American
- 1/1 Pure European/British
- 1/1 World
- 1/1 Mixed/Other
- 1/1 Biology
- .85/.85 Chemistry
- .85/.85 Physics
- 1.3/1.3 Other
- 1/1 Painting/Sculpture
- 1/1 Music
- 1/1 Other Fine Arts (.5/.5 visual, .5/.5 auditory)
- 1/1 Social Science
- 1/1 Philosophy
- 1/1 Religion
- 1/1 Mythology
.5/.5 Geography
.5/.5 Current Events
1/1 Pop Culture
Set Vision:
Matt Bollinger wrote:The past few tournaments I’ve worked on have been ACF Nationals. Nats is meant to feel imposing, grand, and serious. While that tournament model has its place in deciding a national champion, I’d like this tournament to feel less severe. Where it’s zany and difficult, it should be zany and difficult in the service of being fun.
The tournaments I have in mind as models are 2010-2011 Minnesota Open and 2010/2015 VCU Open. Although the Minnesota and VCU Opens were written in very different styles, they both give out early buzzes and 30s much more liberally than Nationals. They also both have lots of questions that Nationals editors are sometimes hesitant to write. Minnesota Open often pitches you straight-down-the-middle tossups on upper-canon topics that have come up recently. VCU Open has lots of unthemed, generously-powermarked tossups on ACF Fall level answerlines.
I think especially for older writers, worrying too much about what’s come up in the past can be counterproductive and exhausting. I am hopeful that emulating the approaches above will make this more fun for both us and the players.
Ultimately, we aim to produce the best BHSAT ever, and we look forward to seeing it played!Rob Carson wrote:I heartily endorse this event or product.