I Want To Help Grow My Home Quizbowl Circuit

[emf484848]

Before I begin, I am not by any means an expert on quizbowl outreach. I just really want to come up with some creative ways to grow quizbowl in my home circuit. Please feel free to provide any input on any ideas I have and if you know anything about the circuit or its history feel free to add that as well.

Introduction
As a really passionate quizbowl player who grew up in the suburban areas of Western Pennsylvania, I got to experience a very baffling system of leagues and tournaments which ran on poor-quality questions and had rules which barely resembled what many people would consider good quizbowl. It was heavily overpriced, which forced schools that did not have many resources to either drop out of leagues and competitions or always be at the bottom of the barrel of tournaments they did play because they could not afford the hundreds of dollars that schools paid every year to play 15 games of quizbowl in one of the area’s leagues. (My high school paid upwards of $500 in 2019-2020 in order to play a 15 game season and a single-elimination playoffs).

Meanwhile, in the city of Pittsburgh, it was an entirely different quizbowling world. Pitt and CMU both run two tournaments a year, on top of the tournament run at Allderdice High School. Those five tournaments per year would end up be incredibly fun experiences for me and were some of the most well-run tournaments I have ever experienced in the one year I got the chance to play them before the pandemic began.

It may be surprising to most people that to this day a vast majority of schools in Western Pennsylvania currently play the system of leagues and tournaments I mentioned in the first paragraph, and oftentimes only the recurring cast of 10 or so schools would participate in Saturday tournaments.

Over the past ten or so years, there has been progress made to improve the situation. Thanks to outreach efforts conducted by Pitt and CMU, they hosted some larger tournaments in 2019, including a SAGACITY tournament which had 30 teams! Also, the decentralization of all of the leagues has allowed for multiple of them to switch to NAQT questions, even though many have kept the same scoring systems and rulesets as before. Also, Ben Herman and Chris Chiego's work with GPQB has been a great resource for facilitating the growth of quizbowl in the region.

There is still so much more work that needs to be done. Many leagues, like the two leagues that I played in, still do not use any form of pyramidal questions and have archaic rules. They also charge unnecessarily large amounts of money for schools to partake. This is because a lot of leagues I have seen in the region have all games take place in one central auditorium where every other team watches, meaning teams only play 1 of every 8 rounds and league organizers have to pay for 8x as many questions as they would if leagues ran more efficiently.

I could go on and on about all the weird spelling and word origin questions I had to answer in high school quizbowl, but I wanted to share some of the actions which I am considering taking in order to build a much more equitable, affordable, and better circuit so players who come after me can focus less on constant fundraising and more on having fun and trying to make it to nationals.

Media Coverage/Open Dialogue With Leagues
I’m a member of the student newspaper at my school and I really love journalism and think it has great power to change the landscape of quizbowl in Western Pennsylvania. Providing media coverage to quizbowl will get people having conversations about quizbowl and how it is played and therefore help get the ball moving. I recently contributed a piece to GPQB ranking Western Pennsylvania teams/players and it was a great way to highlight schools and players that might not be included in a statewide ranking and it reached a lot of schools through social media and got a lot of warm reception. I would love to either contribute more or make an entirely separate outlet dedicated to covering tournaments and leagues around Western Pennsylvania. Through this, I can create connections and provide recognition for players and schools which greatly increases the amount of quizbowl discourse in the region and also provides a lot of league/school connections and outreach contacts that schools and organizations have struggled to get in the past. I also won’t include anything else on resolving the problems with leagues because they are so different on a case-by-case basis.

Organizing Tournaments Outside of The City of Pittsburgh
I love traveling to the city and it provides a great option for college visits and a lot of good places to eat for tournaments. Also, thanks to a well-trained cast of tournament directors, tournaments in Pittsburgh are some of the best out there. However, I have heard a lot of reluctance talking to other coaches who are used to playing in leagues only minutes away from their schools and are over an hour away from the city who do not see the value in traveling all that way to play quizbowl. While some schools are willing to travel long distances to play tournaments, it is important to note that a lot of them are very hesitant and there are a lot of logistical concerns that come along with that. I am reaching out to the quizbowl club at Penn State about working with them to organize two tournaments in 2022-2023 at their branch campuses in the region and potentially if that works out well with getting new schools playing, we can expand in the future to hosting maybe even 4-5 tournaments a year in different places around the city. (Greensburg, Butler, Kittanning, Waynesburg, Altoona, etc.)


Providing Tournament Experiences That Are Rewarding For New Teams
One of the most important things is to make sure that if we are asking schools, which are used to their league formats and traditions, to give up their weekends and attend tournaments, we need to make sure the experiences are enjoyable. Not just smoothly run tournaments, but tournaments that have JV/novice divisions. You want teams to play competitive quizbowl and aim to win tournaments, but I have seen so many teams leave tournaments or be discouraged after losing each of their first 5 rounds and playing the top teams in the circuit in their very first experiences with tournament quizbowl! It already takes so much work to get these schools to show up to tournaments, and one unpleasant experience can prevent a school from showing up again. Another idea would be to potentially have a system of registering for tournaments that encourages outreach, where if we have a target of a few counties or areas to conduct outreach in, we would let those areas register for the tournament first so new schools have the chance they can get to sign up for quizbowl tournaments and the rest of the schools interested in playing the tournament can be put on a waitlist which would eventually let them into the field afterward.

While I have those ideas and a lot more, I understand that this is all going to take a large amount of work which as a college student, especially one who is currently residing on the other side of the state, may take time to complete. However, I just want to make quizbowl in my area more accessible and fair to all who want to partake in it.

[alexdz]

Something to think about -- it might be worth developing a sort of "middle ground" between the league play these schools are used to and a full Saturday tournament. Several locations in Missouri have had some success with weeknight mini-tournaments -- 3 to 5 games, just a few teams, hyperlocal, with good questions and efficient, fair formats. The idea is to expose teams to the idea in a more palatable way.

[Saratoga]

I am the coach from South Side in Beaver County, PA. I agree with everything you've said here. I have tried over the years numerous times to spark an interest among other local schools, especially Beaver County schools. Given the size differential between many Pittsburgh schools and more rural schools, it would be a more even playing field for us. We even host the History Bowl at our school every year, hoping to draw local participation. Yet we are more likely to get a team from Pittsburgh to come than from a school that's right next door even after many years. Heck, we've had teams fly in and never had a single Beaver County school participate. I'm sure we are missing something, but I haven't been able to figure out what it is.

It's probably not the only issue, but I feel like one of the barriers to entry might be Saturday tournaments. Unfortunately, although I have no issues with this, a lot of teachers aren't really willing to give up their Saturdays.