2025 ACF Regionals: Global Announcement (February 1, 2025)

[ACF Announcements]

This is the official announcement for 2025 ACF Regionals, which will be held on February 1, 2025. Ani Perumalla and Jeremy Cummings will be co-head editors. The subject editors are as follows:

Taylor Harvey - British Literature, World Literature
Henry Goff - American Literature, European Literature
Noah Sheidlower - American History, Social Science
Erik Christensen - European History, Geography, Popular Culture, Current Events
Amogh Kulkarni - World History, Religion
Abigail Tan - Other History
Munir Siddiqui - Biology, Mythology
Maxwell Ye - Chemistry, Physics, Other Science (except Math)
Tim Morrison - Painting/Sculpture, Math, Philosophy, Other Academic
Jeremy Cummings - Classical Music
Ani Perumalla - Other Fine Arts

Hosting
Mirrors of this tournament may be held in-person or online. If you are interested in hosting a mirror of ACF Regionals, fill out this form before 11:59 p.m. PT on Saturday, November 16, 2024. If you have any questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator, Kevin Jiang, at [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Mirrors will by default be regional. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites.
A list of (intended) regional mirrors can be found in the next post in this thread.

Registration
Once tournament hosts are chosen, teams will be able to register for the tournament by filling out the central 2025 ACF Regionals registration form with all relevant information. This form will go live on November 27, 2024. Once tournament sites are confirmed, they will be listed below under Mirrors.

If possible, teams should register for the site that is geographically closest to them and/or is in the region they would normally attend. After the field cap for their site is reached, teams will be placed on a waitlist or potentially assigned to another site.

Fees
Fees and discounts for this tournament are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
New to quizbowl discount: -$100
Shorthanded discount (teams of 1-2 players): -$75
Travel discount: −$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
Buzzers: -$10 per functional buzzer system
Staffers: -$15 per staffer with functional laptop (staffers must register with ACF in advance)

Teams may also receive packet submission discounts or fees as described below. The new-to-quizbowl discount is for schools that have not sent a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively Novice tournaments do not count) since September 1st, 2023, and have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, cash, or PayPal.

Packet Submission
Note: please read this section carefully as packet submission guidelines have changed this year.
Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1st, 2023, is required to either (a) submit a half-packet, or (b) pay an opt-out fee. ACF is introducing an opt-out fee this year to reduce the number of late submissions received. High school teams attending a high school-only mirror are exempt from this requirement.

Please email [email protected] if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional half-packet by December 8, 2024 for a $50 discount.

*For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule:
October 27: -$75
November 10: -$50
November 24: -$25
December 8: +$0
December 22: +$25
January 5: +$50
No packet: +$75

If a team does not submit a half-packet by January 5, 2025 and is required to submit per the criteria above, they must instead pay the opt-out fee; submissions will not be accepted following this date.

If your team is planning on submitting a half-packet, email [email protected] to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 PT on the day listed to meet the deadline. Please format the half-packet as a .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team letter (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

Depending on when you request your assigned half-packet distribution, you may be asked to write questions from more specific categories within the distribution. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on 20th-century American poetry, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.”

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editors at [email protected]. Non-playing students are welcome and encouraged to help newer club members write, but it’s useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

If multiple teams from one school are submitting packets, they should NOT be aware of each others’ questions. Any roster changes that entail an author for one packet playing for another (e.g., if a player on Team B moves to Team A) should be flagged to the TD and to [email protected].

Question Guidelines
This tournament is intended to be similar in difficulty to 2024 ACF Regionals. Tossups will be capped at 800 characters and bonuses at 850 characters. However, you are free to write longer questions if you wish. Please do not write questions that are significantly shorter than the target length (i.e. tossups under six lines or bonuses in which each part is only one line). Half-packets should be formatted in 10-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Please do not add extraneous spacing or paragraph breaks between question text and answerlines. For answerlines, please bold and underline minimum acceptable answers and include the most likely answer first. Include diacritics in foreign words if applicable. For example:
ANSWER: Panama [or Republic of Panama or República de Panamá]

The distribution for this tournament will follow the standard ACF distribution. More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

Submissions that flout the length, difficulty, or formatting guidelines, or which include unoriginal material (e.g. plagiarized text or recycled questions from a previous set), will be sent back to teams and will be considered unsubmitted for the purposes of packet discounts.

If you would like to request an extension for your deadline, or if you have any further questions, please email [email protected].

If you have any other questions or concerns, please email [email protected].