Is high school quizbowl in Missouri salvageable?
Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 2:34 pm
Given the events of the last few months, I'm wondering if those in the know about good quizbowl have any thoughts on when further effort to save a state is futile.
A brief review of what the situation in Missouri is:
*Teams have a date window outside of which they are not allowed to play, affecting about a third of the normal high school quizbowl season.
*College students who want to aid high school teams at their practices are disallowed from doing so.
*Players are not allowed to participate in collegiate or open tournaments.
*Teams are not permitted to travel more than 250 miles out of state during the season.
*The format used at the MSHSAA state championship series, and thus at events which emulate it, takes 45 minutes to run a game and is full of math calculation.
*The format used to qualify teams for the state championship is dependent on arbitrary district assignments that often preclude the second- or third- best team in the state from qualifying for the tournament.
*The questions for the state championshiop series are written by Questions Galore.
*Missouri teams cannot participate in national championship tournaments held during the school year (this means a great deal of them cannot participate in PACE NSC this year, since most Missouri schools are in session until Memorial Day weekend). To participate in a post-graduation tournament, they have to apply for special permission from the MSHSAA, which is not always granted, and often involves waiting until two days before the tournament to find out that participation is sanctioned (this means some teams will not participate in NAQT HSNCT this year because their applications will be denied or will be too much hassle to file at all).
*The MSHSAA levies sanctions against schools who attempt to use "ineligible" players in their tournaments, by penalizing the entire interscholastic competition program. This means, for example, that someone who participates in ACF Fall and then tries to play in MSHSAA States can get his school's football team disqualified from competition. The implied threat of a quizbowl player being ostracized or assaulted for harming the high school sports establishment is the appalling basis behind MSHSAA's power over quizbowl.
*Nobody can hold a tournament anywhere on Earth without the MSHSAA claiming jurisdiction over it. To invite any teams from Missouri, one must apply to the MSHSAA for approval of the tournament. The approval process is designed to give the MSHSAA grounds to reject any tournament it feels like, as it is nearly impossible to actually complete the required forms. Even for tournaments held within Missouri, approval is not automatic and is sometimes withheld in order to punish people for criticizing the MSHSAA.
*The attitude of the vast majority of Missouri coaches is quite poor. This is, I think the most major of the problems. When the coaches in the state are not on the side of good quizbowl, there is no effective voice to create positive change. The coaches on the MSHSAA Academic Competition Advisory Committee and the most influential members of MACA clearly demonstrate contempt and misunderstanding towards good question-writing principles and to the idea of quizbowl as an opportunity for intellectual growth. Questions which do not reward or encourage learning are the norm in Missouri. A militant egalitarianism coupled with an attitude of "anyone who can beat me is cheating" is the ideological framework for all policy decisions. Any player or team who seeks to get better is ruthlessly cut down. Coaches publicly mock players on other teams for events in their personal lives, then turn around and complain about "sportsmanship" when their own terrible ideas about quizbowl are criticized. Players who want to improve their games, learn more, attend more tournaments, and write questions are derided as troublemakers, while perpetually mediocre players who cheerlead for the MSHSAA are praised for their "good attitudes." Every time someone figures out how to improve his ability at the game, new rules are passed and old rules are conveniently re-interpreted to make sure no one in the future may repeat what that player did. Most coaches have no interest in teaching their students anything or in improving their gameplay through legitimate means; instead, they come to quizbowl with an attitude of entitlement and seek to "level the playing field" by making every aspect of the game a complete random draw.
Every effort from every perspective has been made to change things in Missouri. WUSTL has been running a tournament with pyramidal ACF-format questions for several years, and no one seems to have caught on to why this is better. People have written letters to coaches and to the people on the MSHSAA and MACA boards, which have been met with stone silence in 99% of cases, and incoherent ranting and namecalling in the other 1%. Jeremy Gibbs, the president of MACA, was on this board, promising to speak up for change. Instead, he went behind the backs of the good quizbowl people he had been talking to, repeatedly claimed that good quizbowl is something that "only the best three teams in the state" want, and participated in such decisions as adopting the participation restrictions and giving the state championship contract to Questions Galore. He then disappeared from this board when his actions were questioned. This is, sad to say, exemplary behavior for a Missouri quizbowl coach, since most of them won't even give the time of day to anyone who questions them in the first place. At least Gibbs had the patience to lie to us!
If this situation was going on in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, California, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio, or any number of other states, the solution would be easy. Teams would start their own circuit of good quizbowl and stop attending the nonsense MSHSAA tournaments. Indeed, this is what has happened in some of those states--Pennsylvania and Michigan, for example, have state championships run on absolutely terrible questions and formats, while Minnesota has the infamous Knowledge Bowl. The serious programs in those states focus their efforts on real tournaments that high schools and colleges in the state hold. Most of them still play in the subpar state events (though some don't even bother), but they are not obligated to use the terrible state format and are not restricted from playing in a full year of good events in addition to that one weekend where they have to play Academic Hallmarks buzzer-race questions in single-elimination format.
In Missouri, this is not an option. The MSHSAA claims jurisdiction over any tournament in the universe that involves a Missouri high school student. Through their "sanctioning" of independent events, through their power to disqualify football teams from schools who play good quizbowl, and through the lack of any interest on the part of the coaches in changing the system, Missouri has effectively killed high school quizbowl. There is no point to playing what they have now--Trivial Pursuit is a diverting board game to play once a year; it is not the inducement to learning about a liberal arts canon the way good quizbowl is. Forming a breakaway circuit or eschewing MSHSAA in order to travel to the tournaments held on NAQT or other decent questions in bordering states is not possible. The entire state is being held hostage by football coaches who insist on regulating every interscholastic activity, and quizbowl coaches who are happy to be controlled in this way because it may allow their team to win a trophy without doing any work. The only solution seems to be political--to participate in the ongoing effort by Missouri's state legislature to reform MSHSAA, and particularly, by seeking to have MSHSAA's power over non-athletic events legally removed. Such an effort must take years on end and is not guaranteed to be successful. To have to get involved in politics in order to fix quizbowl is a gargantuan effort, and to have created a situation where establishing good quizbowl requires lobbyists and protest marches, rather than properly editing a tournament set, is just ludicrous enough to be something that Missouri has in fact done.
Creating such absurdity in relation to quizbowl is what football coaches do. I don't know if Missouri will ever recover from it. The only good that may come of this is as a warning to other states. Get your high school quizbowl teams out from under the jurisdiction of athletic associations NOW, before it's too late. If you have managed to remain independent to this time, then fight to keep that independence by any means necessary. Don't believe the promises of people who claim they can expand quizbowl by sacrificing it to athletic directors. If you are a proponent of good quizbowl at any level--student, coach, or alumnus--then the football-lovers do not have your best interests at heart. Once you sign away control of high school quizbowl to state athletic associations, you sign the activity's death warrant.
A brief review of what the situation in Missouri is:
*Teams have a date window outside of which they are not allowed to play, affecting about a third of the normal high school quizbowl season.
*College students who want to aid high school teams at their practices are disallowed from doing so.
*Players are not allowed to participate in collegiate or open tournaments.
*Teams are not permitted to travel more than 250 miles out of state during the season.
*The format used at the MSHSAA state championship series, and thus at events which emulate it, takes 45 minutes to run a game and is full of math calculation.
*The format used to qualify teams for the state championship is dependent on arbitrary district assignments that often preclude the second- or third- best team in the state from qualifying for the tournament.
*The questions for the state championshiop series are written by Questions Galore.
*Missouri teams cannot participate in national championship tournaments held during the school year (this means a great deal of them cannot participate in PACE NSC this year, since most Missouri schools are in session until Memorial Day weekend). To participate in a post-graduation tournament, they have to apply for special permission from the MSHSAA, which is not always granted, and often involves waiting until two days before the tournament to find out that participation is sanctioned (this means some teams will not participate in NAQT HSNCT this year because their applications will be denied or will be too much hassle to file at all).
*The MSHSAA levies sanctions against schools who attempt to use "ineligible" players in their tournaments, by penalizing the entire interscholastic competition program. This means, for example, that someone who participates in ACF Fall and then tries to play in MSHSAA States can get his school's football team disqualified from competition. The implied threat of a quizbowl player being ostracized or assaulted for harming the high school sports establishment is the appalling basis behind MSHSAA's power over quizbowl.
*Nobody can hold a tournament anywhere on Earth without the MSHSAA claiming jurisdiction over it. To invite any teams from Missouri, one must apply to the MSHSAA for approval of the tournament. The approval process is designed to give the MSHSAA grounds to reject any tournament it feels like, as it is nearly impossible to actually complete the required forms. Even for tournaments held within Missouri, approval is not automatic and is sometimes withheld in order to punish people for criticizing the MSHSAA.
*The attitude of the vast majority of Missouri coaches is quite poor. This is, I think the most major of the problems. When the coaches in the state are not on the side of good quizbowl, there is no effective voice to create positive change. The coaches on the MSHSAA Academic Competition Advisory Committee and the most influential members of MACA clearly demonstrate contempt and misunderstanding towards good question-writing principles and to the idea of quizbowl as an opportunity for intellectual growth. Questions which do not reward or encourage learning are the norm in Missouri. A militant egalitarianism coupled with an attitude of "anyone who can beat me is cheating" is the ideological framework for all policy decisions. Any player or team who seeks to get better is ruthlessly cut down. Coaches publicly mock players on other teams for events in their personal lives, then turn around and complain about "sportsmanship" when their own terrible ideas about quizbowl are criticized. Players who want to improve their games, learn more, attend more tournaments, and write questions are derided as troublemakers, while perpetually mediocre players who cheerlead for the MSHSAA are praised for their "good attitudes." Every time someone figures out how to improve his ability at the game, new rules are passed and old rules are conveniently re-interpreted to make sure no one in the future may repeat what that player did. Most coaches have no interest in teaching their students anything or in improving their gameplay through legitimate means; instead, they come to quizbowl with an attitude of entitlement and seek to "level the playing field" by making every aspect of the game a complete random draw.
Every effort from every perspective has been made to change things in Missouri. WUSTL has been running a tournament with pyramidal ACF-format questions for several years, and no one seems to have caught on to why this is better. People have written letters to coaches and to the people on the MSHSAA and MACA boards, which have been met with stone silence in 99% of cases, and incoherent ranting and namecalling in the other 1%. Jeremy Gibbs, the president of MACA, was on this board, promising to speak up for change. Instead, he went behind the backs of the good quizbowl people he had been talking to, repeatedly claimed that good quizbowl is something that "only the best three teams in the state" want, and participated in such decisions as adopting the participation restrictions and giving the state championship contract to Questions Galore. He then disappeared from this board when his actions were questioned. This is, sad to say, exemplary behavior for a Missouri quizbowl coach, since most of them won't even give the time of day to anyone who questions them in the first place. At least Gibbs had the patience to lie to us!
If this situation was going on in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Texas, California, North Carolina, West Virginia, Minnesota, Ohio, or any number of other states, the solution would be easy. Teams would start their own circuit of good quizbowl and stop attending the nonsense MSHSAA tournaments. Indeed, this is what has happened in some of those states--Pennsylvania and Michigan, for example, have state championships run on absolutely terrible questions and formats, while Minnesota has the infamous Knowledge Bowl. The serious programs in those states focus their efforts on real tournaments that high schools and colleges in the state hold. Most of them still play in the subpar state events (though some don't even bother), but they are not obligated to use the terrible state format and are not restricted from playing in a full year of good events in addition to that one weekend where they have to play Academic Hallmarks buzzer-race questions in single-elimination format.
In Missouri, this is not an option. The MSHSAA claims jurisdiction over any tournament in the universe that involves a Missouri high school student. Through their "sanctioning" of independent events, through their power to disqualify football teams from schools who play good quizbowl, and through the lack of any interest on the part of the coaches in changing the system, Missouri has effectively killed high school quizbowl. There is no point to playing what they have now--Trivial Pursuit is a diverting board game to play once a year; it is not the inducement to learning about a liberal arts canon the way good quizbowl is. Forming a breakaway circuit or eschewing MSHSAA in order to travel to the tournaments held on NAQT or other decent questions in bordering states is not possible. The entire state is being held hostage by football coaches who insist on regulating every interscholastic activity, and quizbowl coaches who are happy to be controlled in this way because it may allow their team to win a trophy without doing any work. The only solution seems to be political--to participate in the ongoing effort by Missouri's state legislature to reform MSHSAA, and particularly, by seeking to have MSHSAA's power over non-athletic events legally removed. Such an effort must take years on end and is not guaranteed to be successful. To have to get involved in politics in order to fix quizbowl is a gargantuan effort, and to have created a situation where establishing good quizbowl requires lobbyists and protest marches, rather than properly editing a tournament set, is just ludicrous enough to be something that Missouri has in fact done.
Creating such absurdity in relation to quizbowl is what football coaches do. I don't know if Missouri will ever recover from it. The only good that may come of this is as a warning to other states. Get your high school quizbowl teams out from under the jurisdiction of athletic associations NOW, before it's too late. If you have managed to remain independent to this time, then fight to keep that independence by any means necessary. Don't believe the promises of people who claim they can expand quizbowl by sacrificing it to athletic directors. If you are a proponent of good quizbowl at any level--student, coach, or alumnus--then the football-lovers do not have your best interests at heart. Once you sign away control of high school quizbowl to state athletic associations, you sign the activity's death warrant.