Quiz Bowl's Systemic Failure At Expansion and Recruitment

[Cheynem]

This is just a general pet peeve to me (although somewhat unrelated to this thread):

Nobody is assailing or taking a hostile attitude towards teams that do not know any better and go to NAC/Chip and enjoy it or whatever. This would be ludicrous to do so. For that matter, I've really seen not many hostile critiques of teams that do know better and go and admit to having fun because as Matt Weiner wisely pointed out, how can you critique the subjective aspect of having fun?

What people were assailing and criticizing was people (seemingly) trying to defend NAC and Chip. It is very important that people know the many, many, many problems associated with NAC/Chip that cannot be hand-waved away with "well, they're improving" or "it's possible to have fun." These attitudes (which as the thread makes clear, even the people who went to NAC will admit can be unpacked to reveal problems) actually have to be assailed so that nobody gets the wrong impression.

Perhaps I'm just ignorant of it, but I have seen little to no hostility or criticism of teams (who do not know better) attending NAC/Chip.

[cchiego]

I'm happy to put them in touch with schools, and there's been hints of interest in spots, but I haven't gotten too many concrete requests.

Wait, so nobody from the other main orgs has asked for NHBB contact lists yet? And you're willing to share it with these organizations (or any other local/state orgs) upon request? Hey people--get on board this train!

We have spent 100+ hours this year running OSPL - while this isn't likely to provide much in the way of bringing anyone new on board, hopefully it has helped give students additional opportunities to play and get excited about quizbowl.

I certainly appreciate the all-methods-possible approach here, but you may want to see if there's a better way to allocate the time of your full-time staffers, especially considering the fairly low cost of students organizing themselves to play on Skype.

Though whether I will keep the forums on next year's iteration is an open question - I have serious concerns as to whether new teams are likely to be more put off and intimidated by the forums. Conversations with a number of coaches confirms that this is not a sentiment that I am alone in having.

We don't need any more Georgia-esque cases where discussions are bizarrely cloistered off into locked-access websites. Every team should certainly be reading these forums, if not posting. The ability for customers to provide instant feedback is, after all, an important part of what sets good quizbowl apart from bad quizbowl. People should be warned about what might happen if they post, but the number of actual cases of people who come in open-minded and get pummeled by criticism is almost nil.

The connections with the History Channel was pure dumb luck (a producer googled "National History Bee" 3 weeks after our website went online)

That may be the greatest stroke of luck any quizbowl org has ever had. Hopefully you can experiment with ways to keep this relationship going while pushing the questions away from JEOPARDY and into legit quizbowl territory. I'd be intrigued to see with what kinds of creative formats could keep basic pyramidality while also satisfying the television requirements.

In a different vein, one idea I've had, since someone emailed me about it for History Bowl a few weeks ago: many students these days have to do a community service requirement. Could starting up a team at a different school new to quizbowl (even just taking them to a few tournaments and a few practices - it doesn't need to be huge) be a viable community service project? This could particularly work for low income schools, though I think volunteering one's time at any school would probably suffice, no?

This ties into another idea that I've been throwing around: ideally there should be a quizbowl ambassadors program where players or coaches or anyone else around the country could commit to coaching a new or novice quizbowl team for a year and in return receive advice, resources, and maybe a bit of funding for buzzers and travel. It could definitely tie into community service work and help verify service hours and such. Hopefully these people would be recognized just as much as those players who write good questions or do other quizbowl service work.

What people were assailing and criticizing was people (seemingly) trying to defend NAC and Chip. It is very important that people know the many, many, many problems associated with NAC/Chip that cannot be hand-waved away with "well, they're improving" or "it's possible to have fun." These attitudes (which as the thread makes clear, even the people who went to NAC will admit can be unpacked to reveal problems) actually have to be assailed so that nobody gets the wrong impression.

Mike is right here. The NAC thread this year initially made it sound like the NAC had actually improved with all the rose-colored posts about 'improvement,' but once more information came out it became quite clear that the NAC is still a pile of illegitimate garbage. While I understand NHBB's accept-all-comers attitude for now, especially as you're growing and expanding to new areas, at some point there needs to be decisive action to get real structural change in many areas. I can't think of any area where sitting quiet and trying to have good quizbowl coexist with bad quizbowl ended in anything positive for good quizbowl [rather, in many areas it seemed to lead to backtracking].

[The Predictable Consequences]

4. In Westchester County, while Sam and Ryan can attest to this perhaps better than I can, I think we played a role in helping get Ardsley and Irvington to tap into the wider quizbowl world. Ardsley then went to HSNCT this year and did very well - I'm wondering if they're the first Westchester team to ever go.

Playing NHBB was my first introduction to pyramidal quizbowl (even if it was the "modified pyramidal" NHBB ran at Regionals last year), and really gave myself and Ardsley the push we needed to go to good tournaments and improve. It remains to be seen whether other schools in Westchester will catch on to pyramidal in the same way that Ardsley and Scarsdale have, but at a bare minimum NHBB has created a small base of good quizbowl in the heart of country.

[Kouign Amann]

in the wake of Nationals this year, I got emails from roughly 20 teams saying that they had a great time (if people really doubt this, I'm happy to provide a list). . . And I am quite frustrated at some level, that all the criticism seems to be coming on the forums, and all the positive emails coming to me in private. I've always thought that the reverse is a better way of dealing with people, but maybe that's just me...

I don't doubt that you got these emails, but I do wonder who they're from. One reason you see a lot of criticism here is because teams who know about the forums and read and post here regularly probably have higher standards for how tournaments should be run. You have to wonder if these teams saying they had an awesome time really have much to compare it with. Fun is subjective, and I'm sure they had plenty, but they might not know how much better it could have been.

[Scaled Flowerpiercer]

4. In Westchester County, while Sam and Ryan can attest to this perhaps better than I can, I think we played a role in helping get Ardsley and Irvington to tap into the wider quizbowl world. Ardsley then went to HSNCT this year and did very well - I'm wondering if they're the first Westchester team to ever go.

Playing NHBB was my first introduction to pyramidal quizbowl (even if it was the "modified pyramidal" NHBB ran at Regionals last year), and really gave myself and Ardsley the push we needed to go to good tournaments and improve. It remains to be seen whether other schools in Westchester will catch on to pyramidal in the same way that Ardsley and Scarsdale have, but at a bare minimum NHBB has created a small base of good quizbowl in the heart of country.

yeah...it will be interesting to see where Westchester goes in terms of good quizbowl - Irvington was also first introduced to pyramidality through NHBB and afterwards spread out elsewhere - but NHBB has notably already replaced one of the annual Chip tournaments with itself, and Scarsdale hosted (what was likely) Westchester's first pyramidal regular quizbowl tournament this year, and Irvington hopes to host a pyramidal event next year...so in Westchester I would say without a doubt NHBB helped the region move towards pyramidal, though there is certainly a lot of love for questions left. The explanation White Plains gave this year for not returning to NHBB nationals this year was quite simply that "the questions were too long" (and as I heard the same complaint about Half Hollow Hill's A-set tournament, I doubt this will change soon)

[Standard-winged Nightjar]

Note: If a moderator wants to extract this and place in the "Fixing NHBB Nationals" thread, feel free. Otherwise, delete this line.

in the wake of Nationals this year, I got emails from roughly 20 teams saying that they had a great time (if people really doubt this, I'm happy to provide a list). . . And I am quite frustrated at some level, that all the criticism seems to be coming on the forums, and all the positive emails coming to me in private. I've always thought that the reverse is a better way of dealing with people, but maybe that's just me...

I don't doubt that you got these emails, but I do wonder who they're from. One reason you see a lot of criticism here is because teams who know about the forums and read and post here regularly probably have higher standards for how tournaments should be run. You have to wonder if these teams saying they had an awesome time really have much to compare it with. Fun is subjective, and I'm sure they had plenty, but they might not know how much better it could have been.

A quick point here - you're right in that many of those emails came from newer teams, but in many of those cases, that's a result of our outreach / willing to run tournaments in less heavily trafficked areas. Some of those teams (Chaminade, Mountain Lakes, Ardsley, etc.) then have gone to HSNCT, and obviously, to put it mildly, the logistics there the past two years have been far superior. But I also think that at some level precisely because these teams are newer overall they may also be more willing to recognize that just as they are learning about quizbowl, we've been learning about how Nationals needs to run. To repeat the analogy that I made from our regional tournaments, our first two regional tournaments (namely the Tri State History Bowl in May 2010 and then the Westchester regional in November 2010) had all sorts of major problems (i.e. a screwed up playoff bracket, lots of issues with the question set, ending times of 8:30 and 7:30 for a 34 and 36 team tournament respectively), the Bee being run completely before the Bowl (which meant that about 1/5 of the people played it, rather than the usual 40-50%), etc. etc.
Did people enjoy these mishaps? Of course not. Was I frustrated more than anyone when things went wrong? Absolutely. But overall, there was also a sense of "cut them a bit of slack, they're learning the ropes, and going back to the drawing board each time to make it better" (as indeed we're still doing at the regional level). Now, there's obviously still lots we need to keep improving at regionals, let alone nationals, but overall, considering that in our second year, we ran 63 high school regionals, 33 middle school regionals, 8 tournaments overseas, a college tournament, and high school nationals (and did lots of other stuff for the greater good of quizbowl), and that all of those tournaments had logistics that ranged from passable to near-perfect, I would hope that that shows our commitment to improving as much as anything.
Next year, we'll take every step to ensure we have sufficient numbers of well-trained staff, very clear directions regarding where to go when, a more feasible schedule for completion in the time we have available, etc. Could some of that have been foreseen better this year? Sure. But a lot that needed to be fixed over last year did get fixed, and that which wasn't is our number 1 priority for next year. And not only fixing all that, but conveying to the wider community months in advance that the necessary steps are being taken to ensure confidence in our ability to handle Nationals going forward.

[Matt Weiner]

This is just a general pet peeve to me (although somewhat unrelated to this thread):

Nobody is assailing or taking a hostile attitude towards teams that do not know any better and go to NAC/Chip and enjoy it or whatever. This would be ludicrous to do so. For that matter, I've really seen not many hostile critiques of teams that do know better and go and admit to having fun because as Matt Weiner wisely pointed out, how can you critique the subjective aspect of having fun?

What people were assailing and criticizing was people (seemingly) trying to defend NAC and Chip. It is very important that people know the many, many, many problems associated with NAC/Chip that cannot be hand-waved away with "well, they're improving" or "it's possible to have fun." These attitudes (which as the thread makes clear, even the people who went to NAC will admit can be unpacked to reveal problems) actually have to be assailed so that nobody gets the wrong impression.

Perhaps I'm just ignorant of it, but I have seen little to no hostility or criticism of teams (who do not know better) attending NAC/Chip.

This is completely correct and I don't expect the board staff to stand for the sort of nonsense Mike refers to for much longer. To review:

1) It is completely unacceptable to play or defend the NAC once you have been told better.
2) No one is going out of their way to yell at Random Iowa School C for playing NAC when they don't know better and/or have not posted here about it.
3) However, if you are a player or coach of a team that has been told why the NAC is unacceptable, a poster on this board who has been told why the NAC is unacceptable, or the operator of a major quizbowl organization who has lots of knowledge as to why the NAC is unacceptable, and you nonetheless defend it in any way (including making excuses for team that know better to go, telling people how "uncivil" it is to denounce those who defend it, saying it's OK to work for fake tournaments if you make money from doing so, starting Facebook quizbowl forums for the sole purpose of using arguments in defense of NAC that would be laughed off this board, trying to start subjective arguments about whether third parties are "having fun" at something, or challenging the very concepts of right, wrong, good, and bad) then you are doing something that is not correct and not productive for quizbowl and should stop.

The quality of the NAC is a settled and closed question. Whoever you are, I absolutely assure you that the latest rhetorical fallacy you have discovered to try to make a backdoor defense of this sham of a tournament is not, in fact, going to be the final piece in the puzzle that changes the minds of the 100% of quizbowl-knowledgeable people who despise this tournament out of extremely rational, evidence-supported reasons regarding ethical behavior and quizbowl quality (and not out of "bias" or any of that horse flop). You won't. Stop trying, you only make yourself look like an idiot.

"But but what if our school district only pays for--"
"But it's a stepping stone to--"
"But any quizbowl is better than--"
"But now Jason Russell--"
"But I haven't personally been the victim of a fixed game in the last 24 months, therefore--"

No. Absolutely not. No. There is NOTHING that can be said that makes this tournament worthwhile, and NO reason that ANYONE should EVER play or defend it. Am I making myself clear? Do people get this?

[Bartleby]

I've asked this question before, but why even include NAC in the "National Tournament" forum's description, if this is how people feel about it?

[Scaled Flowerpiercer]

I've asked this question before, but why even include NAC in the "National Tournament" forum's description, if this is how people feel about it?

It IS technically a tournament that draws teams from across the nation...(to a certain extent)...but if that was all that was required for the title then things like Texas Invitational would be (more) worthy to be there; so it is probably a good idea to move it, thinking back to when I didn't know any of the flaws about NAC, seeing it discussed very explicitly as "not a national championship" would certainly make very evident, with very little reading required, what the general consensus on the tournament is. Just as how (even though I have never really seen it discussed) "miscellaneous quizbowl" has Science Bowl and KMO in its description to make evident how they are not really quizbowl, perhaps the same should be done with NAC.

[etchdulac]

I've asked this question before, but why even include NAC in the "National Tournament" forum's description, if this is how people feel about it?

I would put forth, though it's just my opinion, that NAC is under National Tournaments so that those who arrive at these boards not knowing better can find it and be educated, rather than being unable to find our pertinent information on NAC.

[Broad-tailed Grassbird]

In a different vein, one idea I've had, since someone emailed me about it for History Bowl a few weeks ago: many students these days have to do a community service requirement. Could starting up a team at a different school new to quizbowl (even just taking them to a few tournaments and a few practices - it doesn't need to be huge) be a viable community service project? This could particularly work for low income schools, though I think volunteering one's time at any school would probably suffice, no?

This ties into another idea that I've been throwing around: ideally there should be a quizbowl ambassadors program where players or coaches or anyone else around the country could commit to coaching a new or novice quizbowl team for a year and in return receive advice, resources, and maybe a bit of funding for buzzers and travel. It could definitely tie into community service work and help verify service hours and such. Hopefully these people would be recognized just as much as those players who write good questions or do other quizbowl service work.

Just my opinion, but in the spirit of actually doing community service, I find this to be a horrible idea. Quiz bowlers make up an above average section of their student population. If they choose to do community service in a school, shouldn't they be tutoring? Helping 3rd graders learn their time tables, or helping a HS student understand chemistry is going to be infinitely more helpful to the community than starting a quiz bowl team. Smart kids are going to be smart. It doesn't matter if they can power a tossup or it they are never going to pick up a buzzer.

Now, I think giving back is a fantastic thing, and I plan on giving back to the quiz bowl community with my time. I guess most of that could be considered volunteer work. But if I BS'd that as "community service," what kind of person am I? Then I wouldn't be going to the food bank every week. If even 1 or 2 other volunteers had the idea that something like working on quiz bowl was community service, then the food bank would be throwing away a lot more food. That food would have gone to a family who couldn't feed themselves.

[Horned Screamer]

Uh, what position are you in to judge whether or not people want to volunteer their time to help steer some smart kids towards being successful at an activity they have fun with? In that case, should we all just feed people at the homeless shelter when not at work?

[Grams's Go-Go Boots]

In a different vein, one idea I've had, since someone emailed me about it for History Bowl a few weeks ago: many students these days have to do a community service requirement. Could starting up a team at a different school new to quizbowl (even just taking them to a few tournaments and a few practices - it doesn't need to be huge) be a viable community service project? This could particularly work for low income schools, though I think volunteering one's time at any school would probably suffice, no?

This ties into another idea that I've been throwing around: ideally there should be a quizbowl ambassadors program where players or coaches or anyone else around the country could commit to coaching a new or novice quizbowl team for a year and in return receive advice, resources, and maybe a bit of funding for buzzers and travel. It could definitely tie into community service work and help verify service hours and such. Hopefully these people would be recognized just as much as those players who write good questions or do other quizbowl service work.

Just my opinion, but in the spirit of actually doing community service, I find this to be a horrible idea. Quiz bowlers make up an above average section of their student population. If they choose to do community service in a school, shouldn't they be tutoring? Helping 3rd graders learn their time tables, or helping a HS student understand chemistry is going to be infinitely more helpful to the community than starting a quiz bowl team. Smart kids are going to be smart. It doesn't matter if they can power a tossup or it they are never going to pick up a buzzer.

Now, I think giving back is a fantastic thing, and I plan on giving back to the quiz bowl community with my time. I guess most of that could be considered volunteer work. But if I BS'd that as "community service," what kind of person am I? Then I wouldn't be going to the food bank every week. If even 1 or 2 other volunteers had the idea that something like working on quiz bowl was community service, then the food bank would be throwing away a lot more food. That food would have gone to a family who couldn't feed themselves.

1) Actually, I've found that intelligent students get left alone a lot because it's figured that they can just take care of their own educational needs. That's not really true. Smart people benefit from the attention of others as well as "less smart" people.

2) This may, like, flip your world view, dude. It is possible to volunteer both with quiz bowl and with activities like the American Red Cross, Relays for Life, and local tutoring groups and schools. How do I know this? Because I spent two years as the president of a chapter of a co-ed service fraternity and did all that stuff, plus more. WHOA

[Cheynem]

When I was in high school (which was a long time ago but probably still similar), a number of people on the team were smart people who actually didn't do that well in school and a number of them also struggled with things like drugs and whatnot. Quizbowl obviously wasn't some miracle cure for their lives, but I'd like to think that the time spent on a enjoyable, productive group activity kept them from teetering off the rails any further, much as the argument has been made that things like Little League and basketball can help other kids stay focused within school/their community. Like any other high schoolers, smart kids have problems too and benefit from some positive attention.

Look, no one's billing quizbowl as the ne plus ultra of community service, but it is a viable community service activity and as Fred points out, you can and should do plenty of other things besides that.

[Marble-faced Bristle Tyrant]

Beating a dying horse here, but it is pretty bad to say that good students should be tutoring by default. Just because you're good at knowing stuff doesn't make you a good teacher. Of course, teaching can help the tutor know the material better, but you still need to consider skill and inclination.

[Broad-tailed Grassbird]

In a different vein, one idea I've had, since someone emailed me about it for History Bowl a few weeks ago: many students these days have to do a community service requirement. Could starting up a team at a different school new to quizbowl (even just taking them to a few tournaments and a few practices - it doesn't need to be huge) be a viable community service project? This could particularly work for low income schools, though I think volunteering one's time at any school would probably suffice, no?

This ties into another idea that I've been throwing around: ideally there should be a quizbowl ambassadors program where players or coaches or anyone else around the country could commit to coaching a new or novice quizbowl team for a year and in return receive advice, resources, and maybe a bit of funding for buzzers and travel. It could definitely tie into community service work and help verify service hours and such. Hopefully these people would be recognized just as much as those players who write good questions or do other quizbowl service work.

Just my opinion, but in the spirit of actually doing community service, I find this to be a horrible idea. Quiz bowlers make up an above average section of their student population. If they choose to do community service in a school, shouldn't they be tutoring? Helping 3rd graders learn their time tables, or helping a HS student understand chemistry is going to be infinitely more helpful to the community than starting a quiz bowl team. Smart kids are going to be smart. It doesn't matter if they can power a tossup or it they are never going to pick up a buzzer.

Now, I think giving back is a fantastic thing, and I plan on giving back to the quiz bowl community with my time. I guess most of that could be considered volunteer work. But if I BS'd that as "community service," what kind of person am I? Then I wouldn't be going to the food bank every week. If even 1 or 2 other volunteers had the idea that something like working on quiz bowl was community service, then the food bank would be throwing away a lot more food. That food would have gone to a family who couldn't feed themselves.

1) Actually, I've found that intelligent students get left alone a lot because it's figured that they can just take care of their own educational needs. That's not really true. Smart people benefit from the attention of others as well as "less smart" people.

2) This may, like, flip your world view, dude. It is possible to volunteer both with quiz bowl and with activities like the American Red Cross, Relays for Life, and local tutoring groups and schools. How do I know this? Because I spent two years as the president of a chapter of a co-ed service fraternity and did all that stuff, plus more. WHOA

I agree (with pretty much all of the replies), I guess I didn't communicate my point across well. People should do different types of activities. Also, I was just giving some examples of a few things, and yes helping out quiz bowlers or showing My point was more that there shouldn't be a nationwide system of "i'm going to help some random quiz bowlers from the next town over, so I can get my required community service out of the way."

Also, on quiz bowlers and school skills, I made a generalization, and yeah all high schoolers have their own issues. And no Fred, you did not blow my mind, but thanks for sharing. Their is no doubt that you are one of the more positive role models in the QB community.

[jgalea84]

To circle back a bit to the expansion and recruitment subject, I will say that I think Ohio as a circuit is notably bad at this, and I've been thinking of ways to remedy the situation to no avail. I'm thinking an organization like the MQBA would be a big help and now that I am done with school, I'd like to be involved in organizing such a thing. Does anyone have any Ohio-specific thoughts?

[Matt Weiner]

In my opinion (admittedly as a non-Missourian) it seems that the most important thing to remember about MOQBA is that they run a lot of great tournaments each year. You know that if you go to a MOQBA event you're going to get an efficiently run event on appropriate questions. Forming groups just to form groups and then being lax about the product by running slow tournaments or letting in overly sloppy or hard sets will only sour people on the good quizbowl alternative. I hope the recent trend of people forming "alliances" keeps this in mind.

[jgalea84]

In my opinion (admittedly as a non-Missourian) it seems that the most important thing to remember about MOQBA is that they run a lot of great tournaments each year. You know that if you go to a MOQBA event you're going to get an efficiently run event on appropriate questions. Forming groups just to form groups and then being lax about the product by running slow tournaments or letting in overly sloppy or hard sets will only sour people on the good quizbowl alternative. I hope the recent trend of people forming "alliances" keeps this in mind.

Yes, forming groups for groups' sake accomplishes nothing.

[Horned Screamer]

Matt is 100% right, the only way MOQBA has been a success has been that we have used all of our connections and clout for the primary goal of running as many good tournaments as we can in as many different places as we can, and then advertise them to as many active teams as possible. I don't think quizbowl alliances are necessary for circuits that are already well established - remember, when we started out in Missouri, there had been 6 sparsely attended tournaments using good quizbowl formats scattered across our fairly large state the year before (and even fewer in previous years). We had only one die hard pro-pyramidality team in our audience, and needed to do everything we could to try and collectively advertise better, find more hosts, and present ourselves as a serious alternative to quizbowl so that we could even get our foot in the door with any teams besides North KC. In our first couple years, we still were not resoundingly successful - we only ran 6 tournaments our first year, and 13 our second year, which were good numbers for getting us some exposure, but in our state, that's basically just a couple tournaments in each region.

It seems to me like Ohio already has a lot more infrastructure there, and could achieve a goal of recruiting a lot more teams by just figuring out new ways to promote the many tournaments that already exist there along with targeting some more teams to run new tournaments in some areas. One especially important thing Ohio has going for it is that you have coaches at places like Northmont, Olmsted Falls, and Solon (just to name a few) totally on board with good quizbowl. If we had had as many coaches on board with us, we might not have formed in the first place, because coaches talking to each other can be an incredibly effective tool. They are colleagues, and it's a lot easier for a coach to tell another coach about ways they can improve at pyramidal questions and convince them to come to their tournaments than hearing college kids yell about the best style of writing. This goes extra since, if I recall correctly, OSU kids have been writing a pyramidal set for OAC, right? It's REALLY easy to use that as leverage, especially if the writers come out and publicly tell teams the best way to prepare for state is to prepare for good quizbowl.

[swwFCqb]

Yeah, I don't think forming one of these organizations is necessarily needed in Ohio. Ohio has a lot of good quizbowl, but our biggest problem is that it hasn't been spread much beyond the Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton areas. The SE and SW regions still have never played host to a TU/B tournament, and the only TU/B tournament the NW area has seen is the annual BGSU tournament, which has probably done more harm than good due to the continued incompetancy of the hosts. I suppose an organization could help in the efforts to bring good quizbowl to these areas, but a small collection of individual coaches and proponents could do just as good as job if they went about it the right way (e.g. Greg Bossick in the Mahoning Co area).

Charlie is on to something that I myself have been thinking: the best way to spread good quizbowl is through OAC regionals. For the past three years we have had pyramidal, high quality sets and I'm happy to see that the demand to attend has been as high as it's ever been (all regions were full this year and there has been talk of establishing a seventh region). Regionals is the highlight of most teams' seasons, so if we can continue the trend of pyramidal sets then we will have a much easier time convincing coaches that TU/B tournaments are needed to prepare for success at regionals.

[jgalea84]

In theory, using pyramidal sets for OAC should make the recruitment much easier. In practice, it hasn't translated that way--teams would rather play bad OAC throughout the season and guarantee themselves some points in the category and alphabet rounds than subject themselves to goose eggs at the hands of Northmont, Solon, or Olmsted Falls at a TU/B tournament. We have been utterly unsuccessful in convincing schools from two leagues we participate in (OAC-formatted) to attend TU/B tournaments that we run.

Now, I'm not saying our sales tactics or marketing are necessarily the best, but I do know Rhonna goes out of her way to explain the virtues of say, NAQT, and it frequently falls on deaf ears. I guess I was thinking of this as more of an organization to share marketing duties amongst many people rather than people like Bossick and Rhonna and Bob Weiser all fighting their largely individual fights.

Those of you who have been successful in converting a team from bad quiz bowl, in getting them to start playing quiz bowl where they weren't before--what were your successful tactics for doing so?

[Horned Screamer]

Well, whenever you advertise good tournaments, do you include a little sentence mentioning that this is the style the OAC writers are emulating? In my experience in Missouri, lots of coaches have a misguided belief that practicing in the state format on questions by the state provider is the best way to prepare for state, and I think it would be a fairly powerful marketing tool for teams who are kind of serious and care about the OAC series if the writers for OAC came out and said straight up that they think teams who prepare on good questions will be better prepared than teams who prepare on OAC style sets they don't produce.

[David Riley]

In Illinois, converting teams (or rather, coaches?) has been an uphill but relatively successful battle, though we still have a lot to do. Word of mouth whenever possible is always a good idea. The IHSSBCA (our state coaches' association) has also sponsored multi-site tournaments (our Kickoff tournament, which uses NAQT-IS, and our Turnabouts (using NAQT-A; teams that have "won some gold" the previous year are blacklisted). Recently, the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) approved several items, upon recommendation of the Scholastic Bowl Advisory Committee, that bring us more in line with national formats. This took several years of working within the organization, which I recommend if you have a state association already in place, along with the suggestions mentioned above.

[Remember-the-Alamo-Remember-Goliad]

Dave Madden once told me that a big advantage for him in spreading history bowl to every corner of the Earth is that he has a ready-made champion in each school: the history teacher. Most people who would become history teachers probably react to learning about history bee and bowl by saying "this is awesome!" and immediately wanting their school involved.

Regular quizbowl doesn't really have a built-in champion at most schools. Everyone always talks about contacting the people who run the honors program or the gifted classes or what not, but that's assuming a correlation between academic performance and interest in quizbowl that I just don't think is there.

BINGO!

[Alliance in the Alps]

This goes extra since, if I recall correctly, OSU kids have been writing a pyramidal set for OAC, right? It's REALLY easy to use that as leverage, especially if the writers come out and publicly tell teams the best way to prepare for state is to prepare for good quizbowl.

This isn't exactly true; the OAC Regionals/States sets in the past few years have been a collaboration of sorts amongst various college students from Ohio. IIRC the only OSU people who have contributed to it in the past two years have been me and Jarret.