New Team with Pee Dee Regional Academic Challange

[Jnhames]

Hey!

My team is joining the Pee Dee Regional Academic Challange and I have no clue how to get them ready. I don't know if a quiz bowl is similar to the Academic challenges but I think the questions would be similar enough. My question is how do you prepare the teams? Do you give them lists of stuff to know? Practice previous questions? There are so many options and I would really like to find what would work best to help my kids out. They really have little to no experience in this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[Corry]

This forum is mostly focused on discussion of "pyramidal" quiz bowl. Pyramidal questions consist of multiple sentences, with the hardest clues at the beginning and the easiest clues at the end. While I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Pee Dee Academic Challenge, local "academic challenges" tend to use one-line questions, which are actually pretty different from normal pyramidal questions. So we probably won't be able to give you much specific advice on Pee Dee.

That being said, your school should really consider checking out some of the pyramidal quiz bowl tournaments in your area. South Carolina is actually home to a really big quiz bowl circuit-- from the looks of it, there are more than 10 tournaments happening in the area each year (mostly in the western halves of South Carolina and North Carolina). For instance, Dorman High School has already planned to host three pyramidal tournaments next year: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14690

[Unicolored Jay]

As someone who has actually participated in the Pee Dee Regional Academic Challenge to some degree (I was part of Williams Middle School's team), I can definitely say that, the types of questions that this board focuses on and the types of questions you'll see in the Pee Dee competition are quite different from anything else the rest of the nation uses (at least in my experiences). As a player in that league, all I really ended up doing was looking through old questions to get a feel for how the game format was like, as there wasn't really a way to study for it given that the questions focus a lot on trivia, math calculation, and the occasional riddle or two (assuming my memory holds).

However, as Corry suggests, I think you can get a lot of experience and fun by competing in tournaments in other places in South Carolina. Dorman, located near Spartanburg, hosts several tournaments each year that draws a lot of schools from around and outside of the state, for example. In addition, attending a single tournament will allow you to hear much more questions in a single day than what the Pee Dee Regional offers. These pyramidal tournaments are the standardized format across the entire country, hence the focus of this board on them. Personally, I found those tournaments (which I attended once I moved to Ohio) to be much more fun and rewarding than my experiences in the Pee Dee Regional Academic Challenge, so I highly encourage competing in tournaments outside of the league to get the most out of the activity.

What school's team do you coach, by the way?

[Jnhames]

Thanks so much for your replies! I'll definitely look in to those competitions. As I said before, I honestly have no clue what I'm doing. Our previous coach changed schools and I have no way to contact her. I did notice the difference in questions. Problem being, I'm having a hard time getting my hands on old Academic Challenge questions and the quiz bowl questions could at least be a starting point on what they need to look at. I'm at Dillon High School and we're really trying to get the team off the ground. They don't have much experience yet so I'm looking to get them ready before we enter into more competitions. I don't want to throw them under the bus by not doing everything I can to prepare them. :)

[fett0001]

Specifically, I'd try to attend Dorman's mirror of SCOP Novice, as that set is of an appropriate difficulty for new teams.

Edit: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14690

[Unicolored Jay]

This website has plenty of practice questions available (they are all tournament questions in the pyramidal style that were used in past years): http://www.quizbowlpackets.com/

In particular, any question sets with the word "novice" in them, as well as SCOP and FKT, should be great starting points, as they were written with new and inexperienced teams in mind.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

Jessica,

We'll almost certainly be hosting a Spring tournament at USC. I'll make sure to contact Dillon to make sure you guys get the date. Feel free to contact me at ericd25 at hotmail dot com if you have any questions

[thomasgnd]

You guys should have recently received invitations to our first two tournaments of the year, the Oct12 Novice Tournament and the Jan18 Cavalier Challenge. I send information to every school in South Carolina. We would love to have you!

If Dorman can be of any assistance at all in helping you get your team off the ground, do not hesitate to contact me.

Good luck!