Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

This forum is for anyone seeking advice on starting a collegiate team, branching out into new types of tournaments, or other "how-to" aspects of collegiate quizbowl.
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NativeSon183
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Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by NativeSon183 »

To Whom It May Concern:

I am a student at Haverford College, a prestigious liberal arts school nearby Philadelphia, PA best known for its student-set Honor Code and rigorous academics, who is in the beginning stages of creating the school's first Academic Team. All proposed budgets for extracurricular activities that are above a certain minimum ($4000, I think) need to be submitted to our Treasury by tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, so I would seriously appreciate hearing what collegiate novice tournaments are going to be offered in PA, NJ, MD, DC, DE, northern VA and southern NY over the course of the '11-'12 school year and approximately how much they will cost--preferably within the next 24 hours. This way, I can make my contribution to the college more legitimate.

Since everyone who goes to this school is extremely intelligent, I will more than welcome suggestions of collegiate tournaments not devoted solely to novices.

If anyone would like to give me advice on other collegiate novice logistics, such as but not limited to finding a representative faculty advisor and hosting a tournament at the school as a fundraiser, please feel free to add your two cents.

A gracious thank you to whoever is willing to suggest regional tournaments and provide other forms of assistance in the limited space of time that I have.

Alec C. Johnsson
White Plains High (NY) '11
Haverford '15
Alec Johnsson
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Sima Guang Hater
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

Penn will be hosting two events; namely, Penn Bowl in January (normal difficulty) and Minnesota Open/Penn Intergalactic in October (difficult). Both will cost 120$ on average (depending on how early you submit a packet), and transportation to Philadelphia is cheap (just take the Thorndale/Paoli line to 30th st Station, probably will run you <10$ per person).
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

In addition to the tournaments Eric listed, University of Virginia is running a fall tournament on October 8th, and I believe they may also be hosting ACF Fall on November 5th, a tournament I highly encourage new teams to go to. Also, University of Maryland is hosting a Novice tournament on October 1st.
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by The Atom Strikes! »

If you're starting a team at Haverford, you should have a chat with recent LASA grad and skilled quizbowl player Thomas Littrell. I suspect that he would be interested in playing.
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Broad-tailed Grassbird »

NativeSon183 wrote:To Whom It May Concern:

I am a student at Haverford College, a prestigious liberal arts school nearby Philadelphia, PA best known for its student-set Honor Code and rigorous academics, who is in the beginning stages of creating the school's first Academic Team.

Since everyone who goes to this school is extremely intelligent, I will more than welcome suggestions of collegiate tournaments not devoted solely to novices.
You sound arrogant. It's quizbowl. A new team will probably get schooled by a lot of people (building a team from scratch or near scratch is not easy). I suggest College Novice and ACF Fall even if you're above that. I hope you get intellectual stimulation from Haverford, and have a good year.

A lot of people played quiz bowl in high school, obviously focus on them. Pizza helps get people to practice. Running HS tournaments makes future potential recruits aware that you actually have a team (good for the long-term).

User was banned for four days for ad hominem comments and essentially "violating" rule 1 in the New Collegiate Teams forum. - FM
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

That's a really awesome way to reach out to a brand new team that wants to get involved in the circuit, Bad Poster Nalin Lalwani. Magically, that post doesn't even say what you decided it did, because I don't read anything there ruling out Haverford attending any novice events, but rather him saying he's interested in attending more than just that. Can you please stop being such an awful poster?
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

That makes me want to make a broader point:

If you are an established quizbowler who is so obsessed with being confrontational over not liking the tone somebody new on the boards takes that you have to go out of your way to attack them no matter what the actual substance of their post is, even if it literally is "I am on a brand new team that wants to be able to use our funding to attend tournaments in the area," then you clearly don't really care about helping the circuit grow.

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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

If you're looking to start a new team and feel confident that your school is prepared for stuff beyond Collegiate Novice and Fall at the very get-go, that can only be a good thing, for the circuit and for you guys alike. No matter how well you do, if you're confident in yourselves and enjoy regular questions as they are, you'll get a lot out of the game.

The major regular-difficulty collegiate tournaments of the fall will be called Missiles of October (MOO) and MAGNI; I'm helping write for the latter. I'd encourage you to go to one or both if possible. Since you guys are situated sort of in-between the bulk of teams in the Northeast and the bulk of teams in the mid-Atlantic, you may have some deciding to do as to whether to go north or south for a given tournament; as far as I'm concerned we'd love to see you guys come up north whenever you can! (As of now, MOO doesn't have a Northeast site and MAGNI doesn't have a mid-Atlantic site, but that will be worked out shortly for MAGNI and hopefully soon for MOO as well.)
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Re: Starting a New Academic Team at Haverford (Urgent)

Post by DumbJaques »

Maryland is hosting a mirror of Collegiate Novice on October 1, as well as an open event I'm editing (that is geared toward being playable for the full range of collegiate teams) on December 3rd. The latter will be paired with the second iteration of our trash tournament, TERP, which will run that Sunday.

Also please ignore Nalin. The rest of us do.

EDIT: I absolutely think you're on the right track with the attitude "let's go to more than just novice events," but when you're building a team (which may consist of some people who have virtually zero quizbowl experience), it probably IS helpful to remember that it takes people a while to adjust to the remarkably unique mental activity of buzzing in on pyramidal questions. Really, that has comparatively little to do with intelligence, and I'd suspect there'd be some downside to linking the two when you've got a large group of people who are new to quizbowl.

If you have any specific questions about issues you might come across while starting up the program, please feel free to email me (or any of the other established teams in the area, who will almost certainly be just as willing to provide any help they can). We'd love to see another DC - Philly corridor team join the circuit. And you should absolutely talk to Thomas, who I believe said at NASAT that he definitely planned to play in college.
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