Huskie Bowl Cancelled

[TheDoctor]

The Huskie Bowl has been cancelled for this year due to a lack of available sets. ATROPHY will still be run on schedule, with a very slight increase in fees; ATROPHY has been supported in the past by the excess funds from the Huskie Bowl, and the club cannot support losing Huskie Bowl revenue while taking the financial loss that ATROPHY has always been.

We hope to run the Huskie Bowl again in future years, but it is simply not possible for us to do so in 2014. Thank you for understanding.

[Dominator]

Am I missing something? Isn't BELLOCO available? As far as I can tell, the closest mirror of it is in Georgia, and the post says it would be done before February.

[TheDoctor]

BELLOCO

Due to the set's proposed distribution, in particular, we at NIU simply don't feel that Bellarmine's set is likely to be truly accessible to the kind of teams we expect and hope to attract. The Huskie Bowl was placed where it was--in the middle of Illinois and an hour out of Chicago--for a reason; it is meant to be a tournament that caters primarily to small, community schools nearby. Yes, we draw some of the more competitive schools, and we appreciate their coming greatly, but the small schools are and always have been the primary concern of this tournament. We have always tried our best to find for those teams a set of appropriate difficulty. That's been getting harder and harder in recent years, as writers have started catering more and more toward the nationals-competitive crowd, and we haven't always managed to provide our local teams with a question set that was completely suitable for them. In this case, particularly, offering a set that downplays American literature to such an extreme (for example) is not going to work for those teams. To be frank, the tournament's mirroring post smacks of a disconnect from what "regular" difficulty really is for teams who don't attend national tournaments.

We've also been bitten in the past by trusting a set with an inexperienced head editor to provide a polished product early in the set's run. You guys probably remember that this is the very tournament at which the RM-TP-(Bellarmine)-Wikipedia debacle happened. We'd be one of this set's first-week mirrors, and the team ultimately felt that taking that chance would just not be worth the risk right now. BELLOCO is a set that we would feel comfortable using somewhere else and later in the set's run. We've discussed making inquiries about using it for a post-ATROPHY doubles event, an event for which this set sounds promising.

We hope to return to the Huskie Bowl in the future, and are looking into our options for next year. We appreciate your understanding as we take the time to make that decision.