Don’t Be That Team / Coach / Player / Random Person in QB!

[Great Bustard]

Perhaps it’s just because it’s early in the year and my tolerance level for acts causing me to facepalm hasn’t been built up enough yet. But for whatever reason, I seem to be encountering a lot of odd decisions made by various people lately that are not in the best interest of quizbowl. None of this is necessarily specific to NHBB, either. Also, I know that emergencies can and do come up, and generally speaking, I tend to be pretty understanding when they do. I also admit full well that over the past 3+ years, I haven’t been totally blameless either. But I don’t think I’ve been guilty of the below acts, and thus I think it would be helpful to go through a list of actions that we as a community should try and dissuade people from. Forthwith:

1. Don’t leave a tournament in the middle of a day, especially without telling anyone.
Even if it’s a family emergency, see if there’s a way for the team to stay, even if one person has to leave abruptly. If that person is the coach, and it’s an emergency, then at least please tell the tournament director you are leaving. Simply being 0 and whatever is not grounds to up and leave a tournament, throw the schedule into a state of confusion, and take away competition opportunities from teams who traveled and paid to play your team.

2. Please respect deadlines.
NHBB in particular tries to be very accommodating here, as I know many other tournament organizers do too. But, deadlines exist for a reason, and if you fail to adhere to them it takes away from either your students’ enjoyment, the TD’s sanity, or both. This also holds for deadlines regarding submitting packets and questions, and payments.

3. Don’t go months without paying if you don’t pay at the tournament.
If a TD is generous enough to let your team play without paying for whatever excuse you have, do not try and take advantage of their good will by then not immediately taking care of payment at the soonest possible juncture. And if late fees accrue due to your inability to read the instructions on the registration form, please do not complain. And if you think you can outlast the determination of a TD to ultimately collect on payments, you are certainly kidding yourself, and engendering unnecessary ill will.

4. If you borrow a friend’s buzzer system, you should return it in less than 8 months, and not ignore repeated polite emails asking you to do this. Really.

5. In general, don’t ignore emails.
We’re all busy, and no one expects everyone to respond within ten minutes of receiving an email. And if an email slips through the cracks every now and then, that’s ok too. But if someone is emailing you about a logistical detail of a tournament, please try and respond to them as soon as you can, even if it’s just to politely decline, or say when you will be able to give a response.

6. Do not forget buzzers, or if you do, let the TD know as soon as possible. Likewise, if you are running late, let the TD know asap. And above all, don’t sign up for tournaments, and then not show up without telling anyone despite emails going out to you in advance of the tournament.
Common sense here, but that hasn't always proven common...

7. If you are with a team, and your team wins a big game, try not to blow your horn in the room right in the face of four despondent players who just lost.
There’s a fine line between being enthusiastic and rubbing it in. Don’t cross it, please.

If anyone wants to add to this list, please feel free. To conclude, none of this has anything to do with being a good team from a competition standpoint. It has everything to do with being a good team from a responsible member of the community standpoint. I don’t mean to call anyone out specifically here (except #4, though that’s still good advice for everyone), though if you think you may be on the wrong side of one of these points, try not to be in the future for the good of the game.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I heartily endorse all of these recommendations. I certainly hope that, as the community of enthusiastic quizbowlers grows and the standards for well-run events become more consistently applied, we'll do better on average on all these fronts as time moves forward.

[AKKOLADE]

1. Don’t leave a tournament in the middle of a day, especially without telling anyone.
Even if it’s a family emergency, see if there’s a way for the team to stay, even if one person has to leave abruptly. If that person is the coach, and it’s an emergency, then at least please tell the tournament director you are leaving. Simply being 0 and whatever is not grounds to up and leave a tournament, throw the schedule into a state of confusion, and take away competition opportunities from teams who traveled and paid to play your team.

I disagree with prioritizing quiz bowl over actual emergencies, for the obvious reasons.

[Great Bustard]

I disagree with prioritizing quiz bowl over actual emergencies, for the obvious reasons.

Fair enough, though some emergencies are more equal than others. At a minimum, having someone else on the team call or notify the director or anyone at the tournament takes all of ten seconds, even if it's just ducking your head into a room to say "we're leaving due to an emergency". The instances that I've encountered over the past few years where teams left due to emergency circumstances have always been of the sort where tearing at breakneck speed out of the building without saying a word to anyone was not necessary.

[Cheynem]

Certainly if there's an emergency I don't begrudge any player, team, or coach from leaving. It would be a good move to obviously tell the tournament director/staffer someone though, at the very least so people know what happened to you. I think this is a pretty basic policy, something that would apply to any scenario--if I'm with my friends and an emergency develops making me have to leave, I would tell them where I went.

[AKKOLADE]

I disagree with prioritizing quiz bowl over actual emergencies, for the obvious reasons.

At a minimum, having someone else on the team call or notify the director or anyone at the tournament takes all of ten seconds, even if it's just ducking your head into a room to say "we're leaving due to an emergency".

Agree with the notifying if you can idea, I just bristle at things that hint that quiz bowl > real life.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I disagree with prioritizing quiz bowl over actual emergencies, for the obvious reasons.

At a minimum, having someone else on the team call or notify the director or anyone at the tournament takes all of ten seconds, even if it's just ducking your head into a room to say "we're leaving due to an emergency".

Agree with the notifying if you can idea, I just bristle at things that hint that quiz bowl > real life.

Look, the answer for what teams should do in case of a real emergency is pretty obvious, and Madden addressed it directly in his first post: you notify the TD that you have to leave due to an actual emergency and leave it at that. This has happened during at least one event I've helped run. I have a hard time imagining an emergency so urgent that it's impossible to tell the TD or the nearest moderator "we have to leave now" while packing up, and it's really not an option to just disappear and leave everyone else's schedule in the lurch given that it takes all of five seconds to do the notifying. There's no actual disagreement here.