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Interest for an ACF-esque high school packet set?

Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2017 5:05 pm
by The Squamous Homarid
Most of the specifics for this tournament has been provided by my teammate towards the end of this thread.

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... 09&t=20066
insohumniac wrote:I was going to address this in a dedicated forum post, but since this topic is important for the upcoming season and will massively affect the direction of our set I’ve posted it here. The plan for Wilmington Charter's housewrite was a high school ACF-esque prototype, where teams could write packets and submit them to receive a discount at the main site of the tournament. Although submitting a packet would not be necessary for attendance, we felt that it would be interesting to try this high school level since this format is prevalent and often expected at the college level. Since more housewrites have been planned for this season than expected, it may be in the best interest of teams planning on writing packets to form a merger with other schools as previously mentioned. The target for our original set, incidentally called "Packet Potlatch," was 16 packets, with 11 packets being written exclusively by members of the Charter Academic Bowl team, and the remaining 5 each being written by other schools.

Since it may now be unfeasible to attempt such a project on our own, we are wondering if other schools would be willing to consolidate efforts into a larger, ACF Fall style tournament, with perhaps 1 to 2 packets worth of tossups being written by one school or team, with a total of 15-16 packets. This process will be more manageable for many reasons, with the primary concerns being quality and mirroring sites. If a few of the other schools proposing housewrites wish to pursue this effort, under the guidance of a few experienced editors (which we don’t have at present), everybody involved can still improve without creating a huge glut of new sets. A large part of Charter's dive into making the housewrite was concerned with improvement for the rising A team, with our sponsors and parents also questioning how we would fund the trip to nationals for next year. In hindsight, attempting such a project was probably not the kindest for both the quizbowl community and members of our team.

As a closing note, I would like to ask all of the other teams proposing housewrites to ask themselves a question. Why do you want to make your set? For many schools it's tradition, but in our case it was a bit too ambitious. A large goal of quizbowl is expanding the availability of good formats to newer teams and schools which may not have had exposure to such styles of competition. Many schools in our state specifically take part in other academic competitions, and we felt that quizbowl was a great way to appeal to students who enjoyed these kinds of activities. However, there comes a point when one tries to accomplish too many goals with one effort. Asking oneself this question should not be an exercise in discouragement, rather a consideration of other means of achieving goals. Hosting quizbowl related activities isn't the only way to fundraise, and you don't necessarily have to brand the housewrite under your school's name if you just want to write questions. After all, if we want to make these sets enjoyable to write, play and edit, collaboration and cooperation are key.
Due to the need for an accurate gauge of interests from high school teams, We have decided to post this here to make it more accessible to more people. So if your team thinks this is a good idea and would like to write 1 to 2 packets for a collaboration packet set, please respond to this post, thank you.

Re: Interest for an ACF-esque high school packet set?

Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2017 6:17 pm
by The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island
D-stem would be down to play this