2nd Annual Junior NAC

[the return of AHAN]

Dear Mr. Price:
Congratulations to Barrington Station for finishing first in Illinois in the Fall KMO competition. This accomplishment qualifies your teams for participation in the 2nd annual Junior National Academic Championship.
The competition will be held in Washington, D.C., June 5 - 7,. Please see www.QUnlimited.com for all the details, as well as results of last year's tournament.
We hope you will decide to accept the challenge.

Yours very truly,

Executive director

GEE! We're so honored!!! What should we do? What should we do? Should 'accept the challenge'????
Actually, we're prohibited from going to DC by the IESA anyway since it's not adjacent!

[AlphaQuizBowler]

Would anyone consider running a legitimate middle school national championship? Seriously, there are middle schoolers out there looking for competition, and if nobody fills the gap, definitely will.

[at your pleasure]

I think the thing to look into would be to offer a separate middle school division at one of the existing nationals. Would PACE be interested in doing this and/or collaborating with HSPAQ to produce a novice-high school level set?

[JackGlerum]

The idea of a middle school national championship sounds a bit silly to me, Chip or otherwise.

[AKKOLADE]

The idea of a middle school national championship sounds a bit silly to me, Chip or otherwise.

What makes it sillier than a high school national championship, for example?

[JackGlerum]

I think that, to call something a national championship, it should include the best teams and players in the country, and I guess I think that it is hard to find an elite contingency of middle school teams.

Other than moderating for the middle school thing that we host, I have zero experience with the circuit, but I'd to think that the canon is immensely smaller than in high school. Along the same lines, I'm inclined to believe that any whiz kid could walk onto a middle school quizbowl team and be a stud. In high school, Johnny, the straight A student with a 2300 SAT, can't come to tournaments and expect to compete. The canon is large (comparatively) and the people he's playing against most likely have studied the canon in one way or another at some point.

Again, I am basing this on basically nothing, but are middle schoolers coming home from school and looking at Masterplots? In my limited experience, middle schoolers know what they are taught in school and perhaps a little bit more. This, combined with the fact that there are, let's say, 3 middle schools for every high school (?), I state that the canon is too small and the pool not comprehensive enough to have a legitimate national championship.

That said, I'd love to be proven wrong, since I think it'd be sweet to have an active and healthy middle school circuit.

[AlphaQuizBowler]

Drawing from my experience in Georgia, we have a fairly large group of schools compete each year. There is extensive preparation, much like high school (I studied frequency lists, read novels like Catcher in the Rye and The Picture of Dorian Gray). And we have organizations that run 2 state championships (PAGE and GATA). I think middle school quizbowl is similar to high school quizbowl: some locations have organization and many competitions, others less so. I think it is at least an idea to be explored and not merely dismissed as "silly".

[JackGlerum]

Hmm, that's good enough for me. I only played sports at a middle school that didn't have a quizbowl program, so that's probably what's driving me with this. But if there are other circuits like Georgia, then I suppose there could be a national crowning of sorts like there is in high school.

[Siverus Snape]

Oh Jack, how you always manage to irritate someone never ceases to amaze me.

[Stained Diviner]

Illinois has 365 teams.

[the return of AHAN]

Illinois has 365 teams.

And that's just the ones who play IESA SchoBowl. There are a multitude of others in the Chicago suburbs and in deep southern Illinois that play, too. When I coached in Cahokia, we went to tournaments at Breese Mater Dei and at Centralia JHS. The former had, including us, 4 IESA teams of the 24, while we were the lone wolf in the latter. Mt. Vernon, Salem, Centralia, Highland, etc., all schools that play but do it with their own SIJHSAA affiliation.

[David Riley]

Perhaps those of us willing to help with a proposed middle school championship should meet at Nationals this year? I agree that the canon might be somewhat elusive, though, where do you draw the line? Or do you? I once had a wunderkind who had read and could talk intelligently about Mann's Doktor Faustus (frightening), but I certainly wouldn't include that in a middle school canon!

[First Chairman]

I do think it's worth a discussion, but there are going to be some other issues where middle school coaches must be included in any discussion. The question that I can think of right now is timing and the legal issues of traveling with even younger students (and their parents) than we are accustomed to. Lee at Brindlee Mountain certainly has a lot of experience in this area, but I think that having a discussion will tease out some of these and other issues we haven't considered.