National History Bowl seeking host school in MD and VA

[Great Bustard]

Hi all,
My name is David Madden and I am the founder and director of the National History Bee and Bowl, which are two new quiz bowl competitions starting this year throughout the country. The Bee is an individual competition which is online at the intramural level and buzzer-based at the State and National levels, and the Bowl is a standard quiz bowl style event, albeit with a unique format and a focus entire on history (albeit with a broad definition that brings in some history of the arts, sciences, etc.) Lots more information is online at www.historybowl.com and www.historybee.com, and there will be a more formal thread going up later this week where everyone can discuss the particulars of what I'm putting together. The one caveat that I will say though is that I am in the process of reworking the practice packets and structure of the formats to make them more pyramidal- so don't be scared away by the look of things as they stand right now. The packet rework will be done by Thursday of this week, at which point in time I will formally introduce the tournaments on the boards.
In the meantime, though, I'd just like to add that I'm looking for a host school in Maryland and potentially a host school in Virginia as well to host our state-level tournaments which will then feed into the National Finals. If you host, you can earn up to potentially $400 or so in recruiting bonuses, and you certainly can still play in the tournament yourselves for free. At least two official NHBB staff members will come and direct the tournament, and we will also handle all logistics in advance. All you would need to do is to provide at least 25 classrooms, and give us a Saturday sometime between early January and late March that would work for you. That Saturday should avoid any preexisting tournament dates in the area though, and preferably, SAT dates too. If you were to host, we would probably do the Bee in the morning and the Bowl in the afternoon, though under a particular scenario which I will go into greater detail on if you're interested, you may just need to host the Bowl. If it's just the Bowl, it will be 7-8 rounds of prelims and 3-4 rounds of playoffs. If it's Bee and Bowl, then each will have 5 rounds of prelims with a quick 20 minute playoff for the Bee and 3 rounds of playoffs for the Bowl. We would need access to the building from 7am-7pm, though the tournament would likely go more like from 9-5:30.
I'm in the process of lining up corporate sponsors for prizes and scholarships, so we'll have some cool stuff on offer for the top teams. All teams who make the playoffs for the Bowl will also go qualify for our national finals in Washington, D.C. next Apr 15-17. I've already lined up competition space for that at Mt. Vernon, the International Spy Museum, a gilded-age mansion, the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, and some other really cool sites, plus we'll have 10 prelim games on offer and be significantly less expensive than a number of other national tournaments, so keep that in mind too.
Please feel free to post here or email me privately if you have any questions. Also, don't be distracted by the lack of a green dot for Virginia on the maps on the site- we are still hoping to do a VA tournament, but we need to find a host first.
Thanks for your help and hope to hear back from you soon!
Best,
David Madden