Let me take a crack at this. I will say that while I have been involved in many sorts of outreach projects, my home base in Virginia had multiple good high school events from before the time I started TDing, and our challenge has mostly been taking teams who already play one good event a year (VHSL Scholastic Bowl) or a few (that plus one of the larger invitationals such as GSAC or Cavalier Classic) and convincing them to become more active. Your situation seems very comparable to something like Missouri or Illinois, where there are many teams who play bad tournaments that you are trying to convince to play good tournaments instead or as well. I would like to hear what a veteran of the successful good-quizbowl-building projects in those states has to say about this.
bsmith wrote:There are no scheduled high school tournaments in southwest Ontario this year. Waterloo had to cancel the novice tournament when only one school was willing to go and another had a conflict. Provincials probably would have been selected to be in southwest Ontario, but no one outside of eastern Ontario made a bid to host it. Meanwhile, Ottawa is doing almost everything, including two History Bowl events.
As a preliminary point: Something I've learned from working with outreach in various aspects is that the above sort of hedging can often contribute to people taking the product (good quizbowl, in this case) less seriously. I think you should set dates, commit to them, and hold the tournament even if registration is low. All quizbowl involves people entering and exiting the field at the last minute. Your worst-case scenario here is that only 1 team shows up, so you spend a few hours reading them packets in practice mode, or you split their group up into two for scrimmages, and you end up with a team that has bought in to future good quizbowl endeavors. By doing that, you avoid the "reschedule this tournament because my #4 player has to take a test that day" dance and the feeling that quizbowl does not take itself seriously enough to stick to its announcements, while also maintaining the possibility of late registration from a few more schools making the tournament viable.
Ontario is more than just Ottawa. In fact, in any other field, Ottawa is an afterthought in Ontario. If a city of about 40 high schools can survive in quizbowl, surely Toronto, a city of 200, can make it.
This is true, though we should also keep in mind the lessons learned from the U.S. Some large metro areas such as Atlanta, Washington DC, and Los Angeles, were early adopters of quizbowl tournaments that were either good, or large, or both. Others, such as New York and Minneapolis, were basically off the map until the mid-00s, when other places had been going for 5 to 20 years before that. Another group, including Boston and Seattle, really only got moving since 2010 or so. There is still no appreciable presence in Denver, Portland, or many other American cities with lots of perfectly good high schools. So, the mere fact of being a large city may not predict much before we look at other factors.
Each September since 2011, I have sent introductory letters to teams across the province, followed up with emails to known addresses. This was how that Niagara tournament came to be, and a few SW teams respond and go to a provincials. In fact, I know that coaches are getting these letters- conversations with teams at SchoolReach tournaments confirm that. Nevertheless, hundreds of dollars of postage goes unconverted, so I’d argue that my mailing strategy isn’t working.
What is in these letters? One thing I have found is that just sending a letter saying "do quizbowl" isn't enough -- you should have several independent, full invitations to specific tournaments in the envelope, with all the pertinents such as date, question set, and contact information ready to go. This refers back to the point above -- it means you need to get several different tournaments to commit to running in the upcoming year early enough that they can deal with room reservations and the like and have all their information finalized in time for an August or September mailing campaign. This necessitates that when someone volunteers in July to host a tournament on the third Saturday in the next year's February, they be prepared to follow through on that commitment irrespective of bad tournaments poaching the date, some team having a non-quizbowl conflict, or low initial registration.
The letters can also contain a diplomatic explanation of the "good quizbowl" concept -- talk about the educational value of pyramidal questions and a liberal-arts curriculum as opposed to buzzer-beaters and trivia, and explain that the entire good quizbowl universe (NAQT, HSAPQ, History Bowl, and PACE-certified independent tournaments) offers a full program from which teams can choose the tournaments that are right for them, rather than either being sparse compared to the Reach circuit or a monolith that must be accepted wholesale.
The ONQBA is a hodgepodge group that essentially boils down to whatever Joe or I need to get done. A lot of events are run by university or high school students, not educators. Tournaments are relatively informal, despite my efforts to make provincials presentable. On top of that, with questions and nationals from the US, it isn’t “made-in-Canada” product. Also, despite me promoting a “tenth year of quizbowl” theme in letters, quizbowl is still not considered “established”.
Ultimately, it may pay off to focus on putting the appropriate amount of Canadian content into 3 or 4 sets a year for now, rather than trying to run everything. Alternatively, have you thought about short-circuiting the American content problem by simply internationalizing the sets -- take out the U.S.-specific questions but don't replace them with anything? There doesn't seem like any reason why Russian literature should be any more foreign to Canadians than Americans.
Quizbowl began quite small in Ottawa, but players graduated to university, passed along the “culture” to future students, and grew a positive word-of-mouth reputation amongst local teams. As a consequence, Ottawa teams became “good” at quizbowl (even though “SchoolReach” skills should be transferrable to quizbowl). Every tournament with at least one Ottawa team has been won by an Ottawa team, most notably at last year’s provincials where the only 3 Ottawa teams took all the trophies. With Ottawa having a case of the rich getting richer, the rest of the province can fall into a “why bother” trap. The “why bother” element is compounded when the other format is traditionally dominated by Toronto teams- why bother with the one you’re not good at?
I think the fact that a tournament specifically targeted at Toronto novices didn't excite people shows that this is probably not the issue. With that said, it's probably related to the general issues of good quizbowl buy-in and difficulty perception I address below.
This is the number one complaint amongst teams that actually show up to tournaments. In the past, I have given numbers to show that question conversion is better in quizbowl than “SchoolReach”, but opening tossup lines and third bonus parts leave a lingering impression compared to the rush to a new question if a one-liner goes dead in Reach. I know the actual difficulty is not the problem, but the perception is probably what causes team to not be retained for future events. The perception then spreads to other schools, leading them to conclude that “quizbowl is hard” before even trying it.
The fact that good quizbowl is usually objectively easier than bad quizbowl is well-known, as is the uselessness of invoking that fact against people who just repeat the word "hard" or "obscure" like magic charms. I have found that surface "difficulty" objections boil down to three fundamental real issues:
1) What you identify as the fact that questions contain multiple parts and people tend to evaluate them non-holistically. A "hard" leadin clue or bonus third part sticks in the memory even if the tossup is answered or the bonus 20ed. Compare to formats where questions are intended as discrete units that are either answered or not. The fact that, invariably, a huge number of the units are in fact in that "not answered" box doesn't seem to bother the same people who find good quizbowl "hard." This is a psychological phenomenon that is basically rooted in the fact that bad quizbowl blitzes a lot of short questions at people, often on a clock, and there's no time to make remarks about how impossible something was because you're already on to the next thing; in ACF style, even if only 1 tossup goes dead in the whole game, it takes 20 seconds to read and then hangs there until time is called, then people comment on it. On a similar note, bad quizbowl is generally an innate skill -- you either have spent a lifetime reading "trivia" books and have a fast buzzer reflex, or you don't. Most people do not become any better or worse at bad quizbowl over time. Good quizbowl is geared towards the intellectually curious being able to make drastic improvements in a relatively short period, and people aren't necessarily supposed to be great at it right away. Are you explaining this difference to people before they make judgments about difficulty?
2) General sidestepping of other complaints -- sometimes "we find good quizbowl tournaments too hard" really means something like "we prefer short questions" or "we prefer being able to win right away at IHSA as opposed to having to put in two years of work to contend at Illinois NAQT" or "my team doesn't know anything about academic topics and wants to answer trivia." Because most bad quizbowl people are not stupid, they know that actually articulating any of those three things would bring some mixture of scorn and further diplomatic attempts to change their mind, so they short-circuit it with appeals to how you're just pummeling their poor innocent players with "hard" material to explain why they don't participate and end the conversation.
3) Most importantly -- The academic nature of good quizbowl arising different feelings about self-esteem in players and coaches. When you're playing in a game-showy, trivia environment, the fact that the tournament doesn't matter in any sense outside of itself could not be more clear. No one's self-worth is wrapped up in answering an audio tossup on "blenders" while a delusional man in a green blazer does soap ads to a TV camera that only he can see. But good quizbowl sells itself as being intimately tied to a well-rounded liberal arts educational ideal and having external value beyond simply being an avenue for those who find it fun. When people fail to win or to answer every question in that environment, it can make them feel dumb or academically fraudulent. It's extremely important for coaches and TDs to explain to their players -- many of whom are Type A get-100-on-everything-for-my-whole-academic-career students -- a few important things about adjusting expectations. First is that quizbowl is designed to go well beyond the classroom, and that it doesn't mean you are a bad high school student if you don't know all the material. Nearly everyone in quizbowl is a very good high school student, and we pitch it at a level that can distinguish within that group, not merely sort it out from the bad. The whole point is to challenge people who are already fulfilling their school curriculum to do more. Second is the explanation of what a competition is -- the point is to know 1 more thing than the other team as a group of 4, not for every player to know everything. A team of 4 players who each reliably know 3 things per game is going to get 12 tossups to their opponent's 8 and win all the time; a team of 4 players who each reliably know 2 things is going to win a lot. For the individual player, it's about knowing 2 things, not knowing 20. I always explain this in letters to new schools, as well as to new recruits in VCU's college program, and I think that the failure of some other TDs/coaches to make this point explicit is what causes a lot of people to erroneously feel they "aren't smart enough for quizbowl" and not return.
Quizbowl does most of its activity before “SchoolReach” leagues kick off in February. As such, there can be a bunch of schools that don’t even have their club started up when November quizbowl tournaments arise. Unfortunately, I think this is something we have to accept- even finding one provincials date can be difficult when considering spring breaks, Family Day, Easter, and varying local league dates. I have a feeling this could be what hurt the Waterloo novice; teams from Waterloo and Guelph could be rallied to come to a March tournament last year.
This can be solved with long-term planning. If budgets and schedules are set by the start of the school year with the expectation that Reach leagues are happening in a defined February-May window, then you are facing a tremendous uphill battle to get that to change. Instead, market next year's events this spring and try to avoid that expectation being entrenched when it's time for the planning to take place.
The 2012-13 job action stopped all extracurriculars in Ontario. Even though the action ended in March 2013, a lot of activities didn’t restart. Some clubs didn’t even return to Reach. The resolution didn’t give too many benefits to teachers, but it appears that the union secured some concessions on extracurriculars. Since the action, pretty much all sports, arts performances, and clubs occur during school hours. With quizbowl occurring almost exclusively on weekends, this is a deterrent for teacher supervision. This is a problem even in Ottawa- weekday Reach has all the teachers; weekend quizbowl is just the students (with the exception of the dedicated Lisgar coach). A pre-existing circuit can survive with student commitment, but getting a new city off the ground needs the initial teacher support.
If, as your paragraph seems to indicate, there's no overriding legal reason why you can't invite students to attend on their own or maybe with a volunteer parent chaperone, then you should target doing so. I absolutely agree that having teacher support will make your task easier, but if you don't have it, you should work around that problem for the time being. I also think that finding some teacher buy-in will be easier if you are willing to have some face-to-face meetings or hold a few tournaments that only have 2 or 4 teams for now, because you can form a strong connection to the people involved that you sometimes can't when you have a healthier field size.
I know that I have a welcoming demeanour and garner respect amongst existing quizbowl teams, but for the purposes of introducing new teams, I’m a nobody. I’m not an educator and don’t have connections to the education sector, I don’t have a marketing, publicity, or events management background, and I’m not on the ground in other cities. I’m not the person for Toronto- a circuit would need someone based there who is known to the various coaches beyond being a name on an address label.
Having some of the pitch come from teachers in the Ottawa scene could help with this. With that said, I think there is an elephant in the room about the topic of you doing the outreach, which is that you are also very involved in the Reach circuit. I cannot for the life of me figure out why so many of the "good quizbowl" people in Ontario continue to lend their support to a bad quizbowl program. It's not going to be made somehow more moderate by your involvement, or gradually move towards good quizbowl. If you believe this, then you are engaging in the same delusion that everyone who has tried a similar approach with bad quizbowl formats in the U.S. has fallen victim to and then regretted. Your message of "good quizbowl is better than bad quizbowl and you should participate in it" is totally undermined when people go to bad quizbowl and see you and other people from ONQBA there. I know it can be hard to let go of phantoms like "civility" or "cordiality" or "not judging things and letting everyone do whatever they find fun," even before the stereotype about Canadian politeness comes into play, but I think a major lesson that the people on this forum have learned the hard way over the past 15 years is that none of that matters. Good quizbowl can only exist by making a persuasive case for abandoning bad quizbowl, period, and you can't make the case to abandon something if you are writing, staffing, or organizing it.
I’d be curious to see how many of these factors would be overcome by History Bowl (credibility, dates, etc). I am, of course, helping History Bowl where I can, but my September publicities obviously didn’t work, and I conceded that they’ll have to make their own independent promotion (like in other provinces).
The teams at History Bowl can certainly be told, honestly, that good quizbowl is nothing more than History Bowl style questions on all topics. That should overcome initial objections about questions being "too long" or "too difficult." You will get a lot of teams who are the target History Bowl audience of people interested in history and might not wish to branch out, but you will get some prospects and you may also get people who tell their friend at school who is into science or arts or whatever to try it.
Of course, any teams in the area would be welcome to go to Detroit, Buffalo, or Ottawa, but publicity and efforts for the area would cease and re-directed to bolstering eastern Ontario further.
If even 1 or 2 teams starts doing that regularly, then it will become easier to overcome a lot of the above problems, because then you have a local high school, presumably with a teacher coach, able to spread the word and organize tournaments. It shouldn't be written off.
Similar to how California or New York is separated, we divide northeastern and southwestern Ontario roughly along the Trent-Severn Waterway (Reach for the Top did this in the CBC era). SW Ontario teams would not be marketed from Ottawa people at Ottawa addresses, and they can have a separated “provincial” championship. There would also be separate quizbowl associations, if enough people in SW Ontario are interested. Teams can still travel across the split for tournaments, though; there wouldn't be a wall at Trenton.
My view, as borne out by the way I've tried to set up the HSAPQ state championships in the U.S., is that there is no point to running things like the "Southwestern Ontario provincial championship." Every other tournament already operates on the model of "any team willing to travel to the tournament site can play." The point of state/provincial championships has to be something more than another regular invitational with a weird name. Being the champion of a state/province has meaning to people outside quizbowl; being the champion of the nonexistent "province of southwestern Ontario" means nothing more than winning the "October Toronto invitational" in the first place.
Theodore wrote:I feel the Reach season not really starting until March-ish can be in fact beneficial, as teams are looking for tournament experience before that time.
Good quizbowl in the DC area got its start largely under the banner of "preparing for It's Academic" before finding its own way. You don't want to be too vociferous or explicit about this because ultimately you have to be honest with people, and if your goal is, as it should be, to supplant Reach programs with quizbowl programs, you should not lie about that fact. But you can make it clear that teams who play more events tend to do better.
Theodore wrote:If credibility is the #1 problem in my opinion, this has to be #2. There now seems to be a lot more red tape/administrative complications for extracurriculars on weekends, and even without this, most teachers are simply not willing to voluntarily give up their weekend. Saturdays are also often a problem for students; many younger members of my team have language school or other commitments Saturday mornings.
There was some discussion in the
April It's Academic thread about a similar point. It can be very overwhelming to tell someone who has a full-time job and a family as a teacher and signed up for a Reach commitment that might have represented 2 weekends a year, that suddenly they "have to" go to 15 things and spend much more time on after-school practice in order to be a legitimate quizbowl coach. It's very, very important to communicate that this is not necessary at all. Chaperoning, practice-running, and other duties can be delegated and a coach can transition into good quizbowl without putting in more hours than they are comfortable with; furthermore, teams can go to 1-2 events per semester rather than everything if they want. Make sure this point is being made clear so it doesn't seem like an all-or-nothing prospect.
Theodore wrote:I think simple steps towards formality would be great. Staffers wearing dress shirts, non-ridiculous names (this applies to tournament writers too!), something like "Regional Tournament" in the name, and awarding at the very least certificates (Your certificates are very nice and professional Ben, while remaining inexpensive), ideally trophies or plaques or something to show school administrators. I am a huge advocate for reading and I love love love book prizes, but official prizes are a small way to help Quizbowl appear more legitimate to the public. It's really awkward telling your principal that you won a tournament but all you have to show for it is a used book (even though I love used books).
I completely agree with this paragraph and I wish more people, even in the U.S., would consider it.
Theodore wrote:Another issue is simply what has been discussed many, many times on the forums and remains a very important issue to address: publicity/media. There are barely any pictures of Quizbowl on the Internet. If I want a video of a sample pyramidal game, I can't easily find one that doesn't have 10-line tossups (ACF Nationals). Quizbowl doesn't get press/popularity within a school.
Sufficiently-staffed tournaments can have like simply a photographer. Games can be videotaped/recorded if they are the last mirror, if question security is a concern (I don't know how good personal cameras/camcorders are. Although high-quality video and audio can be very expensive, some schools have such equipment). Get hype for your team simply through social media, school announcements, etc.
This certainly can't hurt and is something one person can be assigned to worry about during your next tournament for no real cost -- try it.
Theodore wrote:I also think there needs to be a more formal system of tournament announcements and databases outside just forums. These forums are great, but there is no true formal database of information of say, all the basics of Quizbowl, rules, tournament announcements, etc.
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/
There is no real simple one-stop go-to resource to learn about Quizbowl. PACE's Quizbowl 101, QBWiki, and the ONQBA website all to some extent are or have attempted to create something like this, but in the end it's still confusing for a coach trying to find information on Quizbowl. I'm not saying there isn't an abundance of information online (thanks to the many contributors to the community), but it doesn't seem sufficiently-centralized; it's kinda all over the place. Obviously, this is almost entirely due to the nature of Quizbowl; there is no 1 organization that IS Quizbowl; Quizbowl is an activity with many contributing companies and organizations, leading to less centralization. I suppose this is rather foreign to a very centralized system like Reach, where questions are produced and tournaments are run entirely by a sole provider. (Perhaps this has something to do with our accustomed mentality due to Canada's economy and the USA's more competitive market? Anyways, I digress.)
You can (and some areas of the U.S. have) implement a top-down NAQT-only program if minimizing confusion is really that important. With that said, I think that most people involved in quizbowl are smart enough to understand the minor differences across rules and question styles within good quizbowl, and this ought not be the issue.
Senator_Jay wrote:1. Volatility in the board regarding staffing and schools: As more schools get shuttered in Hamilton, teachers (including Reach coaches) are being shuffled around and/or encouraged to retire. Westdale's Reach team has ceased to exist because the coach for the last 20 years retired without setting up a succession plan, and despite numerous emails to the staff and administration there, there seems to be no interest in reviving that institution. Other schools which expressed interest in expanding their programs have been closed (Highland), coaches moved (Ancaster, Westmount, Highland, etc.), or have had the program dropped due to needing to focus on other things. If there are no coaches, students cannot officially meet for practices or attend tournaments, and in our board, may be reprimanded for attempting to do so.
There's no question that these are obstacles. At the same time, many areas of the U.S. face similar issues, and have good quizbowl participation. Northeastern Ohio comes to mind -- they have a particularly volatile combination of a bad economy and a
system by which the budget for the school district must be voted on by the entire district electorate on a frequent basis, with extracurriculars getting the axe first if a ballot question fails. Even despite those significant challenges, there are dozens and dozens of teams playing good tournaments in that area. It can be done by making just one or two people at a school care enough to see it through. The value proposition for quizbowl is significant -- what else can provide a worthwhile activity for four students that lasts all day, for $60? Don't be afraid to show that this can be a budget-saver compared to other programs.
Senator_Jay wrote:Apparently a lot of teachers still have a sour taste in their mouths from the legislation issues of a couple years ago. That means that very few teachers in this area are willing to take on more responsibility than is absolutely necessary, for whatever reason. I have Reach coaches who insist that tournaments must take place during the school day, and be done by 2 so that they can return to school and leave at the prescribed finish time. Any tournaments that are outside, or not considered to be "official school participatory events", like sports and apparently Reach, are therefore out of reach for the students. Coaches need to be willing to put the effort into supporting their teams, and many have a hard enough time dealing with Reach (despite it costing much more). Complicating this, and contributing to the issue, is that many staff are distrustful of their administrators, and since admin get shuffled around frequently too, people don't want to rock the boat too much.
I think that anyone addressing this problem must ask why this should affect Toronto but not Ottawa and move forward with the answer in hand.
Senator_Jay wrote:General apathy towards more academic trivia: No matter how I've tried to sell it; sending appropriately-targeted packets to schools, describing it to individual teams, trying to read Quizbowl packets at Reach tournaments, etc., there seems to be little to no interest outside of my school. My students will do Quizbowl because they enjoy it, having played tournaments, and heard me talk at length about how much I enjoy it. However, this message isn't getting across to the other schools. Coaches express interest, and then back out. Apparently everyone is very busy, and studying is hard. Because a lot of schools in this region are weak at Reach, Quizbowl is beyond their skill level, even at the HS stage. It is hard to pontificate on the joys of academic trivia when some teams around here struggle to compete at Reach to even get a combined score of 100pts between two of them. Although there are good players, many of them are concerned with IB, AP, band, Glee, and whatever other clubs they are involved with, and see Quizbowl as somewhat of a side project. This would suggest that Quizbowl should be a separate club at schools, but the members would largely be the same, and apparently it's tricky enough just to keep Reach teams going as it is.
Some schools fall into the trap of sending the same subgroup of students to every non-athletic extracurricular. I think that in some places this is explained by quizbowl getting a foot in the door through Science Bowl (which inevitably leads to it being viewed as mere "Science Bowl prep" and the atrocious SB tournaments eating up dates for a huge swath of the potential audience). Follow Matt Jackson's advice and boldly, confidently sell quizbowl on its own merits.
Senator_Jay wrote:Many schools have Reach, but apparently there are also many schools with Reach coaches who, for whatever reason, are opposed to Quizbowl. Some of the most influential Reach coaches (like UTS's Fraser Simpson) disagree with the format, and will tend to focus almost exclusively on Reach. Toronto and the surrounding region is home to a large number of schools with great potential for teams, but there seems to be more opposition and unnecessary obstacles than the few of us working at this can surmount, for whatever reason. I could tell my Reach coaches in Hamilton to abandon Reach in favour of Quizbowl, but that would alienate almost all of them, since they are just barely comfortable reading a Reach pack for students.
You will never succeed with this attitude. There is no compromise with bad quizbowl. I know people don't like to hear that and it gets people all anxious about "war analogies" and similar nonsense, but the choice is basically to listen to what people who have been through this have learned the very hard way, or continue banging your head against the wall for another 5 years before admitting it yourself. Learn from what those with experience are telling you -- you MUST withdraw even the appearance of sanctioning Reach participation and explicitly oppose it, or you can NEVER explain to people who are "satisified with Reach" why they should bother starting on an unfamiliar format that they are bad at. Declaring "good quizbowl is superior to Reach in every way and you should stop doing Reach" is your FIRST step here, not some far-off stretch goal.
Senator_Jay wrote: If the students are to be successful, we need to have more supportive and better coaches: Unfortunately coaches are volunteers, and at the same time, many of them are defensive of their clubs, and are not actually competent readers or even scorekeepers. I can run Reach and Quizbowl at Westmount despite any pushback, because the students and staff know me, and trust me based off of my track record. I can also run practices and deal with the issues that may arise during a Quizbowl game. However, another teacher is officially in charge, and will not do Quizbowl at all if I am not around to push it, due to not being comfortable with the format and content, and is too old to change. This leads me to believe that if teams had some sort of Quizbowl mentor, or co-coach affiliated with a pre-existing university Quizbowl program, then that may help things, but requires more initiative from players to go out into the community, and find time to volunteer that they may not even have.
This is where the para-quizbowl stuff comes in -- being more organized with tournament schedules, professionalism, all that. It makes you a viable option for older people with more conservative attitudes. At the same time, you should be seeing a generation of teachers coming in that are open to new ideas or maybe even participated in college quizbowl themselves. Go after both sides of the market.
This is a very complex issue, but hopefully some discussion about this can help move things in the right direction.
I reiterate my call for people who have directly and successfully dealt with similar situations in the U.S. to lend their expertise.