The Quizbowl Resource Center

Greetings Academic Team coaches and sponsors,

Hello, my name is Mostafa Bhuiyan, and I am a member of the Norcross High School Academic Team. The Norcross High School Academic Team would like to invite each of you to the second Blue Devil Academic Tournament, or BDAT II. It will be held on Saturday, December 1st, 2012 at Norcross High School, located in Norcross, GA. The tournament is a varsity-level event, meaning that the questions will be geared towards players in the 11th and 12th grades, although younger high school players are welcome (and greatly encouraged!) to attend.

LOCATION: Norcross High School, 5300 Spalding Dr. Norcross, GA 30071

QUESTIONS: Norcross High School will be writing its own question set to be used at the BDAT. The set will be formatted to a tossup-bonus part and will be pyramidal, meaning that clues in tossups will progress from the hardest clue to the easiest clue. We are also aiming for a very accessible varsity-level set, with easy parts on bonuses being gettable by even new teams and the hard parts still being challenging for nationally competitive squads.

FORMAT: The format will ultimately be decided by the number of teams, but we will make sure that each team has a substantial number of games. The top four teams will be rewarded trophies, and the top individual performers will also be given book prizes.

FIELD SIZE: We are currently limiting the field size to 24 teams. We will take teams on a first-come, first-serve basis, so please, register your team(s) as soon as possible.

FEES: The fee structure is as follows:
- $65 per team
- $5 off for every buzzer. Buzzers must have at least eight working lockout systems in order to qualify for this discount.
- $10 off for every experienced volunteer. He or she must be able to stay for the entirety of the tournament (minus finals)
- $5 off for every 150 miles traveled one-way, as calculated by Google Maps
Minimum price: $0. A team could potentially bring enough buzzers and volunteers to reduce tournament entry fees to zero dollars.

REGISTRATION: To register, please fill out this form. We will also accept registration via email to myself at [email protected], but, for convenience, please use the form.

PAYMENT: To pay for the tournament, please send cash or a check addressed to “Norcross Academic Team” at the following address: 5300 Spalding Dr. Norcross, GA 30071

MIRRORS: We are also seeking mirrors of the BDAT in different parts of quizbowl country. The BDAT will have fourteen packets of twenty tossups and twenty bonuses and tiebreakers. The mirroring fee is just $10 per team in attendance. If anyone is even remotely interested, don't hesitate to ask!

Thank you, and we hope to see everyone at Norcross on December 1st!

- Mostafa Bhuiyan, Norcross 2013

Reserved for field updates:

Field: (24 Teams, 14 +2 Buzzers)

Marist (2, 1)
North Gwinnett High School (2, 1)
Chattahoochee (2, 1)
Prince Avenue Christian School (1, 1)
Grayson High School (1, 1)
Rutland High School (1, 1)
Etowah High (2, 0)
Oak Mountain Academy (1, 0)
Collins Hill High School (2, 1)
LaGrange Academy (1, 1)
Centennial High School (2, 1)
"Howell Cobb Institute" (1, 1)
Northview High School 1, 0)
The Walker School (2, 2)
Locust Grove High (1, 3)
Alpharetta High School (2, 0)

Field update with about six and a half weeks left until the tournament. Let's keep those registrations coming!

Field update with a little less than a month to go. We have one spot left until we institute a waiting list, so register your team!

The field is full with about two and a half weeks left until the tournament. Any teams which register now will be put onto a waiting list.

The following information was emailed to coaches today. Please let me know if you need it.

Hello coaches,

Thank you for registering for the second Norcross Blue Devil Academic Tournament (BDAT II) this Saturday. We are looking forward to hosting the tournament, and are glad that you have decided to be a part of it.


Here is the current field (# teams, # buzzers)

Field: 24 Teams

Marist (2, 1)
North Gwinnett High School (2, 1)
Chattahoochee (2, 1)
Prince Avenue Christian School (1, 1)
Grayson High School (1, 1)
Rutland High School (1, 1)
Etowah High (2, 0)
Oak Mountain Academy (1, 0)
Collins Hill High School (2, 1)
LaGrange Academy (1, 1)
Centennial High School (2, 1)
"Howell Cobb Institute" (1, 1)
Northview High School 1, 0)
The Walker School (2, 2)
Locust Grove High (1, 3)
Alpharetta High School (2, 0)

It is very important that teams bring their stated number of buzzers, so please, bring them. We can't have a tournament without buzzers!

Teams are asked to be at Norcross High School (5300 Spalding Dr. Norcross, GA 30071) between 8:00-8:25. We are planning to start the tournament at 8:30. If teams will be late, please call us at this number: 678-468-8753. We are willing to wait at most 15 minutes for teams to show up before we start the tournament. There should be parking spaces in front of the school, but if not, there are two large parking lots to the left and right of the school.

Each round will consist of twenty tossups each with a three-part bonus. There will be NO bouncebacks on bonuses. The tournament will also feature "powers" on tossups (meaning that buzzing in early enough on a tossup will earn a team 15 points instead of the usual 10.) Also, during tossups, players will NOT be penalized or ruled non-responsive for saying a correct answer to a tossup before being recognized. Conferring on bonuses is allowed. Also, we will be keeping individual player scores.

For the preliminary matches, teams will be sorted into four brackets of six teams each and will play a 5 game round-robin with the teams in their brackets. After that, teams will head to lunch***. For the playoff rounds, teams will be seeded 1-24 based on prelim records into four new brackets of six. The teams in the top bracket will be in contention for the championship. The top three teams will receive trophies. The other three brackets will be playing for their final overall placement in the tournament. We ask that, if your team is not in contention for the championship after preliminary rounds, you do not leave the tournament. This will help us with brackets, and it will allow your team to have competitive games with teams of similar ability in the playoffs. After playoffs, we will be doing buzzer pick-up.

After playoffs, the top two teams in the championship bracket will play an m-ACF style finals. This means that if the first seed has a one win advantage over seed two, then team two must win two games in a row during the finals to win the tournament. If seed one is two games ahead of seed two, then seed one automatically wins. If seeds one and two have the same record after the playoffs, one game will decide the winner.

After lunch, we will be recognizing the top 10 individual scorers, who will receive book prizes as their reward.

***= We will not be serving lunch on campus, but there are a bunch of food options close to Norcross. The welcome packets teams will get in the morning will have directions to these places.

The questions being used at the tournament will be emailed to teams after the conclusion of the tournament.


On behalf of the Norcross Academic Team, we thank you for registering for our tournament! See everyone on Saturday!

I'd like to thank everyone who came out to the tournament, and we hope you enjoyed it!

The top four teams were:

1. Howell Cobb Institute (Athens Academy)
2. Etowah A
3. Marist A
4. Chattahoochee A

Athens Academy went 5-0 in the playoffs, so there was no need for a final between 1 and 2. The placements were decided on PPG since the top teams just played a round-robin.

Here are the links to the stats: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/1132

All in all, I feel like we were able to host a good tournament. We'll definitely be taking notes on what to do better when our March tournament rolls around. The top bracket was finished with its rounds by 4:45, and everyone else was done by around 5:20ish.

In regards to the questions, I think that the set was definitely easier than last year's and of better quality overall. The stats seem to support this, and almost everyone was able to consistently get at least one part of each bonus. However, the set was too difficult for a lot if not all of the lower bracket teams, so that's a spot we fell short in. We'll be looking to rectify this as best as possible.

It seems like Georgia on a whole is a much stronger state for quizbowl than it has been in years past. Even if we have no contender for a national championship, we have a lot of, in my opinion, top 20-30 teams in the country, and the lower end of team skill level seems to also be higher than it has been.

Thanks for coming to our tournament, everyone! I'll be emailing all the teams who came to BDAT the questions sometime later today.