The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mountain Lakes High School will be hosting the first annual Mountain Lakes Invitational on January 4, 2014. This tournament will use NAQT set 131A. Each round will be 20 tossups and bonuses, untimed. We will not be using math computation tossups or bonuses. This question set was used at Yale’s high school tournament in October – if you try to register for this tournament but were at Yale, I will not let you into the field unless you can demonstrate you will have players who were not at Yale.

In-person registration will take place from 7:45am to 8:30am, with Round 1 starting at 9 a.m. Each team will be guaranteed at least 8 games and I anticipate the tournament finishing by around 5 p.m.

Mountain Lakes High School is located at 96 Powerville Road in Mountain Lakes, NJ 07046. Mountain Lakes is easily accessible from interstates 80 and 287, located next to Parsippany.

The top 15% of the field will qualify for the 2014 NAQT High School National Championship Tournament being held May 31-June 1, 204 in Chicago. In addition, this tournament is Gold certified by PACE, meaning that the top 20% of the field will qualify for the 2014 PACE National Scholastics Championship to be held Memorial Day weekend in Reston, VA.

Registration

Due to the recent trend of tournaments in the NJ area filling up extremely quickly with teams ending up on the waiting list because they don’t read the message board super frequently, registration for this tournament will not open until WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 30 AT 5 PM EST. To register for this tournament, please fill out the form at http://bit.ly/MLInvitational . The registration link will not be active before October 30 at 5 p.m. If you do not receive a confirmation e-mail from me within 24 hours of registering, please let me know. Filling out the form is the only type of registration I will accept – e-mails or posts in this thread telling me how many teams you’re bringing will not be considered as valid registrations.

The current field cap is 36 teams. There may be a field extension if (and only if) sufficient staff and buzzers can be lined up. At this point there is a limit of 3 teams per school in. Edit: As of 11/21 the field cap is now 42. Any additional teams from a school will be placed on a waitlist. If there is still room in the field a month before the tournament (i.e. on December 4th), then the additional teams past 3 will be let into the field. There is a limit of 6 players per team, 4 of which can play at once. If you bring more than 6 players, you must register a second team in order for all of them to play.

Payment

First team: $75
Each additional team: $60
Moderator discount: $15 per moderator
Buzzer discount: $10 per buzzer system with at least 8 working buzzers
Scorekeeper discount: $5 per scorekeeper
Minimum fee per team: $30

Teams who do not pay by the day of the tournament will be charged a $25 penalty and will have two weeks to pay their total before we contact your school administration about it. This tournament can accept payment by cash or check. If paying by check, the check must be made out to “Mountain Lakes High School, c/o Academic Team”. If you require a pre-tournament invoice in order to have a check cut, you must let us know by let us know by December 23, so that we can send you the invoice in time. If you do not let us know about this requirement by December 23rd, and it causes you to come to the tournament without your payment, then you will be subject to the $25 late payment penalty.

Since this tournament is occurring when many colleges/universities are still on Winter break, if you have any alums from your team that want to come and read and that you can vouch for as being competent moderators capable of finishing an A-set packet within 30 minutes or less, I’ll pay them $15 for their help. Your team will still get the $15 moderator discount, too. Limit two per school.

Food

We will provide a breakfast of bagels and juice. As there are not many eateries within reasonable driving distance to fit into the hour-long lunch break, we will be doing a large pizza order the day of the tournament. Each large cheese pizza will cost $10. We will have soda/water available for purchase at the tournament. If you want to bring your own refreshments, that’s fine.

If you have any questions about this tournament, post in the thread or send me a private message or e-mail to [email protected]. Hope to see you in January.

Andrew Ibendahl
Tournament Director, Mountain Lakes Invitational

Hello everyone,

Registration is now open at the form linked to in the initial post.

Field update (teams / buzzers / mods):

Seton Hall Prep (2/5/3)
MAST (1/0/1)
Livingston (4/2/0)
Ridgewood (1/2/1)
Bergen Academies (2/1/1)
Hopatcong (1/0/0)
Scarsdale (1/0/0)
"Gotham" (1/1/0)
Millburn (2/2/0)
Middlesex County Academy (2/0/0)
Horace Greeley (1/1/1)
High Point Regional (3/1/1)
Doane Academy (1/0/1)
"Deep Green" (3/1/0)
Newark Academy (1/0/0)
Delbarton (1/1/0)
Morristown-Beard (2/1/1)
Sparta (2/0/0)
Central Bucks East (2/2/0)
Lenape Valley Regional (1/0/1)
Hunterdon Central Regional (2/0/1)
E.O. Smith (1/2/1)
Kings Park (1/2/1)


Total: 38 teams, 23 buzzers, 14 mods

Registration has been open for less than 48 hours and the field is more than half full with multiple other teams indicating their interest to me, so please do not delay registering. It also appears that the snail mail invitations have started arriving to their destinations, so I cannot guarantee that there will still be openings in the tournament very long.

Also, shout out to Hopatcong for registering for their first pyramidal tournament ever!

Millburn will bring two teams and two buzzers

There are currently 30 teams registered for this tournament - if you are one of the teams who has indicated interest to me or otherwise plans on attending this tournament, I would suggest registering sooner rather than later.

Although field expansion is a possibility, it is by no means definite.

Andrew:

I have to check my schedule to be sure, but I may be able to come down that day and help you guys out with moderating the tournament. Contact me at scottblish at gmail.com if it turns out that you need the help, and I'll see what I can do.

--Scott

The field for this tournament has been expanded to 42 teams, but with 5 teams having registered in just the last three days, it's hard to say how long spots will be available.

With the field currently at 41, the absolutely final field cap for this tournament is 48 teams. I do not have the staff available to comfortably go beyond this number (and 48 is a nice, round number for a field size anyway), so if you want in the tournament but have not yet registered, there are limited spaces available. Also, since it is now a month before the tournament and there was an opening in the field, LIvingston's D team is now in the field.

The field for the Mountain Lakes Invitational is now full, including teams from 8 different NJ counties (which might be a record?) as well as 9 teams from PA and NY. If the field stands, nobody will be able to leave this tournament saying they didn't play anyone they haven't played before.

I will certainly still be taking teams for the waitlist, as multiple coaches have informed me that there is some degree of uncertainty regarding the number of teams that they will actually be bringing to the tournament.

Hello--
Late inquiry but would you like a team from CT? I am mainly wondering how long the wait list is and if we'd have a chance of making the field. Thanks.

rpirrie wrote:Hello--
Late inquiry but would you like a team from CT? I am mainly wondering how long the wait list is and if we'd have a chance of making the field. Thanks.

Having a team from CT would be great, the more diverse the competition the better. Right now there are no teams on the waitlist, which I've now edited the post listing the field to reflect. Given the size of the tournament I would guess that a few teams will probably drop before the day of the tournament, so if you get on the waitlist now you'll probably end up in the field. Go ahead and fill out the form and I'll put you on the waitlist.

With two teams having dropped in the past week, both of E.O. Smith's teams are now in the field. There are also now only three teams on the waitlist, so there's still a half decent chance of getting into the field if anyone who is not currently registered still wants to come to the tournament.

On another note, I'm happy to see that other tournaments in the NY/NJ area have started to adopt the "use a google form for registration which will open at a pre-determined date in the future" mode of registration.

Andrew:

If you need another experienced moderator for the ML Invitational, please let me know (e-mail at scottblish at gmail.com) by this Thursday evening, as I should be able to make it down this weekend if you need the help. I'll have to know by then, though, so that I can make sure that the day is free.

--Scott

Ithaca Cricket Ump wrote:Andrew:

If you need another experienced moderator for the ML Invitational, please let me know (e-mail at scottblish at gmail.com) by this Thursday evening, as I should be able to make it down this weekend if you need the help. I'll have to know by then, though, so that I can make sure that the day is free.

--Scott

Thanks for the interest, but I think we will be fine on moderators.

Hello everyone,

As I'm sure most people in the NYC metro are aware, there's some pretty bad weather forecasted for Thursday night into Friday. I will be discussing options with the superintendent tomorrow morning, particularly as to if the tournament can still happen in the event that Mountain Lakes cancels school on Friday. The absolute latest I'll be making a determination about the status of the tournament is 5 am Saturday, but I hope to have a decision made yet Friday. If the tournament ends up having to be cancelled, I will be posting a notification in this message thread, e-mailing coaches, and using the contact phone number that was submitted during registration. If the phone number you submitted during registration isn't correct, please send me a revised number so that I can contact the right person. Also, if the tournament still happens but the weather prohibits your team(s) from attending, please let me know.

If you have any further questions, let me know.

Another tournament update:

I have talked to the Mountain Lakes superintendent (who incidentally was also the coach of the team for the 2011-12 school year), and as of right now the tournament is still on. District policy states that even if school is cancelled on Friday, events hosted by the district for the ensuing weekend can still happen, so whether or not Mountain Lakes has school tomorrow won't have a direct impact on the tournament itself.

The final, drop-dead decision about the status of the tournament has been bumped up to around 1 pm tomorrow.

On another note, High Tech has dropped its 3 teams, and there were only 2 on the waitlist, so there's now an opening if anyone wants it. Otherwise I'll scrounge together a house team of Mountain Lakes players who didn't go to the Yale tournament where these questions were played, or extra players from other teams who would be willing to make a Team USA.

I just sent out a mass e-mail to all coaches, but this tournament is still on for tomorrow.

Scarsdale beat MAST 345-290 in the championship of the first ever Mountain Lakes Invitational. Other qualifiers for HSNCT include the 3rd through 6th place finishers, which in order are 'Deep Green' A, Horace Greeley, Livingston B, and Livingston A. Ridgewood (or rather, half of their A team) and 'Gotham' finished 7th and 8th, respectively, to qualify for the PACE NSC. The rest of the top bracket teams were, in order of final finish, Millburn A, E.O.Smith, Millburn B, and Bergen A who had to leave early.

For it being the first high school tournament Mountain Lakes ever ran and dealing with the fact that a quarter of the field dropped in 3 days because of the weather and that I never had the opportunity to train most of the scorekeepers and any of the stats crew due to Mountain Lakes being affected by the recent snowstorm, I thought the tournament ran pretty well. That being said, I've already started making a list of the things that can be improved for next time, including the mess that was registration and the opening meeting. Stats will be up within a week, probably sooner.

I'd certainly appreciate any feedback from coaches/players, with today having gone the way it did I certainly anticipate Mountain Lakes hosting again in the future.

Great job, Andrew - you & your crew did a great job of keeping things moving along well despite
the obstacles you faced. Look forward to coming back next year!

Peter Urban
Millburn HS

This was a quite well-run tournament, especially for a first-timer. You made up the delay by the end of the day so that it seemed like you would finish around 5:00, which is not bad for 11 rounds. The only big things I'd recommend are sending someone physically over to the meeting places for announcements (it was hard to hear the intercom over the cafeteria noise); and making sure you have a committee of more than just the TD who are familiar with rules for protest resolution*.

I was a decent bit disappointed in the set from NAQT. Obviously it's live and I can't make extensive remarks, but for a set that's been in circulation for a few months to have outright factual errors, lots of grammatical and pronoun stumbles, and what seemed like a pretty bad hose/ambiguity on a game-deciding question* is not what I expect of the leading provider of quiz bowl in the area.

*-I do want to emphasize that in the long run, the situation being alluded to here was handled properly by Andrew, and I have no problem with the resolution. However his hands were tied by a bad question.

The competition was amazingly tight. Our semifinal bracket of 6 teams had all between 21 and 23 PPB as far as I remember looking at the stat sheet, and I think all within 100 PPG of each other in the playoff round-robin. Congrats to Scarsdale on their victory.

Thanks for the feedback!

jonpin wrote:outright factual error

This has been fixed for future use.

jonpin wrote:what seemed like a pretty bad hose/ambiguity on a game-deciding question

Our editors will take a look at this and revise as needed.

jonpin wrote:grammatical and pronoun stumbles

Please let us know if you remember the details!

You folks did a GREAT JOB for your first ever. You faced a lot of obstacles and dealt with them very well. We had a great time, and I wish you success in future tournaments. Thanks again!

All three "Deep Green" teams enjoyed this tournament, as it was exceptionally well run given the circumstances. 11 games and the tournament was done rather early. We hope to be back next year (though officially)!

Stats are now posted and have been sent to NAQT, let me know of any changes that need to be made, a few scorekeepers weren't so good about noting substitutions.