The Quizbowl Resource Center

High Technology High School is pleased to announce the first annual Quiz Bowl Invitational Tournament (QuBIT), which will take place on February 8, 2014.

The tournament will take place at High Technology High School, 765 Newman Springs Road, Lincroft, NJ 07738. There will be ample parking both on our parking lot and that of the adjacent Brookdale Community College, both of which are free of charge.

On the day of the tournament, registration will take place from 7:45 AM to 8:45 AM, and the first round will start at 9 AM. Provided we meet our quota, there will be four prelim brackets of six teams, followed by three playoff brackets of eight teams and six playoff games (no team will play the same team twice). There will be an ACF-style final (a team must have cleared the playoff bracket by two or more games to win outright).

Registration:

You can register for this tournament through this Google form, which will be open for registration on December 9, 2013 at 6:00 PM EST. We are imposing a hard field cap of 24 teams.

Please note that schools may sign up as many teams as they want initially, though we will only accept 2 teams from each school for the first week of sign up (December 9 - December 15, 2013). Additional teams will be put on the waitlist. After one week, any additional teams will be added to those attending.

Also note that our school district requests a Certificate of Insurance from each participating school before the day of competition. This costs no money, and only takes a minimal amount of time to fill out. If you sign up for this tournament, we will email you the specifics.

Question Set:

We will be mirroring IMSANITY 4, written by the students of the Illinois Math and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois.

The distribution is as follows:
4/4 Literature
4/4 History
3.5/3.5 Science
1.5/1.5 Mathematics
2.5/2.5 RMP
2.5/2.5 Art
1/1 SS/Geo

More information on this set can be found here.

Fee Structure:

$75 for the first team, $70 for each additional team
-$5 for each working buzzer system, no limit
-$10 for each moderator, no limit
-$10 for every 150 miles traveled, determined by Google Maps, limit of 2 per team

Method of Payment:

Please make all checks out to “High Tech Student Activities Account”. We prefer payment on the day of the tournament, but if this is against your school's policy then feel free to mail them to High Tech’s address, as listed above.

Food:

A breakfast consisting of bagels and juice will be provided to all teams free of charge. As for lunch, we would prefer if teams stayed on site to speed up the tournament. To facilitate this, we have included the option to purchase pizza on the Google Form.

If you have any questions about this tournament, please contact Patrick LeBlanc at [email protected] or post below.

We look forward to seeing you all in February!

Field (Teams, Buzzers, Moderators):

Mountain Lakes, NJ (3, 3, 1)
Charter School of Wilmington, DE (2, 2, 1)
St. Joseph's, NJ (2, 2, 1)
Hunter, NY (2, 2, 0)
MAST, NJ (3, 0, 1)
Bergen, NJ (2, 1, 1)
Ridgewood, NJ (1, 1, 1)
Livingston, NJ (2, 1, 0)
"Deep Green" (1, 0, 0)

Total: 18, 12, 6

Waitlist:

The registration form has now been unlocked. As a reminder, for now only your first two teams will be put on the "attending" list now, all others will be put on the wait list.

Only 3 hours into registration and our field is almost half full, with teams from four states already signed up. Keep them registrations coming.

It's been one week since registration opened, so all registered teams on the waitlist have been added to the field. Coincidentally, this gets us exactly to our 24 team field cap, so any more teams that register will be put on the waitlist.

With the dropping of North Babylon's two teams, we have added "Deep Green" to the field. There is still one more opening left, and anyone with a moderator would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Hunter also dropped a team, so we are now at 22 teams, with 2 openings.

Sean,

You can add me to your moderating staff.

PACE (the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence) has awarded our tournament platinum certification. This means that the top 25% of teams in our tournament (5 teams in our case) will qualify for our national high school quizbowl championship, the PACE NSC on the weekend of May 24-25th at the Hyatt Regency Reston outside of Washington, D.C.

As of now, we are at 18 teams. We will be running 3 prelims brackets of 6, followed by 3 playoff brackets of 6, with no team playing the same team twice until the finals. All teams are guaranteed 9 games.

On the day of the tournament, you can keep track of cumulative game statistics through this google doc, which will be made available on February 8.

Unfortunately, several conflicts on the day of February 8th - the most noticeable of them Science Olympiad - have led to a field that is too small for an enjoyable tournament. To avoid these scheduling conflicts, and hopefully attract more teams to the field, we have decided to reschedule QuBIT to an alternate day. Two days work within the already busy tournament schedule: February 15th, which is President's Day weekend, and March 1st.

Please weigh in with which date works better, and don't hesitate to register teams if the change in date allows you to.

March 1st is a date with many complications for our school. I am not sure however about the 15th but I believe it to be a more suitable date...

18 teams is too few for an enjoyable tournament? What?

Kenneth Widmerpool wrote:18 teams is too few for an enjoyable tournament? What?

Ok, I should clarify on what's really God-awful wording on my part. "Unenjoyable" was terrible phrasing: the tournament would have been enjoyable no matter what. The problem lay more with the fact the tournament was in fact losing money if it ran this Saturday, so we decided to postpone it in hope of allowing more teams to sign up. We would have preferred to stay with the original date, and are sorry for the inconvenience it has caused.

The decision to postpone was also precipitated by the dropping of more teams to a number less than that listed in the field post, as well as concerns over the continuing inclement weather.

Ridgewood (at least me) will find a way there no matter what day it's on. (Unless it coincides with another tournament).

Hurrah!Praga! wrote: The problem lay more with the fact the tournament was in fact losing money if it ran this Saturday, so we decided to postpone it in hope of allowing more teams to sign up.

Do you have to pay to reserve rooms or something like that?

Sorry you had to postpone; I hope you get more teams to sign up!

The 15th would most definitely work a lot better for Charter, since Delaware's state Science Olympiad and History Bee tournaments are both on March 1st.

I won't be available to chaperone my team either date; I'll ask my other chaperones whether they'd be available.

Based on the replies we have received, QuBIT has been rescheduled to February 15, 2014, which is President's Day weekend. An email was just sent out to all coaches/contacts about the move. Remember that you can still sign up for this tournament using the Google doc in the first post, and we encourage anyone who hasn't signed up already to do so.

Sulawesi Myzomela wrote:

Hurrah!Praga! wrote: The problem lay more with the fact the tournament was in fact losing money if it ran this Saturday, so we decided to postpone it in hope of allowing more teams to sign up.

Do you have to pay to reserve rooms or something like that?

Effectively. We need to pay for custodial staff to keep our building open, which really kills our profit margin. If we drop below a certain number of teams we basically can't run the tournament.

Any update on your current status and field for Saturday? I ask not to pressure you, but to arrange transportation in a timely manner in case this tournament is going to be held.

Thanks.

Edward Powers wrote:Any update on your current status and field for Saturday? I ask not to pressure you, but to arrange transportation in a timely manner in case this tournament is going to be held.

Thanks.

Unfortunately, we do not have enough teams at the moment to run the tournament. We are attempting to fill our roster, and will keep you posted on the progress.

The Charter School of Wilmington will be able to bring four teams, if this helps you fill up the roster. (Buzzers and moderators would not change.)

Unfortunately QuBIT will be canceled. We could not get enough teams signed up to financially justify the tournament, and there is a threat of snow, so we are not holding it. We would also like to apologize for the mess, and thank you for your patience.

Thanks for letting us know Patty.