The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is the official announcement for Vanderbilt's ABC XXXIII, to be held on March 17, 2007 in Nashville, TN. This will be a one-day event, tossup/bonus format, with separate varsity and JV divisions. For further details, see:

Official announcement

and

Additional Information (directions, maps, schedule, etc.)

We hope to see many of you there.

Same day as the first day of KAAC Governor's Cup...

You'll probably lose alot of your KY teams, but I'm sure it will still be a successful tournament. I like the Vandy ABC.

We were well aware of this, but unfortunately it turned out to be the better of two dates where it was even possible to hold it. Fortunately quick recall isn't until Sunday, and we've heard from at least a couple KY teams who plan on coming.

With two weeks to go, we still have plenty of room, so go ahead and contact us if you're interested in coming. We're also working on making ABC a PACE qualifier, if that influences your decision at all.

Could you give us a field update please?

Here is the field so far:

Varsity:
Hoover
Norcross
Lincoln Co.
Apollo
Louisville Eastern
duPont Manual
Central Gwinnett (2)
Soddy Daisy
McGavock
MLK Magnet (Nashville)
Columbia Central

JV:
Hoover
Apollo
Russelville (2)
McGavock
MLK Magnet (Nashville)

Updated field is above. We'll leave registration open till next Wednesday or so. Let us know if you have any interest in attending.

Field is still slowly building (updated above), but is starting to look better. Let us know soon if you want to attend.

As a last-minute note, this tournament will be a PACE qualifier as well.

After all was said and done, we wound up with 16 teams today for ABC XXXIII, so we decided to merge the varsity and JV fields for an initial round robin, followed by separate playoffs. A full write-up can be found here To summarize, Central Gwinnett A defeated Norcross in the varsity final, with Lincoln County (TN) and Central Gwinnett B as the other semi-finalists. In JV, Russellville A defeated Russellvile B in the final, with Hoover B taking 3rd and MLK B 4th. Thanks again to everyone who came out, and we look forward to seeing them again in the fall.

I just wanted to say that that was a great tournament to play at. Everything was on schedule and the questions were great. I'm hoping Norcross will be able to come to the fall tournament especially if it's anywhere close to as well run as the spring tournament.

Please don't discuss the questions. I have access to them for Patriot Games 3/31.

Every time I've seen a tournament near the Tennessee area, it makes me wonder, so I finally decided to ask:

What happened to Cookeville's team? Are they still active?

vandyhawk wrote:After all was said and done, we wound up with 16 teams today for ABC XXXIII, so we decided to merge the varsity and JV fields for an initial round robin, followed by separate playoffs. A full write-up can be found here To summarize, Central Gwinnett A defeated Norcross in the varsity final, with Lincoln County (TN) and Central Gwinnett B as the other semi-finalists. In JV, Russellville A defeated Russellvile B in the final, with Hoover B taking 3rd and MLK B 4th. Thanks again to everyone who came out, and we look forward to seeing them again in the fall.

Hell yeah!!!!

Was MLK A at full strength?

I believe the real MLK A came to Cavalier Open at UVA, where they got 3rd.

Lapego1 wrote:I believe the real MLK A came to Cavalier Open at UVA, where they got 3rd.

That makes a lot more sense.

Was Brindlee Mountain on spring break? Our guys were disappointed you couldn't make it.

BobGHHS wrote:Every time I've seen a tournament near the Tennessee area, it makes me wonder, so I finally decided to ask:

What happened to Cookeville's team? Are they still active?

They came to our fall tournament. From what I understand, they've had a hard time rebuilding since their solid teams from a few years ago, and currently have mostly younger players. Not sure if Carolyn Hawkins is on this board or not to elaborate.

I'm glad people had a good time yesterday, and it was nice to see some new teams there too. Oh, and Dr. Chuck, I did mention to people that you were using the questions, so there shouldn't be any worries there.

Gunnells wrote:Was Brindlee Mountain on spring break? Our guys were disappointed you couldn't make it.

I wish we could've been there. My wife is 9 months pregnant, so I'm not going out of state any time soon. The kids wanted to go, too. But, that's life. We'll be at Nationals, though. See you there.

BTW, did you play Hoover? We haven't played them yet this year and we've been hearing that they are really tough. We'll see them at state.

-Lee

Norcross played Hoover B, which was their JV. They had one of the best JV there, and they was seeded 1st among the JV playoffs. Hoover A had their only losses to Central Gwinnett A (150-360) and Lincoln County (160-340) who were 1st and 3rd seed respectively in the Varsity playoff division. Had Hoover gotten a higher PPG, they would have gotten the 4th seed for the playoffs over Central B.

What is amazing to me is that Vandy could only get 16 teams to play a tournament. Seems like Vanderbilt tournaments peaked a few years ago and have been declining in attendance for several years. I know thr Spring tournament is usually smaller, but 16 teams, jv and varsity together is REALLY small.

I hope Vandy keeps giving tournaments because I like to go there especially in the Fall.

Some of the attendance my be due to spring break being held right around that time... I know that was the case with us not going...

jrbarry wrote:What is amazing to me is that Vandy could only get 16 teams to play a tournament. Seems like Vanderbilt tournaments peaked a few years ago and have been declining in attendance for several years. I know thr Spring tournament is usually smaller, but 16 teams, jv and varsity together is REALLY small.

I hope Vandy keeps giving tournaments because I like to go there especially in the Fall.

Here are the attendance numbers since I took over running things:

Fall '02: (don't have the # on website, but I seem to remember it being around 70)
Fall '03: 53
Fall '04: 73
Fall '05: 62
Fall '06: 74

Spring '03: 35
Spring '04: 43
Spring '05: 44
Spring '06: 31

I don't really see us suffering from any sort of systematic drop in attendance. From what I understand, our fall tournament used to have 80-90 teams, and > 100 once, back in the late '90's, but that there were many problems with them as a result. I don't even know where they put people with that many teams, and it's very difficult to get enough moderators capable of doing a decent job, especially at a university compared with, say, a large high school like Brookwood where you can have teachers, parents, etc. help out. I can't be sure, but Fall '03 was probably kind of small b/c Fall '02 wasn't very good, it being my first time in charge, and with our club membership extremely low. In any case, I think the field size of the last three fall editions is pretty much ideal for us, and seems to have leveled out around there, where we have a very strong field and can still do a good job running it. I don't think I would allow more than 80 teams if we get that many next fall.

As for spring, it has always been smaller thanks to more conflicts, which are getting tougher every year to deal with. Last year was probably the earliest we've held it in a while (the same weekend as this year), so we hit more people's spring breaks. This year, we wanted to host it later, but conflicts with our national tournaments, campus events, our school year ending early (finals start April 25), and other state tournaments already scheduled left only March 17 available. Kentucky teams usually make up probably at least 1/3 of our field, sometimes more, and unfortunately, we found out too late that the dates for their Gov Cup were posted wrong, and the quiz bowl (quick recall) finals were actually March 18. Thanks to that, we had 1 varsity and 1 JV team from KY. We also hit many TN and AL teams' spring breaks, and a few teams who frequent our tournaments decided to test themselves against the VA/DC/Maryland contingent, which I can't blame them for given our field.

That being said, I feel like our tournaments have never been better in terms of question quality and how smoothly they've been running, and several coaches have echoed these sentiments. Hopefully this really is the case, and we'll continue to attract large, quality fields, especially if we can get a better date next spring.

I know we are going to attempt to come next year with at least one team for JV division...

On Cookeville,
We played them in the fall here and they really have lost a lot of steam. I'm not even sure that they broke 100 against us.

I go back to the first ABC in the Spring of 1991.

And I agree that the ABC's are better run now than in the late 1990s when Vandy had more than 100 teams in the Fall.

quizbowllee wrote: I wish we could've been there. My wife is 9 months pregnant, so I'm not going out of state any time soon. The kids wanted to go, too. But, that's life. We'll be at Nationals, though. See you there.

BTW, did you play Hoover? We haven't played them yet this year and we've been hearing that they are really tough. We'll see them at state.

-Lee

C'mon man! You have to get your priorities in order!

Though we did not play Hoover head-to-head, Brindlee Mountain remains the most impressive Alabama team we've encountered.

Gunnells wrote:

quizbowllee wrote: I wish we could've been there. My wife is 9 months pregnant, so I'm not going out of state any time soon. The kids wanted to go, too. But, that's life. We'll be at Nationals, though. See you there.

BTW, did you play Hoover? We haven't played them yet this year and we've been hearing that they are really tough. We'll see them at state.

-Lee

C'mon man! You have to get your priorities in order!

Though we did not play Hoover head-to-head, Brindlee Mountain remains the most impressive Alabama team we've encountered.

I appreciate that. Hopefully we'll be able to win State this year. BTW, I know we played Norcross this year, but I can't remember where. Can you refresh my memory on that?