Walton Academic Challenge - 10/13/07

[jmartin]

The Eighteenth Annual Walton Academic Challenge will be held Saturday, October 13, 2007. Traditionally, the tournament has been the first Saturday of October however, due to the SAT being moved up from the 2nd Sat of Oct to the first, we are moving back a week. All info, including registration and contact person, will be posted soon.[/b]

[Medelstein]

I am the new contact person for the Walton Academic Challenge. Please feel free to contact me for tournament information or visit the Walton High School website to download the registration forms.

Hoping to see you here!

Matt Edelstein
[email protected]

http://www.waltonhigh.org

[Medelstein]

There are still slots available in the Walton Academic Challenge on October 13th.

If you have not registered and would like to participate, please contact me as soon as possible!!!

Thanks,

Matt Edelstein
Walton High School
[email protected]

[Quizbowler123]

will you please post a list of whos coming? and what is the format?

[Ben_Dodson]

No updates..?

[DrakeRQB]

I can tell you the playoff pairings, though I don't know the results...

(1) Dorman A
(32) Lakeside B

(16) Alpharetta A
(17) Dorman C

(8) Brookwood A
(25) Etowah

(9) Lakeside A
(24) Pope

(4) Dorman B
(29) Norcross B

(13) Campbell A
(20) Bleckley Co.

(5) Chattahoochee B
(28) Cedar Shoals

(12) Heritage
(21) Dunwoody

---

(2) Chattahoochee A
(31) Alpharetta B

(15) Brookwood B
(18) Parkview A

(7) Norcross A
(26) Blessed Trinity

(10) Central Gwinnett
(23) Galloway

(3) James Island
(30) Paideia

(14) Roswell
(19) Wheeler

(6) Ezell-Harding
(27) Cherokee A

(11) Robinson
(22) Chattahoochee C

[kCobain911]

1. Dorman A
2. Norcross

(3/4) James Island or Dorman B; No consolation match was played.

Finals- Dorman 150- Norcross 70

[DrakeRQB]

1. Dorman A
2. Norcross

(3/4) James Island or Dorman B; No consolation match was played.

Finals- Dorman 150- Norcross 70

So Norcross beat Chattahoochee. Wow.

[kCobain911]

Georgia seems to be filled with good teams. Watch out for Chattahoochee B also.

[AdamL]

First off, congrats to Dorman on the win, and congrats to Norcross on a strong finish in (I think?) their first action of the season.

One thing I wanted to comment on about the tournament was that the questions in the playoffs (as well as the prelims, but to a lesser extent) seemed rather, by which I mean very, difficult. I spoke with a few of the Dorman players and they agreed: we had never even heard of more than a few of the tossup and bonus answers (one noted that he has read plenty of college-level questions from the archive and they weren’t as hard as these). Our team only made it to the quarters, so I can only imagine what the semis and finals were like. But, for example, in our game against Norcross the final score ended up being 130-100, and over in the next room between James Island and Ezell-Harding the final score was 100-90 (and I believe similar scores were put up in the other quarters games). Out of a round with 600 possible points, I think these scores are pretty low, and pretty indicative of the difficulty – every ten points felt hard-fought. And the finals ended up being 150-70 between Dorman A and Norcross…

On another note, Norcross was looking pretty strong in their match against us. Both teams were struggling with the aforementioned difficult questions (I don’t have exact stats, but many tossups went dead and our bonus conversion was probably about 7ish out of 20), but on the more normal tossups, so to speak, Norcross just plain beat us in. There hasn’t been much prognostication going on in the Georgia thread, but I have to admit I didn’t expect them to be as good as they were. We weren’t having our greatest game, but they were definitely solid. Plus, one kid REALLY knew his WWII US-Japan battles/incidents… (two of which came up as tossups in that one round, and were gobbled up)

One last thing… for anyone possibly surprised by Brookwood A’s seeding, I believe their team was heavily under-manned, missing several (?) starters.

[kCobain911]

That is true. Brookwood did not have their A team because there was some sort of Homecoming Event.

[jrbarry]

Brookwood's teams were missing 11 of our 20 players who could not go to any tournament this weekend.

I was pleased with how our kids who did go, played.

Quarterfinals questions were outrageously hard. My A team lost to Dorman 180-50 with 9 of the 20 tossups going unanswered. As knowlegable as the Dorman players are, something is wrong when they cannot answer 9 of 20 tossups! Just my opinion.

The bigger news might be just how few teams were at the Walton Tournament. 42 is smalll for them.

Norcross, the Gwinnett County Runner-up, is a very strong team. Any success thay have this year will not come as a surprise to any Gwinnett County team. At our county championship, the two matches (on NAQT questions) Brookwood played with Norcross came down to the last question with Brookwood winning by 10 points each time. Those games could easily have gone Norcross' way.

[DrakeRQB]

One thing I wanted to comment on about the tournament was that the questions in the playoffs (as well as the prelims, but to a lesser extent) seemed rather, by which I mean very, difficult. I spoke with a few of the Dorman players and they agreed: we had never even heard of more than a few of the tossup and bonus answers (one noted that he has read plenty of college-level questions from the archive and they weren’t as hard as these).

QFT. At halftime of our Round of 16 match with Ezell-Harding, Ronnie and I just looked at each other and shook our heads in amazement/frustration at the difficulty of the questions - I think his team was up 40-30 after ten tossups. I'm not complaining about the quality of the questions as they were very well-written and some were pretty interesting, but I felt that many of them were inappropriate for high schoolers, especially in October. I'm all for challenging teams a little more in the playoffs but it went a little overboard.

My only other complaint is that there was too much downtime between games in a couple of cases. Other than that, we had a great experience and we hope to be able to attend this tournament in future years.

[Medelstein]

Hi Everybody,

Thanks to those who came and thanks for your comments about the tournament.

We promise to address the difficulty issue when we write next year's questions, no doubt. Sorry about that.

As to the diminished numbers, we think that having to change the date of the tournament (due to the SAT being given on what would have been our usual date one week before) and that there were two other tournaments in the SE on the same date (Hoover, AL and another in SC) may have affected the numbers.

The following are the official results:

1st Place: Dorman A
2nd Place: Norcross A
Runners-Up: James Island and Dorman B

Thanks,

Matt Edelstein
Walton High School

[First Chairman]

Reminder for TD: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4358