I'm not editing any of this except to merge it with the existing thread. Anyway, generally, my attempt to TD the Weekend of Quizbowl was fraught with errors and mistakes. This was actually my first attempt at TDing (I had previously only edited a set and not actually run a tournament), and was counting on someone else with whom I was hoping to split responsibility for various logistic issues. This person canceled two days before the tournament, leaving me somewhat ill-prepared to handle all of them, and I screwed a number of things up. I probably should have taken the initiative by making an apologetic post, so I can't really get on anyone's case for posting this.
Instead, the weekend was wracked with irregular scheduling, haphazard staffing, and telltale signs of inadequate planning.
Yeah, I clearly did not make all the preparations I needed to for this tournament. It wasn't out of lack of effort but lack of experience doing anything like this, and next year I will surely be seeking out someone who has experience running lots of events to oversee what I'm doing. I apologize to teams (and moderators, it seems) who were so offended by the state of affairs.
Many elementary steps that could have been taken to ensure that the tournament would run efficiently and with a minimum of chaos were not. Instead of noting before or during registration where each buzzer system would be used, moderators were told to just grab a buzzer system when they headed out to their rooms. This resulted in confusion when the tournament concluded Sunday evening as teams trolled around the game rooms to collect their buzzers, unsure where, or whether, they would find them.
Yeah, this was a huge screw up and something I completely overlooked. My fault.
The most egregious logistical issues with the tournament centered around the ranking and rebracketing for the playoffs on both Saturday and Sunday. The planned schedule for Saturday included two re-brackets: one after the six preliminary rounds, and one after an initial three rounds of playoffs. Rebracketing for playoffs is a time-consuming process. Rarely does a tournament proceed from the end of the last tossup in a preliminary round to the first round of playoffs in less than half an hour. On Saturday, the first re-bracketing took place over lunchtime and proceeded fairly smoothly, but the second one took well over an hour. In the meantime, staff members had to leave, and many teams no longer in contention for the championship lost interest in continuing to play. In the end, the final three power-matched rounds and the finals did not conclude until 9pm, which is far later than any high school tournament should run. On Sunday, playoff brackets that were supposed to be ready for announcing at 1:30 were not announced until 2:15, with games not starting until 2:30. By the time the playoff round-robin was concluded at around 5, half an hour after the TD had promised the tournament would end, two of the teams in contention for the championship - Dorman's A and B teams - had to depart to catch their flight.
The double-rebracket was a pretty bad idea, and one which we corrected for the second day to much improvement. I apologize for not having the foresight to tell it would be a pretty big problem, and while nobody else seemed to think it was inherently doomed when I posted it for all to see a few weeks in advance, I clearly made a bad call employing it. Again, my fault. However, I'll note that the delays Sunday were not because of lunch, but because of a start time that was 45 minutes late due not to me not being prepared, or teams not showing up, but moderators (indeed, two of whom signed this letter) showing up 40 minutes late. We definitely couldn't start without four of our moderators, and had you guys not been late, I think we would have finished by the intended time. Maybe not, as I certainly messed things up Sunday as well. I wouldn't point that out except that two of you guys signed this letter, which seems pretty messed up to me. I would have at least appreciate a call when you guys weren't there an hour after the start of registration. Again, this is in NO WAY a justification for any of my mistakes, I'm merely noting that my attempts to correct them Sunday were affected by matters I couldn't really control.
The TD interrupted a meaningful match (TJ A vs. Charter) to suggest the moderator wrap up the match as quickly as possible sothe winner could be swept away in a rush to play a Dorman A team, that by the time the TD could do anything about it, had left.
That's not true, Jonathan. All I did was check to see what tossup you were on, I certainly didn't urge you to "finish faster" or anything like that. I was desperately trying to get Dorman a final game, and I apologize to them for making them miss out on their intended final.
Chris endorsed in discussions with other staffers the idea of making Dorman co-champions with the winner of an advantaged final between TJ A and Charter, yet the results post on the forums half-jokingly listed Dorman's teams as 11th and 12th, since they had apparently forfeited by hurrying to catch their flight home. Chris completely backtracked on his decision (a fair one in our opinions) that Dorman be considered as champions and mocked them by placing them in a lower position than several teams that had left even earlier.
I never endorsed a co-champions idea, although I do remember some of you (Matt) voiced that idea. If my post seemed mocking in any way to Dorman, I really apologize, and I consider them to be the best team in terms of performance Sunday (something I told them). I received universally positive feedback from Dorman even though they suffered the worst from my screw ups. Listing them as 11th and 12th was probably pointless and I'm not sure why I did it (the 80 hours without sleep come to mind). Anyway, I'm sorry for the confusion, but it really wasn't a joke, it was just a stupid way to convey the information. The idea that I was mocking a team and a coach who I know and respect is out of line, I think.
In light of the gross delays experienced during the WoQ, we find Chris's attitude towards teams who chose to leave early stunning. Even though in an ideal world every high school quiz bowl team would have the energy to play 12 rounds of quiz bowl even when they were no longer in contention for a championship, that simply is not the way the world works. It should not be surprising that Division II teams with losing records chose to leave the tournament early rather than hang around for half-hearted consolation matches.
This was probably my biggest mistake. I did not think that teams who had paid for 24 games (more on that later) would really want to leave after 6 each day. My own limited experience with running tournaments forced me to rely basically on what I would do, which is an incredibly stupid way to decide things. I take full responsibility for the division II issues on day 1 that were caused by teams wanting to go home, and I apologize to those teams. That was why we switched to a standard playoff bracket for division II sunday, which seemed to satisfy everyone just fine. Why you feel the need to hammer this point when we were able to address it by our changes for Sunday, I'm not sure, but in any event, I apologize for lacking the foresight and experience to predict how badly asking those teams to stay would turn out. It's definitely not something I plan on doing again, though I do think it's worthwhile to give Division I teams at an event like this the option (and maybe even having the expectation) of playing every round.
. His attitude towards teams at the tournament was sometimes unprofessional; at one point the tournament director offered a top player "hos, cars and blow" to enjoy the privilege of playing collegiate quizbowl at his own university and then on a public forum once more solicited for his own team, despite not having any position of authority on that team and not being possessed of a right to represent that team in this fashion.
Seriously? This was a joke I made to someone I was socializing with in between rounds, and it resulted in everyone (including that player's parent?) laughing about it. If that offended anyone I'm sincerely sorry, it seemed like just good-natured kidding around but in retrospect I probably should refrain from that when acting as a TD. Also, I was hardly being serious in any attempts to invite anyone to play at Maryland, though even if I were I doubt those attempts would have any consequence at all. I suggest the specific person who has an issue with this speak to me in person.
Chris's approach to finding staff for this tournament struck us as both arrogant and short-sighted. Some of us were not asked explicitly to help at the tournament, and were merely assumed to be coming by virtue of being Washington-area college students.
Who are you talking about? I asked everyone who came specifically, and I asked every one of you if you could come. I never assumed you guys would come and I appreciate it sincerely. I had five moderators bow out on me the week before the tournament which left me scrambling, but it wasn't an actual lack of effort or actual contacting of moderators that caused a problem.
. The Richmond contingent, who made up about a fourth of the moderators on Saturday, had to wait until the week before the tournament to get a promise that their hotel expenses of under $100 would be reimbursed.
I responded to the request for such a promise as soon as it was made. As part of my general schedule of mistakes for this tournament I didn't start asking around for moderators until much too close to the actual tournament date, but I certainly wasn't keeping you guys in limbo about us covering the hotel expenses.
This entitled approach to recruiting staff probably explains why on Sunday, the tournament was 4 or 5 moderators short of the necessary contingent, requiring the recruitment of coaches into moderating duty. We know that in some areas, coaches do basically all of the moderating at tournaments, but it is not the usual protocol in the mid-Atlantic. Aside from being unfair to the players who must operate for a day without their coaches, the Tournament Director has not had a chance to go over rules and expectations with coaches who moderate. A TD can't know how coaches will react to protests, mistakes, or any of the other things that can knock a quiz bowl match of the tracks. More reprehensible than recruiting coaches as moderators, however, was the fact that on Saturday, one member at a time of TJ's 5-person C team was conscripted to moderate during the prelims. To have a player moderate at a tournament at which they are paying to play in is patently absurd. The limiting factor on the size of a quiz bowl tournament ought always to be the number of competent moderators available. Not volunteers from the audience, but experienced quiz
bowlers who can finish 20/20 in 25 minutes, handle protests, and pronounce "Goethe". If not enough such individuals are available, then the thing to do is recruit and train inexperienced volunteers before the tournament, not trust in the good will of the coaches in attendance.
Again, I'm not sure what "entitled" thing you're talking about. Any delay in contact moderators was due to poor planning and not arrogance. I recruited three coaches, two of whom I know for a fact to be excellent moderators and clearly knowledgeable about the rules and one whose help I was not in a position to turn away. There were some rules issues with this third coach but they cleared up after round 2. I reached deals with these teams (all teams with coaches who moderate received free questions at the least and will be getting some reimbursement checks from DACQ/had their fees knocked down by a doubly bonus rate), and they graciously offered to help us out. As for TJ C, they had a rotating sub and offered to staff - I couldn't say no because one of our more esteemed community members abruptly didn't show up to moderate as promised Sunday and didn't tell anyone. In any event, I apologize for not recruiting and training inexperienced moderators prior to the tournament, which is clearly what I should have done, and will do in future situations. Thanks again to WJ, Gov, and Hunter for surrendering coaches and to TJ for everything you guys did to help us out.
The reason that coaches (and even players) can generally be trusted to step up when there's a gap in staffing at a tournament is that quiz bowl is a community based on camaraderie and volunteerism. Outside of occasional travel reimbursements, nobody ever gets paid to moderate. We all volunteered to read at WoQ because we wanted to support the teams in attendance and provide them with competent moderation. Volunteers make tournaments work. So when a TD needs a coach or a parent or two to read at the last minute, usually someone will step up, because that is how our game works. But when volunteer recruitment is entirely last minute, and three or four coaches are needed to even run all the games promised to teams, then something is amiss.
As I said, we were totally set with staff by about a week out when we got hit with a ton of cancellations. We did our best, and had I used better planning, it wouldn't have reached a crisis level. The whole undertone of some kind of affront to qb in general here is way off base.
Post subject: Weekend of Quizbowl Criticism and Discussion Reply with quote
Despite the preexisting presence of a thread devoted to discussing this tournament, a group of the attendants of this tournament have decided that in order to properly and publicly display our critique of this tournament, that a new thread related to what needs to be said needed to be made.
Measured in terms of number of games of quizbowl played by teams on quality questions, the Weekend of Quizbowl was certainly a successful event. However, some of us who moderated over the weekend wish to make known a number of issues we had with the mode of the tournament's operation and direction. From beginning to end, the tournament suffered from poor planning, ad hoc decision-making, and inadequate organization, to the detriment of the experiences of many of the teams in attendance. In addition, we feel that many
of Chris Ray's actions before, during, and after the tournament displayed an unfortunate disrespect towards players, moderators, teams, and the norms of the quiz bowl community. We write not to attack Chris's intentions or his character, but to condemn some of his actions. While we applaud his initiative and his ongoing advocacy for the game, the Weekend of Quizbowl bordered on a fiasco, and it's important to the future of the game and the community that Chris's mistakes not be repeated.
Directing a high school quiz bowl tournament is a challenge not to be taken lightly. A tournament director must make sure dozens or hundreds of players move efficiently through a building over the course of ten hours. Skilled volunteers must read out hundreds of accurate questions. A first-time TD hardly ever does anything perfectly. When we volunteered to help at the WoQ, we generally expected Chris Ray, who had directed at least one high school tournament before and had played in dozens during his high school career, to be capable of putting on a solid event. Instead, the weekend was wracked with irregular scheduling, haphazard staffing, and telltale signs of inadequate planning.
Many elementary steps that could have been taken to ensure that the tournament would run efficiently and with a minimum of chaos were not. Instead of noting before or during registration where each buzzer system would be used, moderators were told to just grab a buzzer system when they headed out to their rooms. This resulted in confusion when the tournament concluded Sunday evening as teams trolled around the game rooms to collect their buzzers, unsure where, or whether, they would find them.
The most egregious logistical issues with the tournament centered around the ranking and rebracketing for the playoffs on both Saturday and Sunday. The planned schedule for Saturday included two re-brackets: one after the six preliminary rounds, and one after an initial three rounds of playoffs. Rebracketing for playoffs is a time-consuming process. Rarely does a tournament proceed from the end of the last tossup in a preliminary round to the first round of playoffs in less than half an hour. On Saturday, the first re-bracketing took place over lunchtime and proceeded fairly smoothly, but the second one took well over an hour. In the meantime, staff members had to leave, and many teams no longer in contention for the championship lost interest in continuing to play. In the end, the final three power-matched rounds and the finals did not conclude until 9pm, which is far later than any high school tournament should run. On Sunday, playoff brackets that were supposed to be ready for announcing at 1:30 were not announced until 2:15, with games not starting until 2:30. By the time the playoff round-robin was concluded at around 5, half an hour after the TD had promised the tournament would end, two of the teams in contention for the championship - Dorman's A and B teams - had to depart to catch their flight. The TD interrupted a meaningful match (TJ A vs. Charter) to suggest the moderator wrap up the match as quickly as possible sothe winner could be swept away in a rush to play a Dorman A team, that by the time the TD could do anything about it, had left. When trying to determine how to run a meaningful final when one of two undefeated teams had left the building, Chris endorsed in discussions with other staffers the idea of making Dorman co-champions with the winner of an advantaged final between TJ A and Charter, yet the results post on the forums half-jokingly listed Dorman's teams as 11th and 12th, since they had apparently forfeited by hurrying to catch their flight home. Chris completely backtracked on his decision (a fair one in our opinions) that Dorman be considered as champions and mocked them by placing them in a lower position than several teams that had left even earlier.
In light of the gross delays experienced during the WoQ, we find Chris's attitude towards teams who chose to leave early stunning. Even though in an ideal world every high school quiz bowl team would have the energy to play 12 rounds of quiz bowl even when they were no longer in contention for a championship, that simply is not the way the world works. It should not be surprising that Division II teams with losing records chose to leave the tournament early rather than hang around for half-hearted consolation matches. His attitude towards teams at the tournament was sometimes unprofessional; at one point the tournament director offered a top player "hos, cars and blow" to enjoy the privilege of playing collegiate quizbowl at his own university and then on a public forum once more solicited for his own team, despite not having any position of authority on that team and not being possessed of a right to represent that team in this fashion.
Chris's approach to finding staff for this tournament struck us as both arrogant and short-sighted. Some of us were not asked explicitly to help at the tournament, and were merely assumed to be coming by virtue of being Washington-area college students. The Richmond contingent, who made up about a fourth of the moderators on Saturday, had to wait until the week before the tournament to get a promise that their hotel expenses of under $100 would be reimbursed. This entitled approach to recruiting staff probably explains why on Sunday, the tournament was 4 or 5 moderators short of the necessary contingent, requiring the recruitment of coaches into moderating duty. We know that in some areas, coaches do basically all of the moderating at tournaments, but it is not the usual protocol in the mid-Atlantic. Aside from being unfair to the players who must operate for a day without their coaches, the Tournament Director has not had a chance to go over rules and expectations with coaches who moderate. A TD can't know how coaches will react to protests, mistakes, or any of the other things that can knock a quiz bowl match of the tracks. More reprehensible than recruiting coaches as moderators, however, was the fact that on Saturday, one member at a time of TJ's 5-person C team was conscripted to moderate during the prelims. To have a player moderate at a tournament at which they are paying to play in is patently absurd. The limiting factor on the size of a quiz bowl tournament ought always to be the number of competent moderators available. Not volunteers from the audience, but experienced quiz
bowlers who can finish 20/20 in 25 minutes, handle protests, and pronounce "Goethe". If not enough such individuals are available, then the thing to do is recruit and train inexperienced volunteers before the tournament, not trust in the good will of the coaches in attendance.
The reason that coaches (and even players) can generally be trusted to step up when there's a gap in staffing at a tournament is that quiz bowl is a community based on camaraderie and volunteerism. Outside of occasional travel reimbursements, nobody ever gets paid to moderate. We all volunteered to read at WoQ because we wanted to support the teams in attendance and provide them with competent moderation. Volunteers make tournaments work. So when a TD needs a coach or a parent or two to read at the last minute, usually someone will step up, because that is how our game works. But when volunteer recruitment is entirely last minute, and three or four coaches are needed to even run all the games promised to teams, then something is amiss.
Programs run tournaments to support their attendance at other tournaments, and quiz bowl money generally remains within the system, with outflows to NAQT, airlines, buzzer manufacturers, and facilities fees. If you're going to try to profit from quiz bowl, it is necessary to provide a compelling product. Chris, while doing a good job of bringing good teams, good questions, and good moderators together in the same building, did little else to make his product seem worthwhile. The questions were purchased from other sources, the facility was obtained by the efforts of Dr. Chuck, and the card-matching system was put together by Dan Schafer. While Chris requested one tournament set in a week an advance to "edit" it, he did absolutely no work on the set, leaving in vulgarities, baffling references to collegiate players not well-known to high school players, and questions the tournament director himself decried as "hoses" and "poor questions" while playing the tournament. Chris essentially acted as a middleman for the teams in attendance. This would have been fine, and fairly inoffensive to us and to the community, had Chris put in the effort to turn the components he procured into a well-run tournament. Instead, from the moment it began, the tournament lacked direction. Chris himself opted to moderate both days, leaving other volunteers in the war room. The tournament director was generally too occupied with games to consider the direction of the tournament. The chaos surrounding rebracketing on both days was atrocious, the promised doubles tournament almost did not happen, and teams often had no idea where they were
going. Chris charged teams $200 for two tournaments, about a 100% premium over the going rate, and what teams got in return was questions they could have heard anywhere and organization that would have put to shame a seventh grader with a checklist entitled "How to Run a Quiz Bowl Tournament".
Well, this is the part of the post I really think you guys are out of bounds with. First off, don't equate me with DACQ - I'm a partner, not the owner. While I ended up having to organize pretty much all aspects of this event (some at the last minute), this was not intended. It doesn't change the fact that I screwed up, but at the very least any money which I personally see from this event will in significant part be spent toward quizbowl. I'm not clear why you're criticizing the fact that Dr. Chuck offered us a place to host a tournament - would it be somehow more morally acceptable to have hosted it somewhere else? Dr. Chuck wanted a dry run for PACE (one that it definitely benefited us to use), and was able to get the rooms for free. I'm not sure who's harmed in this situation, and it's not like tournaments are run at our houses or anything. Likewise, Dan did me a favor by creating a card system that I applied to our schedule, and we used questions from NAQT and Illinois. What's the problem here? Illinois's team gets some extra money, and I hear one or two people have also hosted naqt events. As for the editing, we didn't receive the final set until the 11th hour for copying (and some of it not even until Saturday), and by that time I was so busy trying to assume the extra duties I ended up with and take care of other things that I just didn't have a chance. I should have removed some of the extraneous stuff, so I apologize for that, particularly if anyone was offended. As for moderation, you just established that we had a reader shortage and that I could hardly afford not to moderate. I should have found someone else to moderate during the rebracketing fiasco (which I did for 1 round), and that's entirely on me. It was a big mistake that I shouldn't have made.
On price: We charged $200 because we felt we were guaranteeing teams 24 games, and given that many tournaments charge around 60-100 for what usually amounts to 5-9 games, we thought it was warranted. Next year we'll be lowering the price both since in retrospect it was too high and because many teams were not interested in getting their money's worth. It's a lesson I learned, not a desire to scam anyone. Also, teams got an extremely satisfying opportunity to play good questions against great competition they wouldn't see anywhere else except nationals. That's hardly nothing. This part of your post seems to schizophrenically disregard the earlier assertion that the event was largely successful for about 25 teams.
We do not speak idly. Most of us have been in charge of, or at least part of, running high school tournaments in the past. To put on an exemplary tournament requires a superhuman effort, but Chris did not even put forth the effort to run a passably good one.
We wanted to air our grievances in order to work towards a better event next year. This is a really fantastic idea, and one that promises to really improve the quality of the high school circuit. However, the manner in which it was run this year was a disappointment. We encourage people to discuss this tournament in the context of what happened and what we have written and look forward to an excellent Weekend of Quizbowl '09.
I think it's presumptuous to declare I put forth bad effort. I messed up a ton of things and miscalculated perhaps even more, but I worked quite hard to make this work under a degrading series of problems with teams dropping, moderators canceling, my essential co-TD backing out, and a few other entertaining developments. I accept pretty much everything here as a testament to the ways in which I screwed up and things I will avoid next year, except for this. You guys have no reason to declare anything about my effort level, and it's way off base.
I hope players had a good time at WoQ. I've heard from many who did, and I offer my apologies to those who didn't - it was almost certainly due to my mistakes. Rest assured that the valid criticisms here and elsewhere will be more than taken into account next year.