Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

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cchiego
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Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by cchiego »

I want to briefly offer a few reasons for why "professionalism" in quizbowl is an important thing for every team, event, and organization in quizbowl to strive to achieve. I define "professionalism" as reliably treating all teams and individuals with respect and acting like quizbowl is a serious co-curricular activity in terms of communications and actions before, during, and after quizbowl-related events. While this post is partially in response to events this year, it's also a compilation of many things that I've seen in nearly two decades of involvement with quizbowl.

Every time you run an event or communicate with a school, you are representing quizbowl as a whole. The actions of a tournament's TD and staff (and even other teams involved in quizbowl) before, during, and after an event will go a long way towards determining the quality of the quizbowl experience for newer teams as well as the degree of legitimacy and support that quizbowl gets more broadly. While the former is most important and should always be a top priority, the latter is very important as well in terms of bringing in more teams and players to the game in the long run. The greater the extent to which quizbowl is viewed as "an extracurricular our school/district can support and be proud of" rather than "some weird insular trivia thing," the better for everyone involved with quizbowl. Thus, having more well-run events that give more teams and players good experiences is an important interest of quizbowl more broadly. Remember too that staff members are a key part of this equation, both as representatives of quizbowl to teams (e.g. having a middle schooler read solo for high school or college teams is generally not a good look and can put an unfair burden on a young staffer) and as professionals themselves who deserve fair treatment and respect (remember that staffers often have many things they could be doing other than staffing quizbowl events on their weekends; value them and their time).

Outreach means nothing without positive experiences. Getting new teams to attend events is one thing, but if the event is poorly organized or the team has a bad experience, that is worse than if they had not even attended a quizbowl event because they will now leave with a negative impression of quizbowl. Sometimes, this is out of anyone's control; if a new team insists on showing up to a tournament that's clearly advertised as for experienced teams or chooses not to review freely available practice questions and study materials that they are directed to via links in emails, advice from the TD, etc. [edit: added this to clarify that TDs should provide this info, but that doesn't always mean teams will read/use it] beforehand, then that can't be helped. But as much as possible, ensuring that teams feel respected and fairly treated by tournament staff at all points throughout a tournament is a critical component of any quizbowl event. This means for instance, having clear procedures for what to do to resolve any unclear situations such as who makes the playoffs or how to respond to suspected cheating. The more standards that you have clearly laid out beforehand and can calmly explain when needed during an event, the better.

The discourse during an event matters. Letting players get away with spamming slurs or borderline memes in official chats for online events is unconscionable. Allowing the spamming of memes in any kind of official online event or in-jokes at in-person events is not likely to be a good look either. Tournament staff joking with members of one team during the event or appearing to be friendly only with certain teams can easily create legitimate negative perceptions in other teams. Teams should also be aware that saying things like "Oh this should be an easy W" or "Oooh they don't have Y player, this will be a cakewalk" and other things out loud before matches is also disrespectful. In addition to being consistently fair and unbiased in their public-facing dealings with teams, tournament staff and organizations should look for as many opportunities as possible to recognize and support teams who aren't in the top brackets during an event while still fairly awarding placements to and recognizing the best teams. Similarly, players and coaches should also conduct themselves professionally and offer tactful praise and support as needed to their opponents. A 300 point loss may either discourage or encourage a team, depending in large part on how the winning team acts.

Respond to mistakes with humility. If you legitimately mess up while running an event, you should take responsibility for it and not yell at teams who call you out on it. If you forgot to tell teams a new schedule or accidentally messed up rebracketing, you should take responsibility, apologize, and immediately correct the issue. Pretty much every experienced TD has made mistakes when running events before. The key is in how you respond to teams, especially if they have a legitimate point. And even if they do not have a legitimate point, responding coolly and calmly will look good as well, not only to the team that you are responding to but to other teams and staffers as well.

Accountability is a good thing. Quizbowl is better when there are more clear paths to accountability for players or teams. Letting in teams to high school tournaments without a clear accountability chain makes it much harder to hold players or teams accountable. Teams in quizbowl represent schools and those schools--and the relationship between sponsors and coaches and their teams--can be one way to hold people accountable.

Names send a message. Tournament names should, as much as possible, sound like events that a school principal or communications office would be proud to send out a press release about. In-jokes or excruciatingly cheesy acronyms will likely make it harder for sponsors to justify attending a specific tournament, much less promoting a team's performance at such an event. It should be no surprise that "National Academic Championship" or "College Bowl" sounds important to many schools and administrators in a way that alphabet soups of acronyms or cringe-worthy phrases might not. Team and individual names should also reflect similar standards. If pseudonyms must be used, make them standardized--NAQT's "X city Scholars" is a good example of an effective way to do this.

Professionalism is not something that is foisted by "Crooked Olds" trying to shut down bright young players who have new, innovative ideas. Professionalism is a way to ensure that all players competing at quizbowl events are treated respectfully, have positive experiences, and help sustain and expand both their own programs and the game of quizbowl as a whole. Professionalism is essential to the success of quizbowl as a broad extracurricular activity and in bringing in and retaining new schools and players at all levels. It costs relatively little to act with professionalism, but acting unprofessionally will negatively affect all of quizbowl as a whole.
Last edited by cchiego on Thu Jul 01, 2021 12:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Chris C.
Past: UGA/UCSD/Penn
Present: Solano County, CA
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meebles127
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Re: Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by meebles127 »

Thank you for making this post.
Chris Chiego wrote:Every time you run an event or communicate with a school, you are representing quizbowl as a whole.
This is one of the most important things that people tend to forget when running and/or participating in tournaments. Let's suppose High School A in school district X plays a tournament at a local high school. At that tournament, there are various high schoolers running around without chaperones, staffers behaving inappropriately, and their team is accosted by another team because they're not "good". High School A's coach is appalled by this situation and decides not to attend another quizbowl tournament and tells his principal about what occurred. High School A's principal could talk to the other high school principals in school district X and those principals may decide that they won't allow their students to attend quizbowl tournaments because of the potential liability/poor representation. That's one school district. Now suppose this is in a state that doesn't have a state org sponsoring quizbowl and the circuit could generally be considered emerging. High School A's principal may discuss his experience with quizbowl at the state principals conference (yes, these exist) and now you run the risk of turning off an entire region or state to quizbowl because of a bad experience at *one* tournament.

Ensure that your staff are behaving maturely and that all kids have some level of supervision.
Chris Chiego wrote:Outreach means nothing without positive experiences.
I encourage TDs and others engaging in outreach to also consider whether or not their outreach methods are sustainable and you're not just seeking profit from having an additional team play your event. I've been thinking about this a lot in the last year with all of the online-centric outreach that's taken place. Are you really doing the right thing when you invite a team who has never played quizbowl before to a tournament that you're running on a hard high school set? As Chris notes, it's one thing for a newer team to insist that they want to attend a tournament after being warned of its difficulty but it's a completely different story when you're inviting teams to tournaments for which the difficulty is entirely inappropriate or you're accepting all registrations regardless of whether or not the team is going to have anything remotely approaching an enjoyable experience just because you want their $70 registration fee. Don't invite teams to tournaments that will be too difficult for them and if you're running a tournament on a harder set, make it known that the set is difficult. Additionally, if you receive a registration from a newer or less-experienced team for a tournament running on a difficult set please explain to them that the set is probably not appropriate for them. This helps to avoid situations like this from occurring:

EDIT: To my knowledge, this team has not played a single quizbowl competition since this event, which took place in 2019. This is Not Good.

Image
Chris Chiego wrote:The discourse during an event matters.
I've seen a lot of issues with this over the last year, most of them boiling down to a lack of maturity, which frankly is quite pervasive in quizbowl as a whole. If you're running an online tournament and you have a chat for players you need to set clear expectations for what is and is not appropriate. I've been involved with close to two dozen tournaments in the last year and from what I've seen college players can handle themselves well while high schoolers generally can not. You really shouldn't need such a chat in the first place but if you choose to have one, set clear expectations and enforce them.

I touched on this earlier but please be conscious of what you're saying and how it will affect the experience of those around you. Don't belittle a team for not being "good". Don't tell a team that they don't matter if they don't have [Star Player] with them that day. And please, for the love of God, don't be a dick if you're beating a newer or less experienced team by hundreds of points. Recognise the other team for their good buzzes, show kindness, and be respectful. I've seen numerous situations of high-performing teams behaving quite poorly in matches against less experienced teams. Behaviour like this is what is limiting quizbowl's growth. You can live in a bubble all you want but quizbowl would not be sustainable if only the top 50 teams in the country were playing. Do you think NAQT would produce IS sets if they didn't have hundreds of teams playing them? Do you think we'd have the same number of house writes that we do right now if those sets were only played by forty teams?
Chris Chiego wrote:Respond to mistakes with humility.
One of the largest issues I've seen with online quizbowl discourse is legitimate criticism of events or organisations being reduced to a petty Youngs v. Olds argument. Ignoring criticisms of your tournament or organisation and instead choosing to double-down with ill-informed criticism of other tournaments or organisations is not an appropriate way to handle yourself. Listen to criticism and think about how you can improve going forward. Responding with something that essentially boils down to "I'm not going to listen to you because y'all are crooked olds" is not productive for anyone. Remember, how you respond to issues with your event is going to impact whether or not that school chooses to attend another quizbowl tournament.
Chris Chiego wrote:Accountability is a good thing.
Given that I've covered just about every point I want to make, I'm going to take the time to repeat my opinion on chaperones and why it's so important for teenagers to be accountable to someone. All middle and high school teams need to have a non-high school adult chaperone actively present in the tournament venue during the entirety of the competition. I am OK with allowing one adult to chaperone multiple teams from their school assuming that they're easily reachable by tournament staff in the event there is an issue with a team they're not actively watching. A lack of adults opens up many potential issues, one of which is liability. Having unaccompanied minors roaming about a high school or university campus opens the host institution up to liability while also reflecting poorly on quizbowl as a whole. If you were a high school administrator how would you feel if there were multiple groups of minors from area high schools roaming about your school without any supervision? What if one of those students is injured? On the flip side, what if you're the principal of the students roaming about a school, would you be confident in the ability of a group of unsupervised minors to behave appropriately and not reflect poorly on your school? A lack of supervision also leads to situations where misconduct can fester uncontrollably. What are you going to do as a tournament director if a student attending your tournament behaves inappropriately and you have no adult to contact to resolve the issue? How are you going to ensure that this student faces the appropriate consequences for their actions? Or that any adult is aware of the situation at all?

People have previously raised concerns about how requiring an adult chaperone would decrease accessibility to the game and while that may be true for some teams, frankly, I don't care because of the negative consequences it can have. Is it better for one school to not play quizbowl because they can't find an adult chaperone or would you rather have thirty area teams not able to compete because an incident happened at the host school that could've been prevented with adult supervision and now the administrators of that school are prohibiting future quizbowl competitions at their school? This is a very real possibility in areas where there are only one or two consistent hosts.

Most of the things I've said here are things I've been saying elsewhere for quite some time. I recognise that a lot of it is similar to the points that Chris already raised in his initial post but I wanted to get my thoughts out there. Please consider how your actions affect the experiences of those around you and the goals of quizbowl outreach. We're never going to be an activity with widespread appeal that consistently brings in and retains new schools if we don't clean up our act. As Chris said, behaving in a professional manner is quite simple and can improve the experiences of those throughout the game, but a lack of it will have long-lasting, negative consequences.

Do Better.
Last edited by meebles127 on Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Em Gunter
Club President, University of Virginia
Tournament Director, 2023 Chicago Open
Assistant Tournament Director, 2022 and 2023 ACF Nationals

Author of: My Guide to High School Outreach and So You Want to Buy a Buzzer System

"That's got to be one of the most useful skills anyone has ever gotten from quizbowl." -John Lawrence
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meebles127
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Re: Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by meebles127 »

This is a situation where I think quizbowl could learn a lot from other activities. In FIRST robotics, we have an ethos called "Gracious Professionalism" which is supposed to guide all of our actions both on and off the field.
Dr. Woodie Flowers wrote:With Gracious Professionalism, fierce competition and mutual gain are not separate notions. Gracious professionals learn and compete like crazy but treat one another with respect and kindness in the process. They avoid treating anyone like losers. No chest thumping tough talk, but no sticky-sweet platitudes either. Knowledge, competition, and empathy are comfortably blended.

In the long run, Gracious Professionalism is part of pursuing a meaningful life. One can add to society and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing one has acted with integrity and sensitivity.
This ethos encourages professionalism while also maintaining a balance between it and fun. Gracious Professionalism is supposed to show that it is possible to have an enjoyable competition experience where everyone learns something and is treated with kindness and respect. I'd encourage y'all to think about these words throughout your quizbowl journey.
Em Gunter
Club President, University of Virginia
Tournament Director, 2023 Chicago Open
Assistant Tournament Director, 2022 and 2023 ACF Nationals

Author of: My Guide to High School Outreach and So You Want to Buy a Buzzer System

"That's got to be one of the most useful skills anyone has ever gotten from quizbowl." -John Lawrence
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Cheynem
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Re: Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by Cheynem »

I thought about the ways in which I've been most of guilty of unprofessionalism over the years. I thought of two in particular:

1. Thinking of tournaments or practices as things that amused and entertained me, rather than trying to serve others or the teams attending. This includes stuff like slacking off on or skipping "boring" tasks like clean-up or set-up, talking loudly in a staff room, getting upset if I didn't get a "good" staffing assignment, doing unprofessional things like commenting on the questions in front of teams, reading packets loudly while other things are going on, etc. A lot of this is normal behavior, especially from new staffers, but all of this is unprofessional, even harmful to an extent. Staffing a tournament is serious business--you don't staff things just to have fun and entertain yourself.

2. Not thinking seriously when I talk, especially in social media settings. To be clear on this, I am not saying that you should never have a sense of humor or make jokes or be goofy. But rather, when you are talking about serious topics, you have to remember that everything you say has a ripple effect and in some way is representative of your school, your organization, or if you don't have any of those, quizbowl in general. There are countless times when I think on something I posted on the forums, on Facebook, on Discord, wherever, that I regret. Not in a "this will ruin my life, I said such horrible things" way, but in ways where I think "Man, I really didn't think that one through" or "I think that sounded way more offensive or hurtful than I intended." I like to talk, I talk a lot--sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad, and I think for me, and others who are like that, we need to consider when not talking or taking more time to think before we talk is the more professional approach.
Mike Cheyne
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Re: Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by etchdulac »

cchiego wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:25 am Respond to mistakes with humility. If you legitimately mess up while running an event, you should take responsibility for it and not yell at teams who call you out on it. If you forgot to tell teams a new schedule or accidentally messed up rebracketing, you should take responsibility, apologize, and immediately correct the issue. Pretty much every experienced TD has made mistakes when running events before. The key is in how you respond to teams, especially if they have a legitimate point. And even if they do not have a legitimate point, responding coolly and calmly will look good as well, not only to the team that you are responding to but to other teams and staffers as well.
I've TD approximately 100 events, and I cannot emphasize enough the importance of how you respond to mistakes and/or things going poorly. I would add these tips:

If as a TD you are put in a position to have to apologize for something, in writing or (especially) face to face, use "I" and/or "we". Do not pass the buck. Participants can see tournament staff in monolithic terms, and if you try to throw someone else under the bus, it reflects poorly on everyone.

If a situation had no ideal solution and instead had a least-unfair course of action, admit that. It is better to leave someone understanding that an effort was made toward equitability than to allow them to leave thinking they were arbitrarily (or perhaps intentionally) screwed over.

If you have to defend a staffer who has behaved correctly and followed the rules, do so firmly while also allowing someone to state their case. Feeling "heard out" or "listened to" is important to people, and there's a decent chance that they have not yet been given a thorough enough communication on a ruling or an incident.

If there's a protest resolution to be given that is complicated on contentious, if you are able, deliver the ruling yourself as TD, joining the staffer in the room. Start by outlining the information that was given to you, then go through what rules apply to the situation. People don't have to leave happy -- but they should leave having the best chance possible of understanding why a decision was made. Don't leave the room until you believe you've done that to the greatest extent you can.
Stephen Fontenot
Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance Deputy Director
Communications, UT Dallas
Strake Jesuit '96 -+-+- Southwestern '00
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Re: Why Professionalism in Quizbowl Matters

Post by osbornrj »

Having been in the roles of parent, coach, and TD this past season, there are a couple of things I'd like to add.

1) If you're a TD and state that you will send out trophies and/or prizes to the winning teams and individuals, this is something you should follow through on. It's a very, very bad look and extremely unprofessional to not send out the awards you committed to at the time people paid their registration fees. There were two tournaments I was really disappointed with because I paid the fees very promptly, yet the TDs/organizations seemed content to not hold up their end of the bargain. I won't publicly post the name of the company, but it took one place about 8 months to finally send a trophy, and I'm not sure they would've sent it at all had I not asked about it every couple of months. I will say it wasn't NAQT. They were great. There was a second tournament that never sent the 1st place individual medals they told my kids they would receive. I ended up ordering the medals myself and sending them to my kids since a couple of months had passed and I didn't want the TD to feel discouraged in terms of hosting future tournaments, but I also didn't want my kids to never receive the awards that an adult told them they'd get. Ordering the medals myself was fine for my kids, but I truly feel bad for the other individual winner from that same tournament whom I assume never got his medal, either. I wonder if some adults don't appreciate how much those medals and trophies can mean to a kid, especially if it's their first time winning anything. It's not so much the physical object, but what it represents, and the memories attached to it 10 or 20 years from now when the child looks back on it. I've ordered medals, so I know they're not very expensive, and ordering them online is pretty simple. I just think it's wrong for us adults to not follow through for the kids. I know we're all busy, but it's just too important not to do. If nothing else, it sets a bad example. As a TD, I made sure in advance that we had all the funds for the cash awards, medals and trophies, and then after the tournaments I checked, double-checked, and even triple-checked to be certain that all the awards were properly distributed. Thankfully the organization I was working with is extremely professional and was completely on top of it.

2) As a coach and a parent, it's pretty disheartening to see another coach complaining in public forums about a ruling they didn't like because it didn't go in their favor against your school's team. We're not just talking about "moderator discretion," either. We're talking about a ruling that was sent up to the control room where a final decision was rendered based upon rules that were clearly posted well before the tournament. I understand a ruling that doesn't go your way in a close match that's a critical game can be hard, and people get frustrated in the moment. Still, it's incredibly unprofessional to put it out there in writing, for a lot of people to read, that you feel you were cheated, the game was stolen, or whatever, against team X. I think it's disrespectful not just to the other team, but the organization that ran the tournament. Most people probably don't know what I'm talking about, but even if you do let's please not name teams or the tournament. I just want to discourage students, parents, and coaches from that sort of negativity about official rulings that are based upon established rules. Of course it's natural to want to vent, and people are free to vent. I'm just saying maybe do it in private rather than sharing it with potentially hundreds of people.
Robin Osborne
Alabama School of Cyber Technology and Engineering (parent)
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Greater Huntsville Section (Associate Fellow)
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