The Problem of the West

[Wartortullian]

...or, "The Need for Top-Down Efforts in Quizbowl Expansion"

Recently, there's been a lot of discussion in the Discord on the barriers expanding college quizbowl in various regions. The goal of this post is to outline the structural factors opposing quizbowl expansion in the western US, and to investigate how these factors might be ameliorated.

What I mean when I say "the West":

I'm most familiar with the Mountain West (which I'm defining fairly broadly to include Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), and as such, most of my comments will pertain to those states. However, similar systemic factors affect the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho) and the Great Plains (the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma). To a lesser extent, they affect Texas and California as well (particularly SoCal), but the presence of strong college teams masks this.

Barriers:

Distance: This is the most obvious one. Colleges are just further apart out west, so a student needs to be more committed before they're willing to attend a tournament. This makes it significantly harder to retain people and grow clubs.

Transportation: Similar to, but distinct from the distance issue, is the fact a car is generally necessary to attend a tournament at a school in different metro area (or occasionally the same one!). Even in California, which actually has intercity rail, train schedules are often so inconvenient as to make quizbowl travel infeasible. Because it's so rare to find several colleges in the same city out here, a burgeoning quizbowl club generally can't play anything until they have access to a car.

School quality: This is, admittedly, somewhat controversial. However, when the barriers to attending tournaments are high, the critical mass of quizbowl interest required to sustain a team is also high, and the probability of reaching that barrier is vanishingly small at all but the largest or most selective schools. This is not to say that people who attend less prestigious schools are inferior in any way, or that an intellectually curious person won't have a reason to attend one, or that these institutions can't produce good scholarship—only that the sorts of people who play quizbowl are more likely attend a small fraction of colleges. Said colleges, simply due to population density are just a lot rarer in the West (with the exception of California and Texas).

Quizbowl tournament sparsity: The easier it is to attend tournaments, the greater the reward of putting in the work to establish a club. However, all of the above factors reinforce each other to drive down the frequency and spatial density of tournaments, which make running a club a less appealing task. As such, quizbowl faces a chicken-and-egg problem: finding someone willing to start a team will be nearly impossible at many schools until the only barrier to tournament attendance is a 30 minute bus ride, but that will not happen until most schools have teams.

What has not worked:

The intramural model: This is a pattern I've seen in the past, most notably with UC Colorado Springs. NAQT reaches out to the student activities offices of colleges without quizbowl clubs and tells them "hey, quizbowl is a thing! you should run an intramural tournament on our set and send the winning team to Sectionals" (I'm inferring that this is how it works; someone correct me if I'm wrong). The school does that, the top players—who rarely have actual quizbowl experience—get sent to SCT, and proceed to lose to a bunch of the better DII teams and maybe eke out a win against a couple C teams.
They then become discouraged because they don't even realize that studying for quizbowl or holding regular practices is a thing, and they think all these people are just intrinsically better at quizbowl than them, and the other schools must've had more competitive intramurals. The students and club administration people see NAQT as synonymous with quizbowl, so they don't send teams to ACF tournaments or housewrites, and it doesn't grow the circuit. Eventually, the school stops sending teams because whoever was in charge of running the intramural got busy with other things or took a different job.

Asking colleges to send teams to tournaments: We've gotten some interest in the past from honors programs and activities offices (primarily the former). However, this has never worked for more than a one-off tournament attendance.

Reaching out to former high school quizbowlers: I believe this may be effective in Colorado in the long run, but for now, most teams which we've tried to start via this method have petered out. Considering the substantial difficulties in running a team out here, it's extremely difficult to find people willing to do so. Furthermore, dedicated quizbowlers will often gravitate toward state flagships, and in some states, might be likely to leave the state altogether due to the "school quality" issues I discussed above. To use Idaho as an example, I don't recall any iteration of Boise A, Treasure Valley A, or Timberline A for which the top players stayed in-state for college.

What has worked:

By far, the most consistent quizbowl programs in the Mountain West are Colorado and Boise State. Both of these teams were started with the heavy involvement of a faculty member, and in the case of BSU, Colin still takes an active role in the club to this day. A dedicated faculty advisor can take on most of the administrative duties that bewilder potential club founders, allowing the club to incubate new players while the it grows and ensuring that it continues to exist after its first tournament. The advisor can either continue indefinitely, occasionally delegating tasks to students (e.g. BSU), or can hand off the reigns to a dedicated player once the club is sufficiently established (e.g. CU). Because it significantly lowers the barriers to quizbowl participation, I believe that such an approach is the best way to start a team at a new institution, and possibly the only approach likely to work at most Western schools.

What could work:

Sadly, the above approach will be unworkable on a large scale until ex-quizbowlers have teaching positions at a significant fraction of institutions. As such, we need a way to jump-start an analogous process without relying on individual faculty. Here's what I propose:

We need a top-down effort to reach out to institutions and have them establish clubs, possibly as part of a larger "quizbowl league." Not sending a team to one tournament. Not holding an intramural qualifier. CLUBS. Such a thing needs to be coordinated on a regional level (or within athletic conferences), with different activities offices aware of each others efforts, and with clear plans to host practices and attend tournaments. Obviously, everything should be fully funded as well.

Now, we obviously need to make sure that such an organization still has the best interests of quizbowl at heart, that players still have a strong voice in how their clubs are run, that student-led clubs can remain independent without being isolated from the new teams, and that the rest of the quizbowl landscape remains relatively unchanged. It may not be perfect, and we may need to make concessions (not sure what they'd be), but the potential benefits are so immense that I'm willing to do so. There was a time when I would have been hesitant to sacrifice even the slightest amount of autonomy for more institutional support, but I've since come around on that. As much as I hate club bureaucracy, the barriers to quizbowl make it a necessary evil for many schools.

I'm not sure who would organize this, if anyone. Perhaps ACF? Perhaps NAQT? I'm not clear on what happened with the ACUI thing, maybe that could be revived? I'm not even sure if it's possible. All I know is that, unless something like this happens, college quizbowl will remain a frustrating experience throughout large swaths of the US.

[Wartortullian]

I could probably have been more clear about this in my original post: this wouldn't just help in the West, but all over quizbowl. We'd probably see massively expanded field sizes at low dfficulties as many regionally-focused masters universities start fielding teams, even if they would be unlikely to start clubs under the current system. The set of schools with people willing to join quizbowl teams but not start them is pretty large—I know for a fact that Colorado Mesa (a school whose population is mostly "kids from Grand Junction who wanted to stay close to home") would probably have an active club if it were institutionally managed.

[cchiego]

Distance: This is the most obvious one. Colleges are just further apart out west, so a student needs to be more committed before they're willing to attend a tournament. This makes it significantly harder to retain people and grow clubs.

Transportation: Similar to, but distinct from the distance issue, is the fact a car is generally necessary to attend a tournament at a school in different metro area (or occasionally the same one!). Even in California, which actually has intercity rail, train schedules are often so inconvenient as to make quizbowl travel infeasible. Because it's so rare to find several colleges in the same city out here, a burgeoning quizbowl club generally can't play anything until they have access to a car.

These seem to be the most-unique issues to Quizbowl out West (both at the HS and Collegiate levels), so here are some ideas: Is there a way that more Western tournaments could do 2-3 events in one weekend? It seems like this might help schools get more bang-for-their buck and 2-3 long trips per year resulting in 4-6 events seems better than just 2-3 total. In terms of housing, could these teams try to do more to find places for players coming from other schools to crash with host team members, etc. to lower the costs of getting hotels? While it would also be nice to lower the mirror costs and such for Western mirrors to account for these structural issues, I doubt that would matter too much and there would likely be pushback by other circuits. It also seems ideal to try to find more places where there are schools relatively close together to try to develop stronger circuits in those places first (the Front Range corridor, SoCal, the Bay Area, the Seattle-Willamette Valley corridor, etc.), but then that gets into some of the stark inequities mentioned in Matt's post between the flagship state schools/systems vs. other schools.

By far, the most consistent quizbowl programs in the Mountain West are Colorado and Boise State. Both of these teams were started with the heavy involvement of a faculty member, and in the case of BSU, Colin still takes an active role in the club to this day. A dedicated faculty advisor can take on most of the administrative duties that bewilder potential club founders, allowing the club to incubate new players while the it grows and ensuring that it continues to exist after its first tournament. The advisor can either continue indefinitely, occasionally delegating tasks to students (e.g. BSU), or can hand off the reigns to a dedicated player once the club is sufficiently established (e.g. CU). Because it significantly lowers the barriers to quizbowl participation, I believe that such an approach is the best way to start a team at a new institution, and possibly the only approach likely to work at most Western schools.

Sadly, the above approach will be unworkable on a large scale until ex-quizbowlers have teaching positions at a significant fraction of institutions.

It's not just a matter of a lack of quizbowl alumni (I suspect if someone went back through local, CBI, and older NAQT/ACF alumni you'd find a decent number of them now in college teaching positions), but rather the incentives for involved sponsorship. There's a bit of a Catch-22 here with the faculty sponsor issue in that the institutions most likely to look favorably upon faculty sponsorship of an unheard-of, interdisciplinary student activity like quizbowl are smaller liberal arts colleges, teaching-oriented state colleges, and some community colleges. In contrast, the incentives for faculty at flagship state schools (where you'll likely get a lot of whatever HS quizbowl alumni who stay in-state) will be to focus your time on research and avoid things like sponsoring a time-consuming student activity. And even if you get a happy combination of both lots of HS quizbowl alumni and a school that might value sponsorship at a place like Colorado Mesa, you're then like 4+ hours away from any other schools and subject to the other distance issues mentioned above.

Keep in mind too that at the schools that might value service in the form of advising a student organization, many departments will only view sponsoring something specifically related to their department as a form of service (Mock Trial and Model UN in Political Science for instance, various quizbowlish things in Athletic Training, business, agriculture sciences, etc.). In this case, quizbowl's interdisciplinary nature is not helpful. The ideal I suppose would be to find some already-tenured professors, perhaps associated with a school's Honors Program (thus the interdisciplinary part), who are willing and able to sponsor quizbowl. Maybe just reaching out to more faculty would be helpful (I'm sure many of them have children who might be interested in quizbowl too, so HS quizbowl expansion could at least put this on the radar of more professors and potentially lead to more people in the state's education establishment thinking about quizbowl), but I'm not sure you'd get many takers even of quizbowl alumni. It couldn't hurt to ask though if there was some group willing to put time into it.

A more fanciful plan is to try to get quizbowl on TV or some streaming service, especially for an athletic conference. That would likely get the admin to be willing to put resources behind it, but seems quite difficult to make happen unless someone from the Mountain West or PAC-12 is reading this post and feels inspired or quizbowl figures out how to lobby rich, powerful people and organizations.

We need a top-down effort to reach out to institutions and have them establish clubs, possibly as part of a larger "quizbowl league." Not sending a team to one tournament. Not holding an intramural qualifier. CLUBS. Such a thing needs to be coordinated on a regional level (or within athletic conferences), with different activities offices aware of each others efforts, and with clear plans to host practices and attend tournaments. Obviously, everything should be fully funded as well.

I like the "league" idea in theory (it's similar to Michael Borecki's focus on athletic conferences in the other thread), but it seems in general student activities offices are not the best stewards of understanding quizbowl as an institutionalized club. From what I have seen, even in the CBI days the focus was more on offering an intramural as a one-shot on-campus activity with the possibility of a few students then getting to play a few more events. This is because student activities offices often want to offer activities that affect a lot of students on campus rather than repeatedly fund a tiny group of students to take expensive trips. I think a better approach would be to try to get the Honors Colleges/programs to institutionalize funding and support for a quizbowl club (and point to the potential fruits of using HS tournaments as recruitment opportunities, which I believe some schools already do--I think Montana's Honors College does, albeit with non-pyramidal questions), though given the current budget environment facing higher education right now I suspect any new spending would be a tough sell.

[Cody]

Liberty has successfully maintained a program with an Honors College affiliated advisor. It seems like an approach that could work well because the recruiting pool of the Honors College is also fertile ground.

[Wartortullian]

Thanks, Chris, these are all very useful perspectives.

These seem to be the most-unique issues to Quizbowl out West (both at the HS and Collegiate levels), so here are some ideas: Is there a way that more Western tournaments could do 2-3 events in one weekend? It seems like this might help schools get more bang-for-their buck and 2-3 long trips per year resulting in 4-6 events seems better than just 2-3 total. In terms of housing, could these teams try to do more to find places for players coming from other schools to crash with host team members, etc. to lower the costs of getting hotels? While it would also be nice to lower the mirror costs and such for Western mirrors to account for these structural issues, I doubt that would matter too much and there would likely be pushback by other circuits. It also seems ideal to try to find more places where there are schools relatively close together to try to develop stronger circuits in those places first (the Front Range corridor, SoCal, the Bay Area, the Seattle-Willamette Valley corridor, etc.), but then that gets into some of the stark inequities mentioned in Matt's post between the flagship state schools/systems vs. other schools.

So, we've actually considered this, and I've volunteered to let people crash on my floor in the past, but it's important to note that the temporal cost of long trips can comparable to the financial cost. Asking both players and staffers to take an extra day out of their life is extremely nontrivial, and there are many tournament weekends where I wouldn't be able to take both Saturday and Sunday off.

I like the "league" idea in theory (it's similar to Michael Borecki's focus on athletic conferences in the other thread), but it seems in general student activities offices are not the best stewards of understanding quizbowl as an institutionalized club. From what I have seen, even in the CBI days the focus was more on offering an intramural as a one-shot on-campus activity with the possibility of a few students then getting to play a few more events. This is because student activities offices often want to offer activities that affect a lot of students on campus rather than repeatedly fund a tiny group of students to take expensive trips. I think a better approach would be to try to get the Honors Colleges/programs to institutionalize funding and support for a quizbowl club (and point to the potential fruits of using HS tournaments as recruitment opportunities, which I believe some schools already do--I think Montana's Honors College does, albeit with non-pyramidal questions), though given the current budget environment facing higher education right now I suspect any new spending would be a tough sell.

Excellent point. In general, our sticking points with honors college have been more related to explaining how holding regular practices works, and ensuring some sort of continuity after they send a team to their first tournament. However, I think these could probably be overcome with more concerted efforts, and I'll recommend that our club consider it in the future. It might still be a good idea to have help from a national organization on this, but it's certainly something we could try again ourselves.

[vathreya]

Re: travel - I think more can be done to help newer clubs find sources of funding. Travel is a pain because funding is relatively hard to come by (in the case of UW, our school's student organization travel fund literally ran out in December, so we couldn't use it to fund trips to Regs and ICT (rip)). An excellent source of funding could be the creation of a local high school circuit (the revenue we get from hosting tournaments at UW is enough for us to make the one or two trips we take outside not prohibitively expensive).

In addition, I think that while top-down outreach efforts are good, there can be more done to help gather interest among students. Perhaps during outreach efforts, in addition to saying "here are packets + the forums" we could also say "here's a sample club constitution" and "here's a sample email to faculty". Additionally, online circuits are a great way to create interest among students. I think the presence of an online circuit can do wonders to help get interested students integrated with the greater quiz bowl community and provide them with an opportunity to participate without having to deal with club bureaucracies (thanks a lot to Colin McNamara of Boise State for organizing a relatively online circuit for the Pacific Northwest/Mountain West).

For clubs that are already somewhat self-sustaining, getting underclassmen and/or newer members to help out with administrative tasks can go a long way to ensure continuity. For clubs with students who are interested in quiz bowl/participate in the online circuit, this, I believe, is where top-down recruitment would have the most impact. Without an existing pool of interested students, faculty advisors might find their efforts futile and make quiz bowl a very low priority. Without a faculty advisor, students might be put off by the bureaucratic work needed to create and sustain a club. Perhaps more could be done to connect motivated students with motivated faculty members, so that they can help each other in outreach efforts.

In conclusion, I think that both top-down and bottom-up recruiting efforts are necessary for success with outreach (at least at the collegiate level). Students and faculty should be able to share the burden of outreach, rather than deal with it separately.

[tiwonge]

Distance: This is the most obvious one. Colleges are just further apart out west, so a student needs to be more committed before they're willing to attend a tournament. This makes it significantly harder to retain people and grow clubs.

Transportation: Similar to, but distinct from the distance issue, is the fact a car is generally necessary to attend a tournament at a school in different metro area (or occasionally the same one!). Even in California, which actually has intercity rail, train schedules are often so inconvenient as to make quizbowl travel infeasible. Because it's so rare to find several colleges in the same city out here, a burgeoning quizbowl club generally can't play anything until they have access to a car.

These seem to be the most-unique issues to Quizbowl out West (both at the HS and Collegiate levels), so here are some ideas: Is there a way that more Western tournaments could do 2-3 events in one weekend? It seems like this might help schools get more bang-for-their buck and 2-3 long trips per year resulting in 4-6 events seems better than just 2-3 total. In terms of housing, could these teams try to do more to find places for players coming from other schools to crash with host team members, etc. to lower the costs of getting hotels? While it would also be nice to lower the mirror costs and such for Western mirrors to account for these structural issues, I doubt that would matter too much and there would likely be pushback by other circuits. It also seems ideal to try to find more places where there are schools relatively close together to try to develop stronger circuits in those places first (the Front Range corridor, SoCal, the Bay Area, the Seattle-Willamette Valley corridor, etc.), but then that gets into some of the stark inequities mentioned in Matt's post between the flagship state schools/systems vs. other schools.

I've tried asking people if they could host an incoming quiz bowl team, but I think most of the current club lives in dorms. (This is common with first-year and second-year students that make up our club.) In the past, I've been able to find people to host incoming teams, but often times, this can't be done. However, I agree that this would considerably decrease the cost of travel (although not the time involved, which is probably a bigger hurdle).

I'm not sure what hosting two events would look like. A regular tournament and a side tournament? A regular one and a trash one? (UW used to do this occasionally.) Tournaments of two different difficulties? Two tournaments of the same difficulty? A side event could be done on the same day. Two full-length tournaments wouldn't leave much time for travel back.

Honestly, the travel time is a bigger deal than the cost of the tournament. When UW hosts a tournament, BSU has sent multiple teams because the club can get the university to pay for airfare, significantly reducing the travel time. When BSU hosts, UW sends one (this year) or two (last year) players, because it's a significant commitment to drive. (Also, it doesn't help that it's kind of early in the year with their quarter system to drum up a lot of interest.) I don't know that hosting two tournaments or events on a weekend significantly affects that. I don't know that having two tournaments happen will make more people want to drive the 8 hours.

By far, the most consistent quizbowl programs in the Mountain West are Colorado and Boise State. Both of these teams were started with the heavy involvement of a faculty member, and in the case of BSU, Colin still takes an active role in the club to this day. A dedicated faculty advisor can take on most of the administrative duties that bewilder potential club founders, allowing the club to incubate new players while the it grows and ensuring that it continues to exist after its first tournament. The advisor can either continue indefinitely, occasionally delegating tasks to students (e.g. BSU), or can hand off the reigns to a dedicated player once the club is sufficiently established (e.g. CU). Because it significantly lowers the barriers to quizbowl participation, I believe that such an approach is the best way to start a team at a new institution, and possibly the only approach likely to work at most Western schools.

Sadly, the above approach will be unworkable on a large scale until ex-quizbowlers have teaching positions at a significant fraction of institutions.

I'll also mention that UW has been able to be stable and successful because of the presence of Mike Bentley. I've taken it on myself to try to provide something of that role to BYU and U of Idaho. I at least chat with their club leaders, and at the end of the semester (happening soon!), I make sure I know who to contact for the next year so that I can keep them tied into the circuit. This is helpful, especially for new programs. It doesn't that *that* much effort from somebody else in the local circuit to occasionally check up on them, talk to them about their plans, and include them in planning for the tournament schedule. (I've also tried to help them get some high school tournaments going so that they can try to make some money and establish a local circuit. This does take more work.)

It's not just a matter of a lack of quizbowl alumni (I suspect if someone went back through local, CBI, and older NAQT/ACF alumni you'd find a decent number of them now in college teaching positions), but rather the incentives for involved sponsorship. There's a bit of a Catch-22 here with the faculty sponsor issue in that the institutions most likely to look favorably upon faculty sponsorship of an unheard-of, interdisciplinary student activity like quizbowl are smaller liberal arts colleges, teaching-oriented state colleges, and some community colleges. In contrast, the incentives for faculty at flagship state schools (where you'll likely get a lot of whatever HS quizbowl alumni who stay in-state) will be to focus your time on research and avoid things like sponsoring a time-consuming student activity. And even if you get a happy combination of both lots of HS quizbowl alumni and a school that might value sponsorship at a place like Colorado Mesa, you're then like 4+ hours away from any other schools and subject to the other distance issues mentioned above.

Keep in mind too that at the schools that might value service in the form of advising a student organization, many departments will only view sponsoring something specifically related to their department as a form of service (Mock Trial and Model UN in Political Science for instance, various quizbowlish things in Athletic Training, business, agriculture sciences, etc.). In this case, quizbowl's interdisciplinary nature is not helpful. The ideal I suppose would be to find some already-tenured professors, perhaps associated with a school's Honors Program (thus the interdisciplinary part), who are willing and able to sponsor quizbowl. Maybe just reaching out to more faculty would be helpful (I'm sure many of them have children who might be interested in quizbowl too, so HS quizbowl expansion could at least put this on the radar of more professors and potentially lead to more people in the state's education establishment thinking about quizbowl), but I'm not sure you'd get many takers even of quizbowl alumni. It couldn't hurt to ask though if there was some group willing to put time into it.

The Speech & Debate team here is very successful, but is well-funded and has the support of the Communications department (including a faculty member as a coach).

The Education department sponsors E-sports, which has also been very successful very quickly. (Both the Speech & Debate and Esports host high school competitions on campus, as well.)

I've made half-hearted attempts to try to find sponsorship in the university. I had small success with the Honors Department in the past, but I haven't girded myself up for the effort of trying to grab the attention of like an Academic dean of somebody who might be in more of a position to be interested in a multidisciplinary activity.

A more fanciful plan is to try to get quizbowl on TV or some streaming service, especially for an athletic conference. That would likely get the admin to be willing to put resources behind it, but seems quite difficult to make happen unless someone from the Mountain West or PAC-12 is reading this post and feels inspired or quizbowl figures out how to lobby rich, powerful people and organizations.

Many years ago, I had a fanciful idea of contacting the WAC about something like that. They weren't dismissive, but they also wouldn't offer anything to help out in a conference type tournament. I think they said that if I did the work of organizing it, etc., that they might recognize it. It might be worth it to try again, but other than publicity (after doing the work ourselves), I don't know how much support we'd get from that.

We need a top-down effort to reach out to institutions and have them establish clubs, possibly as part of a larger "quizbowl league." Not sending a team to one tournament. Not holding an intramural qualifier. CLUBS. Such a thing needs to be coordinated on a regional level (or within athletic conferences), with different activities offices aware of each others efforts, and with clear plans to host practices and attend tournaments. Obviously, everything should be fully funded as well.

I like the "league" idea in theory (it's similar to Michael Borecki's focus on athletic conferences in the other thread), but it seems in general student activities offices are not the best stewards of understanding quizbowl as an institutionalized club. From what I have seen, even in the CBI days the focus was more on offering an intramural as a one-shot on-campus activity with the possibility of a few students then getting to play a few more events. This is because student activities offices often want to offer activities that affect a lot of students on campus rather than repeatedly fund a tiny group of students to take expensive trips. I think a better approach would be to try to get the Honors Colleges/programs to institutionalize funding and support for a quizbowl club (and point to the potential fruits of using HS tournaments as recruitment opportunities, which I believe some schools already do--I think Montana's Honors College does, albeit with non-pyramidal questions), though given the current budget environment facing higher education right now I suspect any new spending would be a tough sell.

Even having a quiz bowl league doesn't solve the problem of travel times. The only thing that solves that problem is getting funding to fly instead of drive.

[tiwonge]

Re: travel - I think more can be done to help newer clubs find sources of funding. Travel is a pain because funding is relatively hard to come by (in the case of UW, our school's student organization travel fund literally ran out in December, so we couldn't use it to fund trips to Regs and ICT (rip)). An excellent source of funding could be the creation of a local high school circuit (the revenue we get from hosting tournaments at UW is enough for us to make the one or two trips we take outside not prohibitively expensive).

In addition, I think that while top-down outreach efforts are good, there can be more done to help gather interest among students. Perhaps during outreach efforts, in addition to saying "here are packets + the forums" we could also say "here's a sample club constitution" and "here's a sample email to faculty". Additionally, online circuits are a great way to create interest among students. I think the presence of an online circuit can do wonders to help get interested students integrated with the greater quiz bowl community and provide them with an opportunity to participate without having to deal with club bureaucracies (thanks a lot to Colin McNamara of Boise State for organizing a relatively online circuit for the Pacific Northwest/Mountain West).

I gave U of Idaho our constitution to help them get started. It might be helpful, in general, to have a few different examples of club constitutions available for new clubs to use as a model.

For clubs that are already somewhat self-sustaining, getting underclassmen and/or newer members to help out with administrative tasks can go a long way to ensure continuity. For clubs with students who are interested in quiz bowl/participate in the online circuit, this, I believe, is where top-down recruitment would have the most impact. Without an existing pool of interested students, faculty advisors might find their efforts futile and make quiz bowl a very low priority. Without a faculty advisor, students might be put off by the bureaucratic work needed to create and sustain a club. Perhaps more could be done to connect motivated students with motivated faculty members, so that they can help each other in outreach efforts.

In conclusion, I think that both top-down and bottom-up recruiting efforts are necessary for success with outreach (at least at the collegiate level). Students and faculty should be able to share the burden of outreach, rather than deal with it separately.

Not just top-down or bottom-up, but I think that there's also room for parallel efforts. If clubs will look out for other local clubs, especially in times of transition (a president graduates, making sure that the new president is integrated into the circuit planning), this helps the stability of the circuit. It would be a good thing if more stable clubs take it upon themselves at the end of each year to make sure they know who's going to be in charge of other schools' clubs the following year, and reaching out to those people at the end of the summer.

[Mike Bentley]

I'll add more later, but regarding transportation, the Pacific Northwest has the additional challenge of the winter being a dangerous time to travel by car. The Cascade mountain passes often require chains during winter due to snow. People are often not comfortable driving in these conditions. In the days when I used to drive UW teams to Boise State, we got caught in a storm once and had to spend the night near the mountain pass. Luckily two team members at the time had family members on the other side of the mountains where we could stay.

I'm skeptical that bundling tournaments together on one weekend will have a positive effect on field sizes at least until the circuit gets more mature. You have to be pretty dedicated to play two quizbowl tournaments in one weekend. Even more so when there's long transportation on either end of it.

[tiwonge]

I'll add more later, but regarding transportation, the Pacific Northwest has the additional challenge of the winter being a dangerous time to travel by car. The Cascade mountain passes often require chains during winter due to snow. People are often not comfortable driving in these conditions. In the days when I used to drive UW teams to Boise State, we got caught in a storm once and had to spend the night near the mountain pass. Luckily two team members at the time had family members on the other side of the mountains where we could stay.

I'm skeptical that bundling tournaments together on one weekend will have a positive effect on field sizes at least until the circuit gets more mature. You have to be pretty dedicated to play two quizbowl tournaments in one weekend. Even more so when there's long transportation on either end of it.

The University of Idaho skipped out on the SCT this year because of travel concerns. At least twice in the last 4 years, tournaments have been canceled/postponed/had fields reduced because of snow. (Actually, I think these were both SCT tournaments.)