Building a quiz bowl team

[Mathlete]

In my area, it often seems like quiz bowl coaches in high and middle school start scouting for potential quiz bowlers with the math team, in hopes that they will be good all around, or at least have a decent probability of getting science questions right, if they accept there is no guarantee of all-around academic excellence based on math and science excellence.

From past observations mathletes on a quiz bowl team typically have a decent probability of getting math and science questions right, but are all over the place outside of math and science.

Here are my questions:

1) What could make a coach prioritize its school's math team for scouting, other than perceived weaknesses in math and science?
2) How would you build a middle/high school quiz bowl team, assuming you have to build one from scratch?

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[joshxu]

1) What could make a coach prioritize its school's math team for scouting, other than perceived weaknesses in math and science?

That's an interesting question! The answer will vary from school to school, and many (if not most) quiz bowl teams aren't formed by scouting from coaches at all. I can share from my own experience in high school, though take it with a grain of salt as this is just a single case study. My high school had an interesting setup where our quiz bowl team was closely tied to our Science Bowl and Ocean Sciences Bowl teams, so recruiting for all three teams took place simultaneously. This naturally meant science (though not math as it seems in your area) was "prioritized" in our scouting. So I suppose it was the opposite of perceived weaknesses in science that motivated us/our coach to prioritize science scouting—it was that we already had strong teams in that category. More generally, if a school already has a well established and successful team in [math, science, history, whatever subject etc.], that could make a quiz bowl coach prioritize scouting from that team. This makes sense for the reason you mentioned that players on these teams will already be likely to answer questions from those subjects. As for why math and science as opposed to other subjects, I'd speculate (without supporting data, could be wrong) that more schools have Mathletes teams than teams in other single-subject academic competitions.

2) How would you build a middle/high school quiz bowl team, assuming you have to build one from scratch?

This is a very good guide for new teams.