2023 NAQT SCT: February 4

[Important Bird Area]

NAQT is pleased to announce that our 2023 Sectional Championship Tournaments will take place the weekend of February 3-5. Both in-person and online hosting options will be available for the 2023 SCT.

If your school would like to host SCT this coming February, please read the 2023 SCT host requirements and then use our tournament request form.

[Important Bird Area]

2023 SCT sites:

In-person SCTs:

Toronto
Brown
Cornell
Penn State
North Carolina This site will take place Sunday, February 5
Georgia Tech
Central Florida
Ohio State
Purdue
Minnesota
Missouri
Mississippi
UC Berkeley
Southern Cal
Washington

Online SCT:

Texas This site will take place Sunday, February 5

Last updated 1/19 --JTH

[Important Bird Area]

Our first batch of sites has been confirmed and registration will open this Saturday (December 3).

We're working on additional sites in other regions of the country. If you'd like to host the 2023 SCT, please read our host requirements and then use our tournament proposal form!

[Important Bird Area]

Reminder that SCT registration closes for most sites on January 31st. If you haven't signed up already, now is the time to register your team!

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I'm very annoyed with NAQT's decision to make the online SCT mirror open to all teams. Essentially every team that would normally attend the upper mid-Atlantic site, Columbia, Cornell, Hopkins, and Rutgers, is attending the online site. This isn't meant as criticism of these teams, but they are (to my knowledge) all capable of attending an in-person mirror, and the current in-person mirror at Penn State only has six teams registered, all from CMU or UMD. This means that, unless Penn State fields several house teams, we will either have to play a combined field, which from my experience playing a combined field in 2018 isn't fun for anyone involved, or we will have to also play the online site. But, this really seems to miss the point of having an online site. The entire point of an online mirror to my mind is to make things easier for schools far away from a thriving in-person circuit, schools like Colorado College and Iowa which are currently signed up for the online mirror. But, by allowing any team to sign up, the online site is instead siphoning off teams from a thriving in-person circuit!

[meebles127]

I'm very annoyed with NAQT's decision to make the online SCT mirror open to all teams. Essentially every team that would normally attend the upper mid-Atlantic site, Columbia, Cornell, Hopkins, and Rutgers, is attending the online site. This isn't meant as criticism of these teams, but they are (to my knowledge) all capable of attending an in-person mirror, and the current in-person mirror at Penn State only has six teams registered, all from CMU or UMD. This means that, unless Penn State fields several house teams, we will either have to play a combined field, which from my experience playing a combined field in 2018 isn't fun for anyone involved, or we will have to also play the online site. But, this really seems to miss the point of having an online site. The entire point of an online mirror to my mind is to make things easier for schools far away from a thriving in-person circuit, schools like Colorado College and Iowa which are currently signed up for the online mirror. But, by allowing any team to sign up, the online site is instead siphoning off teams from a thriving in-person circuit!

Inflating the field for the online mirror also makes it difficult to acquire enough staff, who after reading SCT on Saturday (unless you're at the UNC site), almost certainly do not want to read the exact same set *again*.

[Cheynem]

I'm very annoyed with NAQT's decision to make the online SCT mirror open to all teams. Essentially every team that would normally attend the upper mid-Atlantic site, Columbia, Cornell, Hopkins, and Rutgers, is attending the online site. This isn't meant as criticism of these teams, but they are (to my knowledge) all capable of attending an in-person mirror, and the current in-person mirror at Penn State only has six teams registered, all from CMU or UMD. This means that, unless Penn State fields several house teams, we will either have to play a combined field, which from my experience playing a combined field in 2018 isn't fun for anyone involved, or we will have to also play the online site. But, this really seems to miss the point of having an online site. The entire point of an online mirror to my mind is to make things easier for schools far away from a thriving in-person circuit, schools like Colorado College and Iowa which are currently signed up for the online mirror. But, by allowing any team to sign up, the online site is instead siphoning off teams from a thriving in-person circuit!

I think part of the issue is the lack of a Mid-Atlantic type site that would have been more convenient for a number of those East Coast, New York schools. Also, Cornell is apparently hosting in person on Saturday anyway.

[halle]

I didn’t plan on playing SCT this year and I’m not directly involved with my club’s decision making about which tournaments and sites to attend, so there’s no real reason for me to wade into this thread, but as someone involved with a New York school that is sending a team to the online site (a D2 team, which wouldn’t solve the field issues at Penn State anyway) I do want to give some reasons why Penn State was never really an option for us. First of all, it’s basically impossible to get to State College by public transit. The only route I can find from New York to Penn State involves two different trains and a bus, takes at least 7 hours, and only runs starting around 6:00-6:30am until 1ish pm, necessitating taking the whole day off to travel on Friday. Returning to NY involves either taking a bus from midnight to 7ish am or spending another night in a hotel, which quickly becomes prohibitively expensive for many clubs. The situation traveling from Rutgers is not much better. I didn’t bother looking up the route from Johns Hopkins. “Skill issue,” you might be tempted to say, “learn to drive.” I don’t disagree, in theory. However, the Northeast and Upper Mid-Atlantic regions are generally very well served by rail, so it’s pretty reasonable for schools in the region to not be used to driving to tournaments and not have school-approved or generally willing drivers at the ready. The exception is the Upstate New York region, which doesn’t connect as well by rail to the rest of the East coast, and which very reasonably has its own site. In my opinion, there’s no real reason to choose Penn State, or any site without rail access, as the site of a major tournament if you expect it to serve as a Mid-Atlantic regional hub. New Brunswick, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and College Park are all easily reachable by train; if any of these cities were the SCT site, NYU might’ve considered sending a team there, although I do think the online site has huge merit for clubs who want to save money, of which NYU is one, so we might’ve ended up playing online anyway. Also, if we were able to drive to a tournament, it would’ve been just as easy and probably slightly faster to get to Cornell, because State College is not even particularly convenient to drive to from NYC. Basically, the Upper Mid-Atlantic site that was chosen doesn’t really make sense for at least some of the teams it was supposed to attract. I think the choice of Penn State as a host makes much less sense than the decision to make the online mirror open to all teams.

Also, I think that holding Regionals and SCT on back to back weekends is not ideal, and that fatigue from having traveled last weekend is probably contributing to the appeal of the online site. I’m not sure how avoidable this situation was this year, but I do think it contributed.

[halle]

Okay my last post was incessantly long already but I thought of another thing: the drives from basically any of the schools that are going to the Cornell mirror to Penn State are shorter than the drives from a lot of the typical Mid-Atlantic schools to Penn State. It’s not entirely clear to me that both of these mirrors needed to exist.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

Yeah, if it wasn't clear from my first post, I'm not criticizing any team for chosjng to attend the online mirror. I'm criticizing NAQT for allowing this clearly suboptimal arrangement.

[Krazy]

Okay my last post was incessantly long already but I thought of another thing: the drives from basically any of the schools that are going to the Cornell mirror to Penn State are shorter than the drives from a lot of the typical Mid-Atlantic schools to Penn State. It’s not entirely clear to me that both of these mirrors needed to exist.

The problem with this is that for us we would be choosing the online mirror if the Cornell mirror did not exist because traveling longer than three hours and leaving the state changes the classification of our trip and so it would most likely have not been possible without the Cornell mirror.

[Important Bird Area]

Thanks for your comments, everyone.

We considered the possibility of geographic restrictions for the online site, but ultimately rejected that plan. There are a number of reasons why teams might prefer to play online, including:

-physical distance of the campus from in-person SCT sites
-players who are themselves physically distant from their teammates (taking remote or online classes)
-players who have concerns about possible COVID exposure for themselves or for others

The last one especially would be difficult or impossible for NAQT to fairly adjudicate, so we decided to allow registration for the online SCT from anywhere in the country.

We're aware that the geographic configuration of in-person SCTs in the mid-Atlantic was suboptimal this year. We're sorry this resulted in a disappointing SCT experience for some teams, and we'll try to have a better geographic distribution of host schools for the 2024 SCT.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

Without knowing anything about either the internals of NAQT in general or as it related to SCT this year, is it possible for NAQT to better publicize the hosts and the areas they could use hosts in earlier? I assume, without intending to criticize any of the I-95 teams, that part of the problem was that nobody (except maybe Columbia very late?) offered/considered hosting SCT. Maybe if decently early something like "currently we're unable to find a host in the eastern seaboard of the mid atlantic area" post went out, teams could talk to each other and try and coordinate a site (especially if this would allow teams to share knowledge of possible outside staffers). For instance, I and presumably some other NYC-area staffers would've been willing to staff an SCT at RU/Princeton/NYU/Columbia, and if we know early enough that there are struggles to find a host, that info could go public, and a prospective TD who was thinking their school couldn't handle SCT will know that it has access to a certain amount of outside staff. Again, I have no clue how these things work internally, but from my perspective this could make it easier for all of the club presidents/TDs in the area to coordinate for a mutually beneficial site.

EDIT: apologies if this already happens and I was simply unaware.

[Important Bird Area]

A private forum for the 2023 SCT is now available- please select "2023 SCT Discussion" from your user control panel.