Why College Recruiting Fails (2 of 3)

[username_crisis_averted]

DISCLAIMER: this guide assumes that you 1) are trying to start a traditional tournament-playing quizbowl club and 2) don’t have much of a community to draw from on campus. It may not be as applicable to other clubs, especially ones with more casual goals.

Intro

By far the most important thing for building student community is recruiting. Everything in my last post is predicated on a successful recruiting campaign. This is because a club’s culture is determined by the people in it. After a club gets its starting cohort, its horizon of possibilities shrinks dramatically. Most clubs understand this intuitively, but they don’t always act in accordance with this reality. Which brings me to the first of our three recruiting problems:

#1: Quizbowl Clubs Focus Too Much on Recruiting a General Audience*

I’m going to borrow some language from this blog post from David Chapman (even though creative subcultures are vastly different from club environments, the core distinction is similar). In any club, you’re going to have members who are more passionate about engaging deeply with the club (geeks) and people who are more passive— mostly there for the vibes (MOPs). MOPs are great, but in the early stages you should primarily be trying to attract geeks. This is because it is relatively easy to find MOPs, while geeks are harder to come by.

The thing is, recruiting geeks is a zero-sum game. There are many communities that a geek might want to join at the start of the year, and most of those communities would be equally happy to have them. A single geek can’t join them all! So most geeks (even ones that would be a great fit for your club) will end up somewhere else due to the sheer number of options. But the geeks that do join will be the lifeblood of your club. These are the people that will bring the energy, plan events, and make stuff happen! In other words, the geeks will make your club a place that people will want to come back to.

This means recruiting isn’t just about raw numbers! A critical mass of members is important, but a critical mass of geeks is even more important. Who’s going to be showing up every week? Who’s going to be playing tournaments? Who’s going to be genuinely invested in the club’s future? This is especially important when it comes to replacing people in club leadership. Any club that fails to replenish its geeks is on a path to decline.

When you host a recruiting event for quizbowl, your goal isn’t to please the average attendee. Your goal is to get a few people to think “wow, quizbowl is sick! I could see myself spending a lot of time on this!”. These are your potential geeks! It’s great if your event happens to be fun for the other attendees, but you mainly want to hook your potential geeks. Everything else is secondary! Six months from now, it’s not going to matter what the approval rating of your event was. It’s going to matter how many geeks ended up joining your club as a result. So make sure to keep them in mind every step of the way!

And this goes for individual recruitment too! If you’re telling a potential recruit about your club, your goal shouldn’t be to get that person to join quizbowl. Your goal shouldn’t even necessarily be to get that person to like quizbowl! Your goal should be to get that person to join quizbowl, if they are someone who would be a good fit for your club. Ultimately, you’re not going to know that without seeing how they respond to the club, and they won’t either! All you can do is be a good ambassador for the club by giving them an engaging and accurate impression of quizbowl.

That being said, you still want to make sure that your pitch has the widest possible appeal among those potential geeks. And that brings me to recruiting problem #2:

#2: Quizbowl Is Bad at the Quizbowl Pitch

Nine years ago, Matt Jackson said something that still rings true today:

> the zeroth step in this process is to be confident. As I’ve said multiple times already in this thread: when talking to each other within the quizbowl community, we all know and see the value of the effort we put in and the organizing work we do -- otherwise none of it would happen and we’d be fine just seeing the game rot away. We’re certain that what we do is immensely rewarding. Is there any reason on earth to let that certainty drop off with people who haven’t seen what we do? I doubt it. What’s more, it seems to me like a lot of the anxiety about talking up quizbowl stems from a fear of negative reaction -- of people saying “you spend all your time on that?
> such fears are not realistic. One interesting thing about social interaction is that the things you talk about sound cooler to other people in direct proportion to how positively and confidently you speak about them. (so in some sense, anxious, eyes-downcast attitudes about one’s own participation in quizbowl are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you act like people will react badly and mumble rather than sharing your sense of excitement, they’ll ...React badly and not share your sense of excitement.) when talking with other people about what interests you, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Even if there’s no way in any of the various tossupable underworlds that they’d want to do it themselves, high skill at a competitive activity reflects well on a person in its own right, and confidence is a huge component of ‘coolness’ by any metric.

I’m not sure how prevalent this attitude is globally, but many of the people I know in quizbowl get hung up on “scaring people off”. These people advocate for an incremental approach, something like “start with trivia, move on to SCOP Novice, and only then should you bring out *real* college quizbowl”. We’ll call this ideology gradualism. (for the sake of argument, I’ll be making some generalizations about the gradualists. I realize that reality is more nuanced than this!)

I am not a fan of gradualism. You don’t want to scare all newcomers off, but it’s important to draw a distinction between the different ways you can do that. One way you can scare people off is if you come off as weird, abstruse, and/or insular. This should obviously be avoided; make sure that you give off an approachable vibe, and don’t say things that make you sound crazy. But another way you can "scare people off" is if you show them quizbowl and they just… aren't that into it. That type of scaring is totally fine, because let’s face it: quizbowl has a narrower appeal than many activities! It takes a certain somewhat unordinary type of person to want to invest in quizbowl. But like Matt Jackson says, don’t expect those people to treat your interest in quizbowl with any less respect than they would any other specialized interest.

For example, I could never see myself getting into crocheting. My fabric manipulation skills are not great, and I’m not a huge fan of yarn-based items on an aesthetic level. But if someone showed me told me about their involvement in a crocheting club, I wouldn’t think “wow I could never get into crocheting, they are so lame for that.”. I’d think, “well crocheting isn’t my cup of tea, but it’s exciting to see that they’re so passionate about it!”. Even if the person you’re talking to would never do quizbowl, you can still be an effective ambassador if your passion shines through! So explain your interest in quizbowl with pride! Good energy is contagious.

If people aren’t interested in quizbowl, it’s better for them (and you) if they figure that out sooner rather than later. People try out all kinds of stuff in college, and most of that stuff won’t end up being their “thing”. Again, if people don’t like quizbowl, that’s okay! No amount of gradualism is going to conjure a love of quizbowl out of thin air (more on this at the end of the post).

Ultimately, we just don’t want to be misunderstood. We want people to understand that yes, quizbowl is hard, but it is possible for you to become good at it. Yes, the range of subjects is intimidating, but it is okay if you only know about a couple. Yes, quizbowl questions can be convoluted, but they give you such a rewarding payoff in return. We don’t want potential recruits to come away from our pitch thinking that it’s for “people who are not like them”.

But we shouldn’t address those concerns by giving an overly “safe” representation of the game. Rather, we should strive to be even more authentic. What role has quizbowl played in your life? Why do you love it? What about it speaks to you? So many quizbowl pitches lack soul. My own elevator pitch compares quizbowl rules to balancing a video game and tossups to newspaper articles, but the style is uniquely my own. I’m not sure if others would have any luck emulating it, because so much of it is grounded in my experiences and what I find easy to talk about. Ultimately, you should pitch quizbowl in the way that allows you to start a personal and interesting dialogue with others. Don't get overly hung up on impression management!

This “interesting dialogue” part is important. Don’t get bogged down in thoroughly explaining every rule of quizbowl. All you have to do is show enough of the game to pique their interest. If they really care to know more, they can find out on their own! If you’re introducing quizbowl to a specific person, then you can try to guess what will pique their interest specifically. In other words, maybe don’t always go for the same approach! When I show quizbowl to people who played sports, I emphasize the competitive spirit of the game: things like the fast pace and conference rivalries. But when I show quizbowl to professors, I try to emphasize the scholarly element, focusing more on question writing and its similarities with academia. Your quizbowl pitch will always be a work in progress, but they only way to improve it is to go out and give it!

#3: Quizbowl Clubs Don’t Always Promise Social Connection

One of the most (if not the most) common reasons that people don’t come back to a quizbowl club is because they don’t see a place for themselves in its social scene. Most people join a college club for a sense of community. And here’s the thing: a quizbowl match is a terrible setting for meeting other people. So on the first day of practice, please don’t just go right into tossups. You want to have some kind of mixer activity, at least for the new people in your club. If numbers permit, get all the new people into a separate room. That way, veterans can enjoy practice as usual without interfering with the newbies. I won't prescribe a specific mixer activity, but I will advocate for keeping things small. Don’t have people introduce themselves to the whole room; everyone hates that, and no one remembers those introductions anyway. Instead, break people into smaller groups of 2-3 and give them some space to connect with each other. Even if some groups are a bust, just seeing other people form connections provides that valuable promise of social connection. Remember, people will stay in a club if they can see a social future for themselves there. If they make a friend on the first day, even better!

Speaking of friends, here’s another advantage of high school clubs in general: often, their geeks come from a single friend group. I’ll call this type of club a Friend group-Based Club, or FBC. In FBCs, you don’t necessarily need the club to be a space for connection, because you have already bonded outside of quizbowl. When you know each other, playing quizbowl together can also be quality time. But that can only be true if you get to know each other outside of it.

The other type of club is a Confederation-Based Clubs, or CBCs. This type of club may have a large friend group contained inside of it, but a significant portion of its members are either other friend groups or just individuals. In a CBC, social time spent not doing quizbowl now becomes necessary.

So a micro-reason that college recruiting fails is that clubs try to be FBCs and adopt a club structure that is designed for FBCs. To be fair, FBCs can develop at colleges, and sometimes they do! Competitive college quizbowl clubs often blend into a friend group by necessity, and sometimes people who knew each other in high school quizbowl will join college clubs as a unit. But most of the time, college clubs are CBCs. We see more CBCs in college because college life is messier than high school life. There’s not as much structure, and people have a wider variety of things to do. People are just living a broader range of lifestyles. This is something you should consciously account for in the design of your club.

In my experience, the secret sauce of every CBC is an active online space. If you think about it, greater quizbowl is its own sort of CBC. And look at our online spaces! When I was in high school, we had ILQBM on Facebook. Nowadays, players have the quizbowl and hsquizbowl Discords. And this isn’t even counting the weird and wonderful universe of private online communities lurking beneath the surface. This is where so many players outside of the traditional competitive circuits come to feel at home. If I never went online, I never would have felt connected to the wider quizbowl community. I see this contrast when I meet people who played in high school but didn’t have an online presence. Even though many of these people were solid players, they had no idea that there was such an active national quizbowl ecosystem out there. Deep social connections within a club are common, but it’s only the extremely online high schoolers who are able to build deep connections across school lines.

Now you don’t need (or want) everyone in your club to become extremely online. But the thing about something like a Discord server is that it allows people to keep tabs on your club, even if they’re not able to come for a while. And this is important!

Just to get a sense of the scale of our club’s Discord activity, we have sent over 74k messages just in the #chat channel since December 2020. We have 23 users in the 1k messages club. And the activity of the server is only growing. 56k of those messages were sent just this school year. This makes us the most active server at our university, ahead of the most active RSO (21k), the general UW server (14.5k), and even the general quizbowl server (20k). The quizbowl server at USCD, which has had a similar club model and trajectory to our own, has a similar message count. This activity is critical to our club’s health, and I credit it with most of our success. Bonds aren’t formed in the midst of a practice game but in the channels of our Discord server.

Of course, just having a server isn’t enough. People won’t just participate on their own unless something interesting is happening. And creating an online environment that is vibrant without scaring off new users is tricky! You can’t force the emergence of an online community, but two things that have really helped in the past are 1) fine-tuning the onboarding process and 2) having passive ways to participate.

I can’t overstate the importance of a welcoming onboarding process. At minimum, make sure that a bot sends new members a message explaining how to use the server. But if you want to go above and beyond, put someone in charge of welcoming new members. Most people join servers on a whim and never participate, but those people are actually pretty likely to at least respond if you personally send a message. During this interaction, you want to 1) deliver them information about the club as quickly as possible and 2) answer any reservations that they might have about the club. With that in mind, it’s helpful if you can link them to a club website (or even just a Google Doc) that gives them a rundown of what to expect. Here’s UW's website as an example. Don’t feel obligated to persuade them to join, just make sure that they feel acknowledged and have any resources that they might find helpful (and if they do express interest, try to get them to commit to showing up to a specific practice).

It helps if your server has passive ways to participate. You want new users to be able to do something, even if they don’t feel like they can have anything to add in #general. Quizbowl geeks tend to be introverted, so it’s helpful if they can do something w/o having to talk to a stranger. For example, our server has three channels where you can have a bot read read bonuses to you (and get points). These channels have 356k (!) messages total from users. We also have a #music channel for this same purpose, which allows you to compare your music listening stats with other users. These only impact things at the margins, but we’ve certainly had people “cross over” from passive bot participation to more active participation in the club’s social scene.

This also applies to people who have 1) left the club for a bit, 2) wanted to join earlier in the year but couldn’t, or 3) can’t participate as regularly as they would like to. You should emphasize that no, members don’t need perfect attendance; yes, you can always come back; and yes, there will always be a place for you in the club. Make sure to keep those people in mind, especially ones with significant participation in the past. If you’re running a tournament or some other event, maybe shoot them an invite! People appreciate that, and it shows that you care. The bottom line is that you should leave the door open for people to join (or leave) the club at any time.

Online communities are not a panacea for a lack of community. You can’t build an online community without a foundation. But they act as community amplifiers. They grease the wheels during times of stagnation, and they make it easier for people to stay in a community over long periods of time. I’m sure people who still read these forums know this to be true.

Key Takeaways

• Effective recruiting is by far the most important thing for building community.
• Go for quality of participation, not quantity. Focus on attracting people who will actually invest in the club.
• Don’t get hung up on whether people will find quizbowl “lame” or “uncool”. If you display your genuine passion with confidence, people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
• Make sure that your club promises social connection. If people can’t see their own social future in the club, then they’re probably not going to come back.
• Accommodate the broader range of college lifestyles via an online community. Make sure everyone feels acknowledged and that the barrier to participation is low.
• Be a welcoming presence, always.

Ultimately, this post doesn’t say much about actual club operations or how to set things up for the future. I’ll go over that and more in my final post of this series: Why College Longevity Fails (link to be added).

But before that, I want to revisit gradualism. We shouldn’t ignore gradualism because it comes from a place of valid concern. No one tells people to become gradualist; it’s a position they adopt based on personal experience. Maybe they had a negative experience trying to share their love of quizbowl with someone. Maybe they watched some people get super discouraged after hearing some tossups, and maybe those were even people that could have gotten into quizbowl under different circumstances. These scenarios are unfortunate, and they deserve a closer look. I will argue that showing them college quizbowl was NOT the source of the problem in next week's post: Some Thoughts About Gradualism.

*=I am NOT saying that quizbowl clubs focus too much on retaining a general audience. The opposite is true, which will be the subject of my next post.

[Cheynem]

Another very interesting post.

I 100% agree that we should be confident and approach quizbowl as a fun thing that we're passionate about (I find there is too often a strain of anti-quizbowl quizbowlism that intentionally or not depicts quizbowl as this boring, socially horrible thing).

I do think that starting small and working up isn't necessarily a bad thing, though, even if we do weed people out as we go up. When I ran practices, I believed the first thing we needed to do is see if people like quizbowl. I know that sounds stupid, but sometimes people think they do but what they really like is Jeopardy or bar trivia or just something else altogether. So to me the first few practices are less about playing a specific difficulty and more about playing any actual quizbowl packet--can be HS, easy college, etc. I'm not entirely sure you're advocating against this kind of gradualism, but I do think it's a good approach to take.

I also completely agree that the ideal recruiting pitch is not trying to get like 10 people who kinda sorta attend practices and play tournaments, but rather 1-2 people who are REALLY into quizbowl and will take the time to really lead the team and do the grunt work of organization, lead practices, and play tournaments. At my first practice at the University of Minnesota, I do not remember how many people there were besides me who were new. There were several, but most didn't really stick around after their first year. I did though. Next year, we got actually a fairly larger clump of people who stuck around but also Eliza Grames, who would lead the club for a few years. As you said, the key is getting those people who are going to go the distance and be team leaders.

[cchiego]

This means recruiting isn’t just about raw numbers! A critical mass of members is important, but a critical mass of geeks is even more important. Who’s going to be showing up every week? Who’s going to be playing tournaments? Who’s going to be genuinely invested in the club’s future? This is especially important when it comes to replacing people in club leadership. Any club that fails to replenish its geeks is on a path to decline.

When you host a recruiting event for quizbowl, your goal isn’t to please the average attendee.

I appreciate the point that quizbowl clubs need some number of highly committed members to succeed (there have been examples in the past of quizbowl clubs that have been "captured" by various non-quizbowl people who seem to view it as a bar trivia fund and/or a resume line), but I don't think the "geeks" part works. You never know who might like quizbowl once they start to play it, so it seems to be better to try to get as many people on a buzzer as possible first rather than assuming that someone is more of a "geek" than not from the outset. People may well grow into quizbowl "geekdom" over time, so long as they keep coming back in the first place.

I also think that it's good to have some number of people who aren't as committed and maybe just want to play one or two events a year, but still show up for half-a-day of reading at a tournament that you host and socialize with other members of the club. That's what really allows for expansion in quizbowl hosting fields since there just aren't that many highly committed quizbowlers out there. This can also be a way for the club to reach more people on campus and improve the social aspect (bonus points if it's someone who can help with funding).

Plus there are many, many roles on a team that can be fruitfully played by even people don't necessarily like playing as much--everything from logistics to recruitment to outreach and tournament direction (one interesting thing that I've noticed is that Model UN teams often have two separate clubs--one for running MUN events, the other for competing at them). Yes, people need to like playing quizbowl to some extent, but there are ways to make that environment an enjoyable one and not a slog through difficult questions every practice.

I’m not sure how prevalent this attitude is globally, but many of the people I know in quizbowl get hung up on “scaring people off”. These people advocate for an incremental approach, something like “start with trivia, move on to SCOP Novice, and only then should you bring out *real* college quizbowl”. We’ll call this ideology gradualism. (for the sake of argument, I’ll be making some generalizations about the gradualists. I realize that reality is more nuanced than this!)

I am not a fan of gradualism.

There has been a long-running debate over the "Stepping-Stone" theory in quizbowl. College quizbowl is just a very steep difficulty curve for most people, especially at clubs that compete at very high levels with people who have decades (!) of quizbowl-playing experience. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and experienced grad students are often valuable anchors of institutional knowledge for many teams, but it's worth emphasizing even for people who've come up through MS and HS quizbowl and have 6-7 years of experience by the time they enter college--it's a very different experience for people who are brand-new to quizbowl in college. So what seems like "gradualism" to some I think is just trying to avoid putting up too steep of a learning curve for new people (not all, of course--there are plenty of people in quizbowl who never played before college or didn't play much before college, and those people are awesome but also generally uncommon).

I also disagree with the idea that you can't read easy questions at the start. SCOP Novice is, in fact, a great way to get people who might stop by an activities fair interested! People *like* answering questions correctly--answering a question correctly on the buzzer is fun, as Christian B. Flow put it, "the rush is considerable." You want them to practice on that a bit, then ramp things up. Or start out with questions like that as a warm-up, then move to harder ones (and perhaps show the overlap). You want people to be intrigued and come back, not feeling like they're being put to the test at the very first stages. Quizbowl should try to have a wider, not narrower, player base.

Rather, we should strive to be even more authentic. What role has quizbowl played in your life? Why do you love it? What about it speaks to you?

This is great! I think more testimonials like that would be awesome and very helpful to quizbowl in general. I think things like Noah Prince's podcast and the NAQT 20for20 project were good examples of that, though I'd love to see even more for each team/program.

I think it's fine to be confident in quizbowl--but there's a big difference between confidence and "git guud" or "you're not worthy" arrogance. This can be exacerbated when some members of the team are extremely plugged-in to national quizbowl circles and many other members of the team are not. This can lead to unhealthy disconnects and badly divided/weaker teams that aren't long-lasting (or aren't actually teams at all, just someone playing under a school name). Finding ways to motivate your teammates is essential, and is something that those who want to demonstrate leadership would do well to focus on. Some of the most impressive quizbowl performances to me are not in sheer PPG, but instead those leaders who organize their teams, put them in a good place once they leave, and help them thrive afterward despite the challenges.

Of course, just having a server isn’t enough. People won’t just participate on their own unless something interesting is happening. And creating an online environment that is vibrant without scaring off new users is tricky! You can’t force the emergence of an online community, but two things that have really helped in the past are 1) fine-tuning the onboarding process and 2) having passive ways to participate.

This is a really cool idea, especially the "passive ways to participate." A good on-boarding process for whenever someone wanders into a practice or Discord is excellent and something I think every team should think about. Having local spaces like team or region-specific Discords that have places to practice and gradually become part of the club and meet people is good as well since it seems like a promising way to provide a space for improvement, feedback, and gradual socialization into the club. I'm not as sure about national-level spaces, as those tend to suffer from more typical online environment issues. But making sure that a quizbowl club does more than just quizbowl practices and creates social opportunities is all excellent advice that I hope most teams at least try to do.

That said, I do want to make an additional point here (that is mentioned a bit in the original post, but I think needs to be emphasized): the online environment is in many ways the product of the offline environment. The reason Illinois HS quizbowl is strong is not because of ILQBM: it's because of IHSA and IHSSBCA. Between the two of those organizations, it ensures that most schools in Illinois have a quizbowl team and that there are resources available to try to reach all of those teams with assistance. Quizbowl at the collegiate level just doesn't have those kinds of organizations to help support it and the college quizbowl orgs are understandably focused more on making sure that sets are written/edited than on actively cultivating teams. Perhaps it would help to think about ways to develop more regional or conference-specific support organizations that can help all the teams in a more systematic way.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Is there a single effective faculty sponsor of a college quizbowl team anywhere in the country who is not themselves a former college quizbowl player of some note?

I'm nowhere near old enough to know what Chris Borglum was doing in college, but Chris is at the very least also a very notable open/masters level player in his own right.

[Halinaxus]

Just to get a sense of the scale of our club’s Discord activity, we have sent over 74k messages just in the #chat channel since December 2020. We have 23 users in the 1k messages club. And the activity of the server is only growing. 56k of those messages were sent just this school year. This makes us the most active server at our university, ahead of the most active RSO (21k), the general UW server (14.5k), and even the general quizbowl server (20k). The quizbowl server at USCD, which has had a similar club model and trajectory to our own, has a similar message count. This activity is critical to our club’s health, and I credit it with most of our success. Bonds aren’t formed in the midst of a practice game but in the channels of our Discord server.

While I understand the point you're making about increased Discord activity indicating increased club engagement, I'm not sure Discord stats are the best metric of overall club health.

The Purdue team also operates out of an extremely high-traffic Discord server (over 79k messages have been sent in our main channel, #qb-discussion, since December 2020), and while positive things have certainly come out of the server (mainly better communication), so have a lot of negatives. Most notably, the server's high-traffic nature and long list of channels, emotes, and in-jokes make it really intimidating to potential recruits. When I joined, it took me several months of non-trivial activity to get to a point where I knew what was going on at any given time and felt comfortable participating, and I was coming from the perspective of someone who had already spent multiple years in quiz bowl Discord servers and sort of knew what to expect.

Practically every person to join Purdue quiz bowl in the past few years either (a) had a substantial amount of QB experience in high school or (b) is terminally online. Some of this is probably due to Covid (I wasn't around for that, but this is what I've heard from older club members), but I think a lot of it is that everyone who didn't meet either of the above qualifications didn't feel welcome or included and (rather understandably) stopped coming to practice. This is even true of players who do have substantial QB experience but aren't terminally online; I can think of multiple people off the top of my head who love quiz bowl but rarely come to practice, probably at least to some degree because they don't like the online-centric club vibe.

None of this is to say that Purdue QB is bad or that club Discord servers are bad; indeed, I would agree that a well-run Discord is one of the most beneficial things a club can have (and maybe yours is just better organized than ours). However, I think it's important to recognize that online chatting can become toxic if left unattended and is not a substitute for in person interaction. Club health should be measured by meaningful relationships and communication, not by how many times the :sus: emoji has been spammed in the past 24 hours.

[mjoy]

Is there a single effective faculty sponsor of a college quizbowl team anywhere in the country who is not themselves a former college quizbowl player of some note?

Well, I've been made to believe that I'm an effective faculty sponsor of a college quiz bowl team. I feel pretty good about 14 straight years of advising an active college quiz bowl team at a regional university far from any hubs of high school quiz bowl activity. We just played in our 51st tournament last weekend (ACRONYM in Minneapolis).

And I am a former college quizbowl player. But I am/was not noteworthy as a quiz bowl player.

In fact, I devolved (from making a run at the Carleton A team during the presidency of Bush the Elder, to a solid B team player by the time I graduated four years later).

[username_crisis_averted]

It seems that at least a few people are misinterpreting this post as "make quizbowl clubs more insular / less accessible", and I'm not quite sure how to respond. First of all, a club that is better at recruiting geeks does not necessarily become alienating to less committed members. In fact, I would argue that a club that is better at recruiting geeks becomes more appealing to MOPs in the long run because of the energy flowing into the club. After all, there's nothing more alienating than a club with a dead vibe. I also want to clarify that every statement I make regarding geeks is about recruiting. At no point do I argue that the actual practices of a quizbowl club should be made more exclusive. (In fact, I argue that when it comes to retention, quizbowl clubs focus too little on a general audience.)

But (and this is something I should have done in the OP), I'd like to emphasize that when I talk about geeks, I am not talking about the people who are the best at quizbowl. Rather, I am talking about people who are deeply engaged with the club and invested in keeping the lights on. In most cases, these groups overlap; people are more likely to invest in an activity that they are good at. But there are also outliers; like Chris Chiego says, players who are not as skilled can still be valuable members of an effective club administration. So I am NOT saying quizbowl clubs need to get better at recruiting people who are very good at quizbowl (although that is good too). I'm just saying that quizbowl recruiting should focus less on recruiting MOPs and more on "wooing" people who might otherwise become a leader of some other club on campus.

This will be covered more in Part 3, but an important factor for recruiting geeks is a personal touch. If there's a potential geek that shows up and you really want them to stay, you should let them know that! People like to feel valued, and they will respond positively to you reaching out to them. I'm a big advocate for sitting down with new members and just opening up about quizbowl and asking them how they're feeling about the club (whether that be online or in-person). This approach is slow, and it can be difficult! It's not trivial to open up to a complete stranger. But this 1-on-1 time has way more potential than any amount of attracting MOPs with trivia and free pizza. In the worst case, you can find out why they're not vibing with your club and what you might want to do differently in the future. The primary "yuck" factor with insular spaces is a lack of caring for people in the outgroup. If you can convey to newcomers that they are valued, then things like in-jokes are a lot less alienating.

And I'm not trying to say that online spaces should "replace" anything either! I just think a healthy online space is a necessary tool for preserving a CBC in the modern age. Without that online connective tissue, it's much harder for heterogeneous clubs to stay together and maintain a sense of community when life gets in the way. A lack of an active online space means less points of entry into the club. Some people feel more comfortable interacting online at first, while others feel more comfortable in person. And that's okay! Ideally, quizbowl clubs should have multiple on-ramps for multiple types of people.

Finally, I am not saying you should never read easier questions. In some cases, this will be an effective way for hooking an audience. However (and I'll try to avoid getting into the subject matter of my next post too much), much of conventional Stepping Stone Theory (thanks for the term) is somewhat divorced from my personal experience of showing people quizbowl. When I've seen people get "hooked" by quizbowl, it's not because they felt in control or because they were able to get a lot of points. It's because of that unique quizbowl feeling: the memorable buzz that just feels so good. And showing people questions that are either 1) not quizbowl or 2) targeted towards a much younger audience is not usually the best way to produce that feeling. That's all that I'm saying.

[High Dependency Unit]

I want to add my two cents coming from a club at a small college that had a lot of challenges with recruiting. I agree with most of what Kevin has said here -- a defining part of the club at Bowdoin was that other team members had greater priorities, and it was difficult to get the same team members to consistently attend tournaments, except during Covid. The club is still active, but still struggles to get people to tournaments.

I disagree about the need for an active online space -- maybe that's necessary in a super-large club, or if you don't travel to tournaments, but if you have < 10 students at any given practice, every team practice is a bonding activity, and team travel (overnights or day trips) are also extensive bonding activities, especially when general college student shenanigans inevitably occur. Onboarding is as easy as spending a few minutes chatting with a new member when they come in and when they leave -- if you've created a club culture that takes time to explain, then you are definitely exclusionary and should rethink how you've gotten there. Team parties/events/fun can definitely take place, and people can have social connection (I met some of my best friends in college through quiz bowl) without there being an explicit club culture. If there were in-jokes, they were always explained promptly, and then the newcomers were in on it as well.

In terms of introducing people to the game, I liked using NAQT Intramural sets at the club fair (skipping any questions that might be too hard) and then primarily using ACF Fall at introductory practices, often throwing in part of an easier packet before or after. What works obviously depends on the club, but I do feel that more-accessible tournament questions is good at balancing the need to understand how hard quiz bowl is while still keeping most of the questions answerable. It helps when the other more-experienced players also have weaknesses, and show that many of the questions are hard for them as well -- and it's crucial that the really good players are supportive and not intimidating.

[Scipio]

Is there a single effective faculty sponsor of a college quizbowl team anywhere in the country who is not themselves a former college quizbowl player of some note?

I'm nowhere near old enough to know what Chris Borglum was doing in college, but Chris is at the very least also a very notable open/masters level player in his own right.

Borglum played for the University of Florida in the late eighties/early nineties, just before I started playing.