Thoughts on starting a team from the outside & outreach in general

[AKKOLADE]

Apologies for typos & unfinished sentences; I'm doing my best to avoid those, but I am very tired. I want to get this posted while I'm inspired to, though.

I've been pretty public on the main QB Discord about wanting to use the Undergrad for the purposes of drawing new teams into quiz bowl. I wanted to talk a little about what I did, what's reasonable to expect others to do, and start a discourse on what we could do to get more teams involved.

I should note that this is primarily focused on starting teams externally. This is in contrast to the far more normal case of teams starting internally, when a player or players (or advisor/s) on campus decides they want a team and they take the steps to get that done via their own motivation. This is obviously a great source of new teams, but it's very luck dependent on an interested person being at a certain school.

There are a number of universities that don't have teams that, frankly, should. I feel like it's reasonable to think that every NCAA Division 1 school should have a team and every school in the top 100 of the US News rankings should have a team. Are these lists arbitrary? Yes - there's a ton of criticism for the US News methodology, and the divisions between the schools in the top NCAA Division & those below are bizarrely defined with no consistency. But it's a starting point, and something to aim for in the long term, so let's go for it.

So: I tried to use this to invite teams from these lists to form quiz bowl teams.

In addition to emailing every extant team I could find, as well as calling the advisors or coaches for every HCASC team in existence, I tried calling the activities offices of each university that had at least a total of 8 players on the last four NAQT Entering Freshmen list. When I spoke with person, I gave them the elevator pitch for quiz bowl & made sure to mention that I was aware of students who self reported they were going to their school. If I got an email address from the person I spoke with, I made sure to include the names of those players, with the disclaimer that I couldn't guarantee their interest or that they were even at their school.

I contacted just shy of 400 universities in total for the Undergrad. This count includes all of the existing teams that I reached out to. I made recruitment essentially a full time job for a month. This is obviously not something that 99% of people in quiz bowl can do.

So far, I have not had any registrations from a school that would fall into the category of having a not yet extant team. With less than a week until the launch of the event, I doubt this will change. I did speak with several people that sounded receptive to the idea of launching a team, and those would be ones to follow up with in the future.

Things that I would do differently, if I could:

1) Begin earlier. I made most of my calls in late September and early October. I think it probably would be ideal to begin this process in late August or early September.

1a) Follow up with the ones that sounded particularly interested. I did not have time for this this year.

2) Have money to give away as prizes at the Undergrad Championship. I think even if I could state that there's $1000 in prize money, that'd be enough to pique the interest of administrators that have no connection or investment in quiz bowl to form a team. Once the team's in the door, you at least have a shot at them becoming semi-regulars on the wider circuit.

3) Have more data from the NAQT Entering Freshmen list, or a currently not yet created equivalent to supplement it. Casting a wider net with this would result in better information about where high school quiz bowlers are going to college.

I'd love to hear other thoughts on how to make this more successful moving forward.

A couple other, tangentially related observations:

We need to create more resources to help teams that have launched to steady themselves. I don't have concrete suggestions on this at this point in time (refer to my first note on being tired at the start of this post, only it now being half an hour later), but the lack of more tools and campaigns than we currently have devoted to keeping teams active that are on the outskirts of the national circuit is a problem that should be solvable. We obviously can't preserve every team that ever springs into existence, but we can't just assume that the knowledge necessary to help a team transition from a newly founded squad into a stable one that exists years down the road will reach these teams via osmosis.

Community colleges should become less of an afterthought in the circuit in general. These are existing teams that play quiz bowl regularly and are enthusiastic about the game. They ideally would be more prominent at events like ACF Fall & Winter at a minimum, and working to create more of these teams would be beneficial to the growth of the circuit as well.

Similarly, HCASC teams have been overlooked for too long. I have five teams that previously only played HCASC registered, with at least two more expressing interest. All I did was call their advisor and invite them. You should be, at a minimum, emailing these contacts for your events on the friendlier end of the difficulty spectrum.

[echoes in the Othersea]

First off, thank you for making this post: this is a particularly relevant thing in North Carolina I think because there are only a couple active college quiz bowl teams in the state out of 68 four year universities (and 58 community colleges), while nine HBCUs listed as active on the HCASC website. HCASC is kind of a footnote on your post but I want to focus on it because I think they're especially relevant for NC

You said there are five HBCUs interested in IQBT, which if I recall correctly is a three dot set. Do you have any concerns about them being introduced to pyramidal quiz bowl playing at that relatively high difficulty? UNC kind of dropped the ball about reaching out to HBCUs about ACF Fall, do you think inviting them to a harder set is fine?

I know there's a definite advantage to having a more official sounding name and Undergraduate Championship definitely has that, I'm just not sure how that relates to tournament difficulty in terms of what has more influence on outreach: I know that the former impacts administrators more while the latter is about the feelings of people who actually are playing, and of course both are important.

[Cheynem]

I don't know if this is produced anymore, but I think something like the old NAQT Intramurals set, perhaps a touch easier, would be nice. Relatively short questions, fairly easy difficulty, more CE and Pop Culture than most sets. I think this could be easier to pitch to some teams/schools. "Hey, I'm willing to run this event on your campus, and if people are into this, I've got some information about how to start a team and what other events are there."

[AKKOLADE]

You said there are five HBCUs interested in IQBT, which if I recall correctly is a three dot set. Do you have any concerns about them being introduced to pyramidal quiz bowl playing at that relatively high difficulty? UNC kind of dropped the ball about reaching out to HBCUs about ACF Fall, do you think inviting them to a harder set is fine?

I think it's okay, for a couple reasons.

1) The Qualifier is two dots in difficulty this year. This, plus the fact that it's only two hours tops per team, means that if anyone is in over their heads, I'm not ruining their whole day.

2) If they qualify for the Championship itself, then they're capable of taking on the three-dot Championship set.

3) For teams that expressed interest, I made sure to link to ACF Fall sets in my email, so they'd have something easier as a warm-up to try. I also linked to the last ACF Winter set, since that matched the difficulty of our Qualifier. Additionally, for every team I talked to early enough, I told them about ACF Fall and encouraged them to look into it. I probably talked to these teams too close to the date of ACF Fall for them to register, but an effort was made.

[cchiego]

After many years of trying similar things at the HS level and somewhat at the college level, I'm pessimistic about the ability of large-scale outreach efforts to make a major difference at the national level. I have had many experiences similar to Fred's at various points and the amount of work to results ratio is just not worth it. I do think that some kind of more regular national outreach with follow-ups might help in the long run, but it's a Herculean task for individuals to try to take up and really needs to be divided up between a team of 5-6 people at least with a database to keep track of those "interested" to follow up with later and ensure that every school gets notified every year.

Instead, I would advocate for focusing on region-specific, conference-specific, state-specific, or system-specific competitions (as Graham notes with NC as a potential example). The "Big South" competition that had a very nice run (though sadly, COVID seemed to end it) was a good example I think of this and may have helped with getting Liberty at least more on the quizbowl circuit. Community Colleges also would be great to get involved, though it will take faculty members taking the lead (and ideally getting compensated/appreciated sufficiently on the service side) to make that happen given the relatively short time that students might be on campus. One way to do this is to work within Community College systems in addition to approaching colleges directly.

With any new-to-quizbowl outreach effort, the primary issue has been getting a critical mass of new players and schools all at once. Otherwise, even on a very accessible IS-level question set, you might end up with lopsided results when a new-to-quizbowl school (in this case, a HCASC team) shows up. This happens far too often. In my current region, any new school will end up having to face Berkeley A-E and Stanford A-B every event. That's just not going to be sustainable even if the questions are relatively accessible.

I do wish that more schools would take an interest in their local region and work to build up new schools and support/stay in contact with teams and programs in their region. My understanding is that this has happened in some regions and I would be interested in hearing more from people who have had success in keeping in touch and keeping programs alive in these regions (integrating with the high school circuit in the area helps as well here).

There are institutional resources out there within conferences, states, and university systems that could help facilitate bringing in multiple new schools as once and sustaining these competitions over time. The key is finding the stakeholders in those places and convincing them of the value of quizbowl.

[cchiego]

We need to create more resources to help teams that have launched to steady themselves. I don't have concrete suggestions on this at this point in time (refer to my first note on being tired at the start of this post, only it now being half an hour later), but the lack of more tools and campaigns than we currently have devoted to keeping teams active that are on the outskirts of the national circuit is a problem that should be solvable. We obviously can't preserve every team that ever springs into existence, but we can't just assume that the knowledge necessary to help a team transition from a newly founded squad into a stable one that exists years down the road will reach these teams via osmosis.

I would love to see more discussion about this, especially attached to quizbowl events. More panels, meetups, online events, etc. about how teams have been successful and compilations of tips and advice for new team leaders would really help here. There will, of course, be lots of school-specific challenges (each school has unique styles of red tape to navigate), but something that I think can be done fairly effectively by the national community is compiling advice on leadership and sustaining teams over time. I would just encourage teams to be aware though that their school might have funding sources and recruitment pipelines that other schools do not have and thus to be aware that what works at a school that gets 20-30 HSNCT participants a year is very different than what works at a school that might not get any.

[Stained Diviner]

Much credit to Fred for trying this. I wish I had more time to work on this type of thing myself. Alas, all I have to offer is two pieces of free advice.

1) The follow-up is very important. I recommend doing it at some point when there is time even if it is too late for this year. If anybody does this in the future, budget time for this. It is both time-consuming and important.

2) It is helpful to let people know that quizbowl is a common activity. This probably requires a major narrowing of the target audience, but it is helpful to tell inactive schools about similar schools that are active. If you want the University of Wisconsin to start a team, make sure people there know that Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan have teams. If you want Brandeis or Amherst to start a team, make sure they know that Tufts has a team. Also, tell people that there were over 200 teams that played SCT (or whatever similar statistics you want to use).

[echoes in the Othersea]

After many years of trying similar things at the HS level and somewhat at the college level, I'm pessimistic about the ability of large-scale outreach efforts to make a major difference at the national level. I have had many experiences similar to Fred's at various points and the amount of work to results ratio is just not worth it. I do think that some kind of more regular national outreach with follow-ups might help in the long run, but it's a Herculean task for individuals to try to take up and really needs to be divided up between a team of 5-6 people at least with a database to keep track of those "interested" to follow up with later and ensure that every school gets notified every year.

Instead, I would advocate for focusing on region-specific, conference-specific, state-specific, or system-specific competitions (as Graham notes with NC as a potential example). The "Big South" competition that had a very nice run (though sadly, COVID seemed to end it) was a good example I think of this and may have helped with getting Liberty at least more on the quizbowl circuit. Community Colleges also would be great to get involved, though it will take faculty members taking the lead (and ideally getting compensated/appreciated sufficiently on the service side) to make that happen given the relatively short time that students might be on campus. One way to do this is to work within Community College systems in addition to approaching colleges directly.

With any new-to-quizbowl outreach effort, the primary issue has been getting a critical mass of new players and schools all at once. Otherwise, even on a very accessible IS-level question set, you might end up with lopsided results when a new-to-quizbowl school (in this case, a HCASC team) shows up. This happens far too often. In my current region, any new school will end up having to face Berkeley A-E and Stanford A-B every event. That's just not going to be sustainable even if the questions are relatively accessible.

I do wish that more schools would take an interest in their local region and work to build up new schools and support/stay in contact with teams and programs in their region. My understanding is that this has happened in some regions and I would be interested in hearing more from people who have had success in keeping in touch and keeping programs alive in these regions (integrating with the high school circuit in the area helps as well here).

There are institutional resources out there within conferences, states, and university systems that could help facilitate bringing in multiple new schools as once and sustaining these competitions over time. The key is finding the stakeholders in those places and convincing them of the value of quizbowl.

I'd like to focus on the Big South Conference for a second because it seems like an interesting case.

A number of schools played the Big South tournament, and Liberty pretty clearly started in the Big South tournament and moved into other quiz bowl tournaments and the circuit, but seemingly none of the others did: Radford, Coastal Carolina, Longwood, High Point, Gardner Webb all played Big South, and pretty much only Big South (although many of them played 2014 SCT, which I feel like there's an interesting piece of historical context missing there about that specific tournament), and then when Big South Quiz Bowl went away they largely disappeared from Quiz Bowl as well.

The obvious questions are about connected outreach, what attempts were made to invite these schools to other tournaments, and why did most of them not move into the mainstream circuit? What I think the deeper question is, and this is more of a question of philosophy, is what does success in quiz bowl outreach look like? If a school sends a team to a pyramidal quiz bowl tournament, but only one specific tournament a year, year in and year out, is this successful quiz bowl outreach? Is handing them a brochure/sending an email saying "here are some other quiz bowl tournaments if you are interested" the end of the road for outreach to that school?

The Big South Championship is also interesting because its a college athletic conference holding a quiz bowl tournament, and I'm not aware of that happening anywhere else. Is there anyone on this forum who knows how that got started, or what those events were like? On paper Big South should have weathered COVID relatively well, its not like the Big South Conference itself went away, and Big South Conference Employees aren't going to graduate in four years like most (I think?) quiz bowl players. Is there anyone on this forum that can tell the story of why and how it failed?

My guess is that the answer is no, because I'm not aware of anyone who played in these tournaments being on the forums, and that is another question about the ethos of outreach: is a presence on this forum an end goal? Is social participation part of "being part of the quiz bowl community"? It is a little weird that I can get firsthand accounts of ACF Nationals in the mid 2000s, or even College Bowl events from the 1980s on this forum, but there's a whole set of fairly recent tournaments for which all we seem to have is some numbers on a spreadsheet. Certain schools not having members on the forum isn't necessarily a bad thing, people can interact with quiz bowl however they want, but in this case it does leave me with less information that I might like, and in the case of most of the schools that played Big South, a seeming lack of other tournaments to play when Big South fell through (or maybe not, maybe Big South was all they wanted to play).

To go back to the broader discussion of outreach, the issue of strength in competition: I believe all the HBCU teams that signed up for the UG Championship Qualifier did not make the cut, and this isn't unexpected given that they were schools new to quiz bowl competing for space against schools that were decidedly not new to Quiz Bowl. This does lead to the question of will they be interested in signing up next year? There are of course tournaments like ACF Fall and DII SCT, but even there a lot of the more successful players actually have a fair amount of quiz bowl experience under their belt. Like you say, its important to have a critical mass of new schools all entering at once, and maybe even having a tournament that selects out experienced players even more than DII SCT or ACF Fall does. And maybe this also helps explain the phenomenon of the Big South Tournament: the only team to transition from there to the ACF and SCT series was Liberty, who was very dominant in Big South but has not replicated that dominance in other tournaments. Maybe the other schools simply didn't want to deal with tougher competition and stayed in their little bubble of Big South until that bubble went away.

Or maybe I'm chasing my own tail: in the words of Anthony (GU) four days ago, "The magic of quizbowl is that you can lose every game but still coming out feeling accomplished." The competitive buffer might not be necessary at all compared to the joy of getting good buzzes on pyramidal questions.

[cchiego]

What I think the deeper question is, and this is more of a question of philosophy, is what does success in quiz bowl outreach look like? If a school sends a team to a pyramidal quiz bowl tournament, but only one specific tournament a year, year in and year out, is this successful quiz bowl outreach? Is handing them a brochure/sending an email saying "here are some other quiz bowl tournaments if you are interested" the end of the road for outreach to that school?

This is a great question. I think the minimum standard for outreach success right now is the persistent existence of a quizbowl team at a school that regularly attends at least one academic, non-pop culture-specific pyramidal event a year. I say "right now" because the vast majority of schools do not even have a quizbowl team and many new teams fold when the leaders graduate; thus, even keeping a team around is a struggle and a success. Having a team in existence that plays at least one tournament annually (and ideally practices on pyramidal questions primarily) creates the opportunity for future people at those schools to have an avenue to play more events if they want with a far lower barrier to entry than having to start their own club (though in some cases, new players end up clashing with older players; see the "Trash-Capture" phenomenon for instance, but anecdotally this seems to affect a decent chunk of other clubs as well).

Maybe the other schools simply didn't want to deal with tougher competition and stayed in their little bubble of Big South until that bubble went away.

This might be true, but the question here is whether or not there's anything really wrong with that. Quizbowl is a weird competition in which there aren't that many competition divisions. You don't get DIII schools playing DI schools in most sports, but outside of a few novice events and divisions, you'll get lots of that in collegiate quizbowl. For some, that can be exhilarating. For others, it can be very demoralizing. I know that "exhilarating" or at least "inspired to study more" is a common experience among people who stay involved in quizbowl, but that's likely a pretty major selection effect. Plus, schools generally like playing nearby/local schools with some kind of pre-existing rivalries built in. Why not have more local competitions and opportunities, especially those linked to external conferences or other institutions (say, different campuses of a university system)?