2023: The most common schools from the last four NAQT Entering Freshmen Lists

[AKKOLADE]

I took the last three NAQT Entering Freshmen (so the classes of 2020-2023) and determined which schools have the most listed players who provided their information. This is a total of 3550 entries.

Class of 2023: 837 entries
Class of 2022: 870 entries
Class of 2021: 812 entries
Class of 2020: 1031 entries

There are 697 unique schools listed. Here are all of the ones with 10 or more entries.

Code: Select all

School	Count
Buffalo	86
RIT	72
Michigan	63
Yale	57
U of Rochester	55
Chicago	50
Georgia Tech	48
Cornell	46
Ohio State	44
Purdue	40
Illinois	38
Oklahoma State	38
Penn	36
Stanford	36
Texas	36
Minnesota	35
Nebraska	35
Harvard	32
UC Berkeley	31
Notre Dame	30
Oklahoma	30
Texas A&M	30
Brown	29
MIT	29
UCLA	28
Princeton	26
Alabama	25
Columbia	25
SUNY-Binghamton	25
Virginia	25
Northwestern	24
Kansas State	23
Michigan State	23
RPI	22
Carnegie Mellon	21
Monroe CC	21
NYU	21
SUNY-Brockport	21
Clarkson	20
Michigan Tech	20
Johns Hopkins	19
UAlbany	19
Georgetown	18
Northeastern	18
SUNY-Geneseo	18
Duke	17
Finger Lakes CC	17
Florida	17
Georgia	17
Missouri	17
Iowa State	16
Penn State	16
UC San Diego	16
Indiana	15
North Carolina State	15
Pittsburgh	15
Tufts	15
Arkansas	14
Clemson	14
Hudson Valley CC	14
Iowa	14
Rutgers	14
St. John Fisher	14
Brigham Young	13
Dartmouth	13
Kansas	13
North Carolina	13
Siena	13
USC	13
Vanderbilt	13
William & Mary	13
Alabama-Birmingham	12
Auburn	12
Case Western	12
Emory	12
George Washington	12
Missouri S&T	12
Nazareth	12
Rice	12
SUNY-New Paltz	12
Virginia Tech	12
Washington	12
Williams	12
Boston College	11
Bradley	11
Central Michigan	11
Cincinnati	11
Mississippi State	11
NDSU	11
SUNY-ESF	11
SUNY-Fredonia	11
Toronto	11
Wisconsin	11
Bowling Green	10
Colgate	10
Le Moyne	10
Navy	10
South Carolina	10
SUNY-Potsdam	10
Vermont	10
WUSTL	10

Of course, there's questions about geographic bias in terms of who's filling these forms out, and which areas are or are not getting responses in. Chris Chiego had a good post about this last year.

[AKKOLADE]

As best as I could tell, these are the top five teams that were not active at all in 2022-23.

RPI - 22 freshmen
Monroe CC - 21 freshmen
SUNY-Brockport - 21 freshmen
Clarkson - 20 freshmen
UAlbany - 19 freshmen

These schools competed in three or fewer tournaments as best as I could tell. Obviously, some of these teams are launching, but it'd be great if help was offered to all of them to help them become more active.

Oklahoma State - 38 freshmen
Texas A&M - 30
Carnegie Mellon - 21
Michigan Tech - 20
Georgetown - 18
Northeastern - 18
SUNY-Geneseo - 18

[AKKOLADE]

Oklahoma State - 38 freshmen
Texas A&M - 30
Carnegie Mellon - 21
Michigan Tech - 20
Georgetown - 18
Northeastern - 18
SUNY-Geneseo - 18

An update on these schools:

Oklahoma State - played ACF Fall & Collegiate Novice, but nothing since October
Texas A&M - played ACF Fall, an online Planetfall mirror, ACF Regionals, and SCT (edit: and a couple others listed as TAMU)
Carnegie Mellon - played Collegiate Novice, CREEK+, ACF Fall, and SCT
Michigan Tech - ACF Fall, Collegiate Novice, and SCT
Georgetown - Collegiate Novice, ILIAC, and ARCADIA. Would be great to get them to ACF Regionals and/or SCT next year.
Northeastern - only played SCT
SUNY-Geneseo - Played no tournaments. Does anyone know what happened here?

[High Dependency Unit]

Oklahoma State - 38 freshmen
Texas A&M - 30
Carnegie Mellon - 21
Michigan Tech - 20
Georgetown - 18
Northeastern - 18
SUNY-Geneseo - 18

An update on these schools:

Oklahoma State - played ACF Fall & Collegiate Novice, but nothing since October
Texas A&M - played ACF Fall, an online Planetfall mirror, ACF Regionals, and SCT (edit: and a couple others listed as TAMU)
Carnegie Mellon - played Collegiate Novice, CREEK+, ACF Fall, and SCT
Michigan Tech - ACF Fall, Collegiate Novice, and SCT
Georgetown - Collegiate Novice, ILIAC, and ARCADIA. Would be great to get them to ACF Regionals and/or SCT next year.
Northeastern - only played SCT
SUNY-Geneseo - Played no tournaments. Does anyone know what happened here?

My understanding is that the SUNY schools get a lot of brainbusters (upstate NY quiz bowl) players who typically come from small schools and may not be significantly interested in quiz bowl compared to quiz bowl players from larger high schools.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

As best as I could tell, these are the top five teams that were not active at all in 2022-23.

Oklahoma State - 38 freshmen

When I was an undergrad at Oklahoma, back when Oklahoma State still had an active club, we were in a similar situation. So, I can give a little bit of insight into the Oklahoma context. Every year OU would get a huge influx of people who had played OSSAA non-pyramidal quizbowl, and maybe a handful of pyramidal tournaments. We would get them to come to maybe one practice and that was it. (I'm not sure how NAQT collects this data, but when I was at OU a lot of Oklahomans on this list seemed like they had never played pyramidal quizbowl before? So people would often come to one practice, get overwhelmed, and leave.) The only people we were particularly successful at recruiting from these lists were out-of-state students.