Boilermaker Spring Challenge (4/13/24)

[Halinaxus]

The Purdue University Quiz Bowl Team is excited to announce the inaugural Boilermaker Spring Challenge, a "nats-prep" quiz bowl tournament for teams in the state of Indiana and beyond. This tournament will be held in person on Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus on Saturday, April, 13th, 2024.

The Boilermaker Spring Challenge will use NAQT's SCT-24DII, a collegiate set that is roughly equivalent to HSNCT difficulty. Sample questions at this difficulty are available here. The field cap will start at 12 teams, though field expansions are possible.

Gameplay
Teams consist of four players, though more can rotate in and out as substitutions. Games will consist of two 10-tossup halves with 3-part bonuses. There will be 15-point powers for early answers and 5-point negs for incorrect answers before the end of a tossup. There are no bouncebacks on bonuses. The SCT-24DII set does not have any computational math questions.

Registration
Registration will be through NAQT, found here, and requires a free account with NAQT. If you have any questions or need any assistance, email [email protected], and we will get back to you as soon as possible. The finalized schedule will be sent out closer to the day of, but a rough duration would be from 8:30am to sometime around 4pm, with included lunch break. Registration closes at 11:59 pm on Wednesday, April 10th.

Eligibility
Since this is a nats-prep tournament, out of state teams who wish to test their mettle against the best squads Indiana has to offer are welcome!

Schools may submit more than one team to this tournament. If you wish to submit multiple teams, please designate each team by decreasing strength with a letter, starting with A. For example, if Carmel High School were to submit 3 teams, we would expect their strongest team to be named Carmel A, the second-strongest to be Carmel B, and the third-strongest to be Carmel C.

Chaperone Policy
Purdue University requires each school (not necessarily each team) to bring at least one responsible adult chaperone. This is usually a coach, but can also be a parent or other adult. In addition, we expect all teams to conduct themselves and reserve the right to remove players for disruptive behavior.

Payment
Payment must be made by cash, accepted the day of the tournament, or by a check made out to "Purdue University Quiz Bowl Team." We will send an invoice with instructions to each team that registers. Please contact us if this system does not work for you.

Fees and Discounts
Registration: $80 per team
-$5 for each working buzzer set with at least 8 working buzzers.
-$5 per 90 miles traveled one-way as determined by NAQT
-$10 per team-provided staffer able to read or scorekeep at least 9 rounds of gameplay at a rate of 45 minutes per round.
Minimum fee of $50 per team

If this year's Boilermaker Spring Challenge sounds of interest to you or your team, don’t hesitate to sign up! For any further questions, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Thank you for your interest, and happy buzzing!

[Halinaxus]

After further consideration, we've decided to use 10-tossup halves (20/20) instead of 11-tossup halves (22/22) in order to make statkeeping easier and have built-in replacement and tiebreaker questions in each packet. The original announcement has been updated to reflect this.

[Halinaxus]

This tournament is now less than two weeks away, and we'd love to get one more registration to round out the field!

[Halinaxus]

Thanks to everyone who came out to the inaugural Boilermaker Spring Challenge today! I was very impressed by the teams' performances on a very challenging college-difficulty question set.

Congratulations to Lemrac/Carmel A for taking the crown with a performance that would have qualified them for college nationals (!!!) had they been a college team (and had college nationals not already happened last week). Full stats are now available on NAQT.com.

I want to also thank all of the staffers (especially coaches Ben Dillon and John Petrovich) who not only made this tournament possible, but made it happen ahead of schedule!

Those of you who will be competing at nationals over the next few months, we at PUQB wish you the absolute best of luck! I know you'll represent Indiana quiz bowl with pride.

We plan to bring BSC back next year and make it an annual event along with Kickoff and Buzzathon, and we hope that you will join us again then! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out! Otherwise, have a wonderful rest of your weekend!