Looking for a good housewrite to mirror in November

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Hey, in Missouri we are looking to organize multiple tournaments on one weekend that is mirroring a housewritten set as part of a campaign to get more good tournaments going, especially in a couple regions where we have weak attendance. If we successfully get this off the ground, you could be looking at getting 4-ish tournaments worth of mirror fees, so this could be pretty lucrative. However, we would like to find a set that meets these specs:
*14 packets
*Very good difficulty control, because we don't want lots of tossups on Clifford Geertz going dead in Southwest Missouri or wherever.
*A distribution that doesn't have 1/1 Social Science per packet, because that nonsense needs to stop everywhere.
*Enough tiebreakers that we can remove the trash questions and still have full packets and a tiebreaker or two.
We would like to find a set that meets all of these criteria, although if you have one that's close we can be flexible. Post here and we can get in touch.

[ValenciaQBowl]

I'll bite. Delta Burke will be ready by the second weekend of November and will have 14 packets. However, like, I think, every tournament in the universe (?), it will have 1/1 social science (I think psych and anthro is interesting! economics, not so much, but who am I to say no?). I am a lazy weenie, however, and don't provide a tiebreaker for each packet; we just create seven extras and have the readers report back to the mods' room when one is used. It's always worked for us (we don't have that many ties). But there is 1/1 pop culture, so this may be a problem for you--you'd have to come up with 7-8 toss-ups to make replacements, and even then you'd have no tiebreakers. That certainly may be a deal breaker for you, which is fine with me; we're independently wealthy, so I'm not sweating more mirror fees. But I'm happy to help if you think you can work within those parameters.

PS--There is also probably going to be an all-Geertz theme pack among the set, and each toss-up in that packet won't drop the pronoun until at least 15 words have been presented, so keep that in mind, too.

[Cheynem]

Is Delta Burke really appropriate for high schools in regions without a ton of exposure to good quizbowl?

[ValenciaQBowl]

Hmm--fair question. I think it's often too easy for most good HS teams, but I probably don't know enough about teams without exposure to good QB. However, FWIW, a large number of the folks playing Delta Burke at Valencia are in their first-ever tournament, and though they're college freshmen, that status probably doesn't guarantee they're naturally brighter than many HS kids.

You asked, Mike--what do you think? You've seen DB questions. I'm honestly curious.

[Cheynem]

I find Delta Burke pretty easy, appropriate as a high school tournament in a lot of cases. However, some of the question choices and elements of the distribution do make it harder than a number of high school tournaments, if that makes sense. For instance, I find it appropriate for even easy level college tournaments to use 1/1 social science and ask about things like Geertz, a commonly assigned author in intro level sociology courses. I would not find such decisions as appropriate for most high school tournaments. I guess I feel like when I read Delta Burke it's slightly easier than ACF Fall--which is little challenge for very good HS teams, but still in a number of ways harder than a lot of HS tournaments. I'm just going by feel here, not by stats, though.

[ValenciaQBowl]

That makes sense, actually--I'm well aware that my own weird interests tend to pervade the set, so we might throw in TUs on "Time Transfixed," for instance, which caused some debate a couple years ago. Anyway, Charlie, caveat emptor. Delta Burke is a possibility, but caveat emptor. There may be better choices from HS programs.

[Nine-Tenths Ideas]

Yeah, Charlie asked Maryland, but we're short a packet and the trash was a dealbreaker for him. Not sure I agree with his rationale that trash shouldn't be in high school sets, especially targeting novices [coaches don't like it], but there it is.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

So, I guess I'll make clear the vision I have for these tournaments, which is that the idea is to have a good, regular set being run on a weekend in the fall so that most teams in Missouri have a place within easy driving range where they can play a normal tournament. It's not specifically catering to new teams, we just want to try and attract everybody so that more and more teams can experience what a "normal" tournament is like.

I would say no to Delta Burke here. It probably will be fine for us to mirror at a single event somewhere, especially in one of the more competitive parts of the state, but Missouri doesn't really have a lot of very good teams, and other than Ladue a lot of our decent teams are not nationally relevant. We also can't afford to have any of the weird in-jokes that were a bit of a problem at that one Penn tournament, because in Missouri coaches would be horrified by them, given that there's been a lot of teams who have already complained when questions about myth reference things like scorpion ejaculation as being too racy.

As for 1/1 Social Science, there are 0 high school nationals that have 1/1 per packet. NAQT and HSAPQ, the only two good high school set providing companies, have nowhere near 1/1 per set. Social Science is interesting, but they are answered at horrible rates and only really benefit teams who study a lot of college packets (which is proportionally very few teams). Having 1/1 per set in high school is a perfect example of the problems of copying college quizbowl wholesale, because it doesn't even help prepare teams for nationals and just makes sets even harder for most teams, which is not a good end result.

Now, here's my thing about trash. I am 100% convinced that virtually none of the true decision makers in quizbowl care for there to be a lot of trash. When NAQT trots out survey results to justify their extremely large trash distribution, they aren't weighing the opinions of coaches and players, or experienced players versus everybody else, separately. Inexperienced high schoolers are obsessed with voting for as much or more trash not because it would help make the set look better, but because most of them have poor opinions on what the game should look like and are amused at the idea that they can answer questions about Pokemon. There are also a lot of players who have no interest in the trash questions, and if you told the trash obsessed players that they didn't have an option to increase the trash, they generally aren't going to complain about it not being there, because it's solely a bone being thrown at them (a lot of them probably won't even notice, because I think trash is a lot less common in MSHSAA sets). The actual financial decision makers, coaches, in my experience tend to absolutely despise trash. Additionally, I've heard a pretty good point brought up before, which is that a math teacher who coaches a local team was annoyed that, as he saw it, math knowledge was less valuable than trash, which is really an argument I don't have a good rebuttal to. On top of all that, PACE has no trash, so it's not like this doesn't have national precedent. Because of all that, I think it would be a net benefit to have a tournament that's supposed to be catering to all levels of teams not including trash here.

[Cheynem]

I agree with the social science argument in that I think too many high school sets copy the college idea of social science wholesale. I do think that there are possible fields in social science that may get short shrift in HS sets because they are not used in college packets--accessible stuff like questions on civics/government, grammar/English, and foreign languages. Of course, many of these questions are hard to write in tossup form, so bonuses may be the way to go for a lot of these topics, but they are available to be written on (I really liked that question which basically tested knowledge of Spanish that Andrew Hart wrote for MUT this year, for example).

As for trash, I see Charlie's argument--I see nothing wrong with tournaments having well-written amounts of trash, but I think trash is actually a pretty hard topic to write, especially for high school sets--you want to write professional questions that won't offend anyone, you want to avoid niche stuff which it is hard to distinguish knowledge on, etc.

[Black-throated Antshrike]

Sean and Jacob said they were interested in using the UD/MSU housewrite for tournaments in Missouri, so that would be open to you

[Charles Martel]

IMSANITY 3 will have .5/.5 Trash and .5/.5 SS, and 1 tiebreaker per round. I think we're planning on 16 packets, though, so one of those could be used in case more tiebreakers are needed.

[DumbJaques]

Is there a reason the Maryland set couldn't be slightly modified by, say, replacing the trash? That wouldn't take all that much work, and Isaac did a great job with difficulty control this year.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Chris, I decided against it because it hits basically all the things I wasn't looking for - it doesn't have 14 packets, does have 1/1 social science, and has 1/1 trash. It would be a lot easier for everyone involved if we got one of the other sets I've heard of that hit at least a couple of the marks I was looking for. We can use the Maryland set for something else potentially.

[Important Bird Area]

Further discussion of the place of social science can be found here.