State tournaments

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tiwonge
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State tournaments

Post by tiwonge »

I'm not a new high school team, but I am new to trying to coordinate statewide cooperation.

I am trying to reach out to northern and eastern Idaho to see if I can encourage schools there to start and establish a circuit. Summer's not the best time to reach teachers, but I did hear back from one teacher who is excited to get back away from the science-specific science questions and wants to try out quiz bowl. Back in the day when INL ran things here, the winners of the three regions would meet in Boise to determine the state champion. (Well, the top 2 or 3 teams. Definitely the top 2 teams in each regional tournament, and maybe the top 3 teams.) He said that this possibility of going to Boise was a big draw for attracting students to his team, and that in the past, the school funded a trip to the state championships when they qualified.

However:
However, I'm pretty sure that we'd have to firm up a schedule of sorts and the Boise component would have to be a real state tournament before I could sell this to my school and school district. In the meantime I will consider doing a north ID tournament as a trial but I don't foresee going to Boise until it is a definite state tournament.
I don't know what he means about a "real" or "definite" state tournament. (In some sense, it is real in that it is officially recognized by NAQT as the Idaho State Championship, but it definitely has not represented the whole state in the past.) In an earlier email to him, I said that anybody who wants to come to Boise for the state tournament can; that we don't restrict participation in the tournament. (The Idaho circuit is not big enough for me to do this. I will take any team I can get.) I suggested that he can practically guarantee his team a trip to Boise every year. I think this message is a response to that.

I mean, we definitely have a cap of the number of teams we can handle because of the number of qualified staffers. (This past year, I determined our cap to be 8 teams, and it probably will be similar this year.) But we've never had an issue of having more teams want to come than available staffers (except last year, when due to unforeseen circumstances, almost all my college staffers bailed on me and I had to quickly press former parent volunteers into service). So, if we have a cap (of, say, 8 teams) and we have more than 8 teams who want to come, we'll definitely have to come up with some way to decide which teams will get to play in our state tournament.

So, mostly, I'm wondering how other state organizations handle their state championship tournaments. Do teams have to qualify for it? Is it open invitation?
Colin McNamara, Boise State University
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Idaho Quiz & Academic Teams
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Re: State tournaments

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

In Illinois there's 3 major state championships, the IHSA state championship (run by the state sporting association, so treated w/ most legitimacy in eyes of school administration but due to format i.e. geographically allocated regionals/sectionals, dumb distributions, cruddy questions, less legitimate in qb's eyes), Masonic state (run by the state masonic lodge, questions are usually good in the last few years due to having real writers but uses a mediocre format, also qualify via sectionals), and NAQT state (open, run by IHSSBCA (?), probably the best good quizbowl state, probably the least recognition from school administrations)
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tiwonge
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Re: State tournaments

Post by tiwonge »

How are teams selected for these? Do they have to qualify through regional or local tournaments?

Edit: oh, I see you said the NAQT tournament was open. Do you ever have to deal with more teams wanting to play than you can handle?
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Re: State tournaments

Post by alexdz »

In Missouri, several organizations are involved in running what might be considered to be state championships.

1) MSHSAA, the state activities association, runs the official state series. Like Illinois, this one is treated with the most legitimacy by districts and administrators. There's a two-tiered qualification in each of four classes: 16 districts into 8 sectionals into state. The 8 sectional winners in each class attend the state tournament and a class champion is crowned from each. The event uses MSHSAA-formatted NAQT questions.

2) MACA, the Missouri Academic Coaches Association, runs the JV and Middle School championships. These are open attendance events that have recently become high-quality, 20/20-style.

3) MOQBA runs the NAQT Missouri Qualifier - and is expressly forbidden from calling it a state championship due to MSHSAA rules. This event is also open attendance.
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Re: State tournaments

Post by AGoodMan »

I don't think so; they always want more teams to come to NAQT State to my knowledge.
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Re: State tournaments

Post by Stained Diviner »

Actually, the Illinois NAQT State Championship got more teams by being selective. It used to have trouble attracting teams because Illinois has a crowded state championship season that includes Math Team Sectionals and some music, debate, and Science Olympiad stuff at the same time of year as three quizbowl state championships.

About five years ago, IHSSBCA made a policy in which teams had to qualify for NAQT State by being in the top 25% of a tournament or by applying for a wildcard spot. This increased the number of teams because teams like playing in events they qualify for, and in some cases schools allow teams to go over budget to play in tournaments they qualify for.

That being said, this is not the solution for every state. It made sense in Illinois because there were already a ton of regular season tournaments and state championships. You also need permission from NAQT to do this, and they only gave Illinois permission after several years of running good tournament that attracted 10-15 out of 500 teams.
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Re: State tournaments

Post by etchdulac »

tiwonge wrote:So, mostly, I'm wondering how other state organizations handle their state championship tournaments. Do teams have to qualify for it? Is it open invitation?
In Texas, Middle School state remains open invitation due to statewide circuit size. We run Championship, Open and Elementary divisions there; only one team per school may play in Championship.

High School State bids are earned by winning a regular-season event or by earning a wild-card entry; wild-cards are issued based on a points-standings system.

In general, it is hard to be exclusive for state without a significant number of schools trying to get there. How many total schools competed in HS quizbowl last year in Idaho?
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Re: State tournaments

Post by J. Young »

In Virginia, we have two state championships, the Virginia High School League (VHSL) and the NAQT States. VHSL is "scholastic bowl" which uses a four-quarter format but is still high quality. Around 90% of the Virginia public schools do scholastic bowl, so the state championship is "closed", in other words, teams need to qualify. The qualification process is really tough, though, because only the top 24 teams out of most of the state's public schools actually compete at the state championship itself. NAQT states, however, are completely open and the only limit is the field cap.
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Re: State tournaments

Post by tiwonge »

I think we had 7 teams, total, competing last year, and 6 of them were at our "State championship." It wasn't a problem last year. This is more speculative than needed, at the moment.

It sounds like Post Falls and Coeur d'Alene Charter up in northern Idaho are interested this year, and they might be able to get a couple other northern Idaho schools to form a circuit up there. That might effectively double the number of teams in Idaho, although given the distance from there to Boise, it's not likely that most of them would come for a state championship.

I do have a problem, though, with the number of teams we can accommodate due to staffing. Due to that, we 'll have a cap on the number of teams, and it will be pretty small (I set it at 8 last year, and had staffers cancel, so it was good thing I just got 6 teams). If the number of interested teams grows more than the number of staffers, I might have to figure out how to restrict the enrollment for the tournament.

I also am thinking about what makes it a true "state tournament." I'd really, really like to have at least one representative from northern and eastern Idaho play. Otherwise, it's kind of just a state tournament in name only.
Colin McNamara, Boise State University
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