Whats the best way to get others to join quiz bowl?

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Ohyeah19
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Whats the best way to get others to join quiz bowl?

Post by Ohyeah19 »

At my school, we have a Knowledge Bowl club and we only got into last year. I have noticed that other schools have at least 15 members in their Quiz Bowl or Knowledge Bowl clubs and they also seem to have a loyal member base. Our club attendance is 8 plus or minus 7, so sometimes it's just me, but we did start out with a lot of people at the beginning of the year (like 16).
I was wondering if any of you would have some tips on advertising and convincing people to join Quiz Bowl and getting people to come consistently. What I have been doing is telling others to "Come to Knowledge Bowl" and I have done it so much that that is something many people know me by.

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Justin Zhang
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cchiego
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Re: Whats the best way to get others to join quiz bowl?

Post by cchiego »

Ohyeah19 wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2019 1:39 am At my school, we have a Knowledge Bowl club and we only got into last year. I have noticed that other schools have at least 15 members in their Quiz Bowl or Knowledge Bowl clubs and they also seem to have a loyal member base. Our club attendance is 8 plus or minus 7, so sometimes it's just me, but we did start out with a lot of people at the beginning of the year (like 16).
I was wondering if any of you would have some tips on advertising and convincing people to join Quiz Bowl and getting people to come consistently. What I have been doing is telling others to "Come to Knowledge Bowl" and I have done it so much that that is something many people know me by.

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Great to see another Knowledge Bowl team looking to get more into quizbowl! Here are some other ideas to help with getting and retaining players:

One thing is to make sure that your practices are well-run. If students are just kind of sitting around and then maybe eventually getting out the buzzer set and practice questions after 20 minutes, it's usually a sign that the club isn't that serious. Have the buzzers out and set up quickly and practice questions lined up before each practice (if you don't already know about www.quizbowlpackets.com, it's the best free source of packets--start with the SCOP Novice ones) so that you can get things going in a timely fashion.

Another is to enlist your team's faculty sponsor and other faculty in helping you out with recruitment. You could ask them to send you the names of students who they think might be interested and have them encourage those students to come check out a practice. Definitely do the standard get-on-the-morning-announcements and ideally have practice times and locations posted in multiple spots around campus and on the web in case students are interested but don't personally get a "Come to Knowledge Bowl" thing from you.

The best but perhaps most difficult strategy is to make sure that you send as many players as possible to tournaments early in the semester. Once someone has a chance to play a full tournament, they'll get a better sense of how quizbowl works and probably get more committed than if there's only one or two chances to play each semester. This is going to be a bit of a challenge in the Pacific Northwest due to the lack of tournaments, so hopefully you can work with the UWashington team and other schools in the area to plan out some novice-level events nearby that you can send lots of teams to and see how it goes.

It can also help to make sure that new members know about all the resources available to improve at quizbowl. A lot of new players feel a bit overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of quizbowl questions at first, so giving them tools and advice to help improve may help with retention as well.

Finally, there may also be issues at some point with the quizbowl/Knowledge Bowl distinction and practice questions. This is a bit too complicated to get into a post like this, but I would do everything you can to make sure that you practice with quizbowl questions as much as possible as Knowledge Bowl questions aren't as helpful in teaching players new clues (and have many other issues). Good luck and let us know how it goes!
Chris C.
Past: UGA/UCSD/Penn
Present: Solano County, CA
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