What is quizbowl in Canada and the UK like?

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Scone
Lulu
Posts: 50
Joined: Fri Sep 28, 2018 1:37 pm

What is quizbowl in Canada and the UK like?

Post by Scone »

Hello,

This is just a thread I am making out of my own curiosity. I've been curious about what the quizbowl scene in Canada and the UK is like when I found out that several college teams travelled to America for ICT and ACF Nationals this year. The QBWiki has a page about Canada but not one about the UK.

What I'm mainly curious about is this: how do teams deal with the fact that the questions are written by Americans and have distributions that reflect that? When tournaments are mirrored in each region, they don't "Briticize" or "Canadianize" them, right? So, is it a shock when new people join the club and realize that they need to learn about American history and literature?

Apart from that, I have other questions like:
What are the high school circuits like?
Is McGill the only Quebec university that would feasibly play quizbowl?
What are the traditional powerhouses and rivalries?

Thanks in advance!
Samir Sarma
Eden Prairie '22
Georgia Tech '26
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Gene Harrogate
Wakka
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Re: What is quizbowl in Canada and the UK like?

Post by Gene Harrogate »

Hi Samir! As an American who's lived the last 6 years in Canada, I'm at least qualified to speak about the collegiate circuit.

The most important thing to know about Canada is that most novices come into collegiate quizbowl with no experience with the game at all. Outside of a few Ontario powerhouses---UTS, Lisgar, and a few others---high schools in Canada play Reach for the Top. Reach is pretty much a semi-pyramidal speedcheck game with a less predictable canon, so the good players are able to make the adjustment after a moderate learning curve. If you look at DII ICT resuts, you'll notice Canadian schools tend to have teams made up of 2nd-4th years. That's mostly a result of this quizbowl learning curve and the lack of high schoolers from elite American programs. Unfortunately Canadian high school quizbowl has almost entirely died out during the pandemic, even among these strong Toronto and Ottawa schools.

Once upon a time novice sets were Canadianized to smooth the transition from the Cancon-heavy Reach distribution. That doesn't really happen anymore, so Canadians get used quickly to the more exotic Americana (E.A. Robinson, Sinclair Lewis, any number of Supreme Court cases, Civil War battles, or founding fathers). But they're generally able to roll with this pretty well since, as far as I can tell, American culture, television, history, and literature reaches high-school Canadians far more than it does the British. Even moving to French-speaking Montreal I experienced relatively little culture shock beyond "Leftenant" and the fact that everyone knew who the Dionne Quintuplets were.

The most consistent rivalry in my time has been McGill v. Toronto, and they've been the most dependable clubs in sending teams since sometime around 2011. Waterloo, McMaster, and Ottawa also have long histories, though I wouldn't know the specifics (there's also a very long West coast tradition starting with Simon Fraser, recently revived by UBC). It's a fairly close-knit collegiate circuit, which I attribute more than anything to a few contributors who put a lot of value early on into cross-club communication (a little bit of national identity probably doesn't hurt either).

If Canada were to get another Quebec team involved, it would almost certainly be Concordia (also in Montreal). McGill has had the advantage in quizbowl of attracting Reach veterans from aforementioned UTS and (especially) Lisgar, and also being one of the top Canadian destinations for Americans. Concordia would probably need some of those players to get a club going, about which I'm not particularly optimistic. The top short term goal is probably getting a stronger circuit presence in Ottawa again.

Hope that answers your questions! Quizbowl in Canada is really rather similar to the game in the US.
Henry Atkins
ex-McGill
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Lulu
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Re: What is quizbowl in Canada and the UK like?

Post by Scone »

Thanks for your detailed response, Henry!
Samir Sarma
Eden Prairie '22
Georgia Tech '26
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