2024 West Coast Championship [2024-05-18]

[Arras Agility]

I'm very pleased to announce the 2024 West Coast Championship, an online high school nats-prep tournament to be held online on Saturday, May 18th. This is a successor to the very successful 2021 iteration. I will be directing.

Divisions

This tournament will have two divisions: a Nationals division limited to teams registered for or applying for a wildcard bid at HSNCT or PACE, and a Standard division for all other eligible teams. If your team would like to play in the Nationals division and is of Nationals caliber but for whatever reason is not intending to register or apply for a wildcard, please let me know - I may make such exceptions at my discretion.

Both divisions will be on NAQT questions; the Nationals division will be played on the Division II SCT set (approximately nationals-difficulty), while the Standard division will be played on the SSNCT set (approximately regular-difficulty). Please note that this means schools which intend to play SSNCT will be unable to play in the Standard division; such teams should play in the Nationals division instead.

We will run 20-tossup 20-bonus quizbowl with powers and negs, and skip computational math questions.

Logistics

The tournament will be run using Zoom and buzzin.live. Players will be required to adhere to standard anti-cheating measures for online tournaments. We'll use NAQT rules (with timing details modified to match the online format).

Eligibility

Teams representing physical schools must be located in the Pacific or Mountain time zones. Any teams from online schools in attendance must only have players physically living in those time zones. Only students in grades 9 - 12 are eligible.

Staffing and pricing

Without staffers from the community, this event will not happen since there's no pool of staffers affiliated with an institution to draw from. In recognition of that fact, staffers -- both team-affiliated and external -- will be paid most of the revenues from this tournament [0]; I imagine (but make no guarantees) that this will come out to something in the $30 to $40 range for a full day.

Please note that due to question security considerations, team-affiliated staffers may not be middle school or high school players.

To register as an external (i.e. not affiliated with any particular) staffer, please email me.

Registration costs $60 per team, with a staffer discount set to be equal to the pay of an external staffer (the $20 amount on the NAQT site is a placeholder), and a $0 minimum. We will prefer payment through Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle, but accept payments through checks or other reasonable payment methods.

Registration

There's a preliminary field cap of 12 teams in each division, with waitlists pending additional staffing support. A maximum of two teams per school may register in Nationals; there's no such restriction in Standard.

Register through the NAQT site at this link. I look forward to seeing teams across the region in May!

Questions, comments, concerns? Post in the thread, email me at [email protected], or message me on Discord.

[0] To be explicit: I intend to divide all revenues between staffers, after set mirroring fees and potential other expenses, pirate plunder-style: one equal share per full-day staffer, half a share for half-day staffers; two shares for myself or other control room staff.

[Arras Agility]

The field cap in Nationals has been increased to 18.

[Arras Agility]

This happened today. Mira Loma went 10-0 in an 11-team round robin to clear the field and win the Competitive division outright; Del Norte B went 9-1 in a 6-team double round robin to clear the field and win the Standard division outright. Full team and individual statistics will be posted to hquizbowl and naqt.com in due course.

Thanks to all the staffers that made this tournament possible!