Week 104: Creating the Practice Environment
and looking at a building today, two years ago and twenty years ago.
[Another long section of the book, and then some notes composed at a place I was sitting on three slow Wednesdays.]
Creating the practice environment
From watching the televised rounds, you can draw some conclusions as to the structure of the studio in which the competition is held. It is useful to model your practice room on the layout of the competition studio. If the teams are facing the host in the studio, the teams should face the reader in the practice room. If the teams are standing around a single buzzer, there should be only one buzzer for a team to buzz in with in practice. If they will be standing in the studio, they should be standing in the practice room. If you can figure out where the audience will be in the studio, that is where you should spend some of the time of practice, when you are not acting as the host.
You see, you will have to fill the role of host for some of the practice. That means you are going to have to read questions to your team, in the fashion of how it is done on the show.
How to moderate during practice
[Note: there’s as many guides to how to moderate as there have been years of quiz bowl competition. Every one of them, however, is targeting that a moderator is going to be moderating for an actual competition match. Not one of them is written for practice, and being able to practice while still helping the team become more skilled.]
Of all the tasks that will be asked of you in the first week, moderating practice rounds is the one I know will you, the new coach, will be able to do. After all, if you aren't familiar with reading a short, prepared text to a group of students, I really don't see how someone would have known to pick you to coach a group of students. This is reading for practice, and while there's special cases we'll go through later, these are the basic points that you'll need to remember.
Simulate the host and the stage and the camera as much as possible -- If the host stands up, you stand up, if they work from a podium, you work from a podium. If there's a monitor behind the host, guess what… It is important to try to follow the rules of play as best as you can, so that your team can understand the rules. You want to normalize the entire stage experience for your team. You want them to know how to listen to someone twenty feet away if they're twenty feet away from the host, and how to direct their answer to a microphone while looking at the camera.
Maintain pace -- I always advise people to read questions in practice as quickly as possible while still maintaining their own comfort, and not to read so quickly that you miss details in the question. The host has experience getting to that point, and will read questions at a pace they are comfortable with.
Allow yourself to follow the intended intonation of the question -- Most questions have a certain rhythm to them, and places where the writer has intended points to break. Punctuation, ends of prepostional phrases, beginnings and ends of quotes.
Break your pace only when you have advice to give or when there is a natural break in the show's pace --There won't be a break in the action during taping unless there absolutely needs to be. You will find during your first practices that there are things you want to note, to correct, to advise your team so that they can do better immediately. Unless you're in a natural break in the show's pattern, you shouldn't break your pace.
Once you’ve broken your pace and paused, handle all the points and advice you wanted to give out before going to the next section of the game — Be positive in your criticism, and give advice they can follow in future. Guidance like, “Next time, just give them Johnson and make them make you specify.” is perfectly good advice, and it gives them an action to perform in similar situations.
Use a word or phrase to prompt the team that the next question is coming -- This is a point to keep them from digressing, or discussing an answered question, or being distracted. Something like "next question" draws the team's focus to the task at hand.
Follow the rules of the competition as closely as possible; in particular, wait a consistent length of time for answers -- There should be a specific cite in the ruleset which tells you how long your team will have to answer once a question ends or once they buzz in. Even if it's obvious from the recording that the show doesn't hold teams to that standard universally, your team cannot count on being given leeway. Training them on a specific fixed time limit is necessary.
Don't worry if you're reading imperfectly. The team needs the reps, and the moderator on stage won't be perfect either. -- Even professionals make mistakes. Even after decades of hosting experience, hosts misspeak. They are able to cover that up with dubbing the audio and clever editing. But that postprocessing won't be used to rewrite the outcomes of questions. Your team has to realize that occasional mistakes in reading happen all the time.
If you flub a name, or if you see a word that is difficult, don't reverse course and reread it. It's more important to get through the question in the style that would happen on stage, and repeatedly running over the troublesome word may make it more confusing to your team. A host's mistake with the word will be cleaned up by editing later. You may also pause and reread it silently before attempting a word. That's less damaging, you get through the word once, and your pause helps indicate that the word is important as a clue.
If possible, read rounds ahead of time. (This may not be possible.) -- The host of the program has the luxury of reviewing the questions before taping. They may not take advantage of that luxury, but if you have the time, you should afford yourself that luxury. This will allow you to note things like clues that repeat between practice rounds, which allow you to highlight the importance of patterns like that during a break in the round.
In a lot of things in quiz bowl it's more important to just do something rather than overthink what you're doing. -- You have a limited amount of practice time in a week.
You won't be the only one reading, so you'll need to give the other readers this same primer. One of the reasons we overrecruit our teams is to provide additional readers during practice. During practice, you (the coach) have to wear a lot of hats. Someone is going to have to read rounds to the teams, someone is going to have to observe where your team has weaknesses and where they have strengths, someone is going to have to teach the team how to scorekeep that particular show's format, someone is going to have to process all the paperwork the show needs about the players and the school, and someone is going to need to teach the team all the quirks of the format as it goes throughout the game, and make sure they're following the rules throughout, someone is going to need to show the captain what their teammates know, and someone has to encourage them to get their best performance out of the team. The first round you read through in practice, all of those are on you.
When we overrecruit, we enable those tasks to be farmed out to team members. Another reader imitating the host means we can actually watch the team, chart their practice matches, and offer encouragement. Someone who learns how to scorekeep the match can show a teammate. The scout team can learn the rules and watch to see if the team knows and understands the rules. Each task we farm out allows us to focus on tasks that only the coach can do the first week.
104 weeks ago was spring break and the Pittsburgh Home and Garden Show, and I was spending Wednesday night in the upper hall as a sparse crowd wandered past. Though it’s one of the biggest events of its kind in the US, Wednesday has always been the dead night at this show, which is why I always seemed to end up covering the booth for my wife. Tonight, the Wednesday of this year's spring break, the crowd is normal for a Wednesday, maybe even a little larger than normal, but that still means I can type instead of helping people. We are approaching normal in that aspect.
Where it's not normal is the show itself. The vendors my wife has made friends with over the years are by and large not here. Appliance Row has disappeared, the Farm to Table section is sparse, the gardening section is effectively gone, and there's hardly a homebuilder in sight. Some can be accounted for by supply chain issues, some have in two years figured out how to move their business online, and some are betting the attendance won't be here. I'm openly wondering about the future of large shows like this, and by extension the convention center it's being housed in. I had already seen some convention centers and meeting halls close up in the pandemic, and this one always likes to have something happening in its halls, but there may not be an audience for events that fit these buildings. If we're approaching normal, we're on an asymptotic approach.
Around 2002, we were approached by the convention center’s management and the management of the attached hotel about hosting a quiz bowl nationals here. Being the local expert, I was dispatched downtown to walk the facility on some otherwise quiet Wednesday night. I marked out the conference rooms on the third floor, did sound checks on the conference rooms, walked the path back and forth to potential headquarters, and figured out it could probably hold a tournament of 128 teams. Now we blew past that standard very soon after, but they weren't really hungry for us either, and couldn't figure out why we needed that many rooms for that many people. As we escape from two years ago, I'm wondering if there will be a newfound availability of places like this.