[This is possibly for the first part of the book, as it’s one of the earliest situations a team will face during the game, and it’s one of the worst endgames to find yourself in. I’m concerned that this takes up space too early, so it’s currently expected to fall into the middle of the book.]
The Jump Ball Situation
Early in practice, or perhaps early in the first game, the team may find itself in the situation where the question has ended and neither team has buzzed in. In this situation, we will assume there is no penalty at this point for buzzing in, and the question will go dead if neither team answers. The situation is like a jump ball. The dominant indicator of the result is not what any single player knows, but which team gets to buzz in first.
Everything rides on that last clue, if the teams didn’t know the clues before the last clue, they weren’t using the last clue as confirmation. Acting on that last clue is the soundest strategy for your team to employ.
There is no value in this situation to not guessing. With zero penalty for an incorrect answer at this point, even a weak probability of success through buzzing and answering is better than not buzzing. But in that is the value of getting there first, having the right of way to answer. Because there is nothing more to the question, no additional clues, there’s no value in waiting. Also in lots of television formats one team’s buzz means the other team can’t answer on that question; when that is in effect, buzzing means you can’t lose, only tie on the question.
The jump ball situation can be painful to watch if neither team is inclined to buzz. This is especially problematic if teams aren’t allowed to buzz in early. The tendency here is over time jump balls outcomes are 50-50 on changing score, but more likely they won’t change the score at all. This makes it slightly appealing to television quiz bowl because it’s believed to make the results closer. But if you apply some degree of strategy it can be worked to your team’s advantage.
The jump ball may be 50-50 but you can craft a better set of odds for your team by teaching them to avoid the situation, and take advantage of better points in the question to buzz. This strategy you will teach so they can abandon it later.
[There’s an advanced strategy omitted here, which depends on the team having the self -knowledge to rank who is the team expert in any particular category, and giving them the right of way to answer with the questions end, educated guesses after a second or two, and wild shots as the time limit expires. I will include it in the book, but not as part of the first week’s training.]
Improving on this situation
The team can either strategize or improve knowledge, ideally both. But using a strategy is easier and quicker to implement than gaining knowledge, over and above what you are already teaching them. So the best course is to implement a strategy that aligns with what is being taught and reviewed.
From the strategy side, you can coach the team to aim to buzz in precisely as the final syllable of the clue is read. That requires some training in practice, but unless there is someone locking them out until the question is read, this is perfectly safe strategy. An untrained team will wait for the host to fully stop, rather than attempt to time their buzz. An untrained team may consider their answer at the end of the question rather than react to the clues and have a guess.
If your team is facing a format where they cannot buzz until the end of the question, teach them to recognize from clues and use subsequent clues to confirm or reject their guess.
Alternatively to working to confirm clues, the strategy of using the final clue as the basis of your whole guess is valid here, and it’s really why we focus so heavily on last clues in the week running up to your first match. The more last clues your team knows, the better off they will be in this situation.
[This paragraph, however, can’t possibly be in the first part of the book, because it assumes situational knowledge and strategy which the coach can’t know at this point, nor am I willing to teach them for purposes of knocking it down.] This is one of many reasons that I don’t advise you to pursue specialization until all team members have a solid base of knowledge of last clues. If the jump ball is truly a situation where any player could buzz in, having a player who has specialized in a subset of early clues is actually a disadvantage for your team. Instead of it being a 50-50 chance of someone buzzing in first with some knowledge, it’s 43-57 for a four-player team (3 vs 4), and 40-60 for three. Until you can successfully avoid jump balls, making them less common than being able to take advantage of specialization, it’s a bad strategy.
The Freshman List and What We Can Do With It
As part of the runup to the first major collection point of the year (the NAQT SSNCT this weekend,) I sent an email blast out to high school coaches this morning, encouraging them to get their interested graduating students to use the Freshman Contact List so that they can join teams in the fall. My goal is to consistently have the list at over 2000, and occasionally scraping 3000. This is roughly a doubling of the pre-COVID numbers. We managed over 2000 once, but I believe it can be done consistently once team counts return to pre-COVID levels.
How the students are distributed in going to colleges looks like a chart of exponential decay. (we’ll just use college from here, but this applies to colleges, universities, community colleges, etc.)
A few colleges get over 10 students annually. These are either major prestigious institutions, or institutions centered in a hotbed of high school activity, where every school has a team AND someone is making a sincere effort to contact every coach in the area every year. These schools are unlikely to need to recruit on campus, they can manage to recruit from the list, or have already made contacts with many of the students on the list before they have made it to college. And these teams are remarkably stable; once formed these teams have continued for as long as I’ve been involved in quiz bowl.
The bad news of that is that there’s usually only five or six colleges that get this level of activity every year.
Those that get between 4 and 10 people annually are getting enough to sustain a team, and maybe grow into multiple teams from year to year. But these are also teams that can have bad years retaining players, and can still disappear unexpectedly.
Those that get 1 to 4 people annually are getting enough to sustain a team for a few years, but they need to consider additional methods of recruitment. Additionally, there’s not really enough here to form a student organization for most college bureaucracy.
So what additional groups can we add to quiz bowl on college campuses through the list?
Students who compete on televised quiz bowl programs: These are areas of intense team density, but largely aren’t aware of the presence of competition outside of high school. By engaging the coaches now, I hope that the list will start to have students considering that they can continue in college.
Students who competed on other similar academic competitions: There’s lots of single-subject and multi-subject competitions which use all the same skills as quiz bowl to study and practice, and compete. These teams have players who could be as good on a different curriculum and subject distribution as they are now. These players could actually be regretting that their knowledge in other subjects isn’t rewarded with opportunities because their school only has subject competitions.
Students who do not intend to travel off-campus every weekend, or students at feeder campuses: One of the small good things that COVID forced upon us was creating a viable format for online competition. The proof of concept got us through the pandemic and as it wanes, we shouldn’t completely abandon the format. A teleconference based competition, while still needing some security work, could build teams which can’t afford to travel due to cost, car availability, or conflicts with other activities. As students use alternate campuses, for affordability or commuting, or participate in distance learning, they could still be recruited to the team, and take part in online practices throughout the year. The shifts in types of enrollment won’t go away, so we shouldn’t abandon methods that allowed those who employed those shifts to continue playing.
Students who are not using quiz bowl as a measure of self-worth, but using it as a means of self-improvement: One of the things I’m hoping the book will provide is a way to allow high school players to take on additional and different roles in their student organization, to relieve the new coach of many duties and burdens as the team develops. If that succeeds, those roles could be easily implemented for college teams by those students who master them. If that happens, the really scarce resources in quiz bowl: writers, editors, quality moderators, tournament organizers, organizational managers, and instructors would begin to swell the ranks of teams, and programs, and be accepted as valuable contributors to their teams.
If we double the size of the list, the curve isn’t going to change much, but it will scale. Colleges local to areas of extremely dense high school activity are going to benefit. We might see a college jump to Wayzata-like numbers of teams at an event. (That’s fine as long as they don’t name themselves after factions in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, which was done before and nearly caused the TD to break down.) The teams that get above 10 from the list are going to increase, and that’s good because it enables stability, and stability means plans can be made. Even teams that get 1 person a year, or less could benefit because they could be in areas of increased college program density. If you are suddenly a couple miles away from another active team, you have the possibility of carpools, shared practices, friend of a friend contacts with high schools, and the ability to draw on resources to build a program that won’t fall apart upon graduation. But while all of that is good, it isn’t a panacea for maintaining a college program.
There’s really no downside to additional methods of recruitment on the college level. Teams need to maintain good relations with the people on their campus, for funding, for rooms, for publicity and visibility. A team should always be overrecruiting their ranks to ensure team viability, throughout the year. Most teams who do events on campus have a need for people outside the team to help get the event going. A major problem we’ve had the past couple of years is that there’s been little to no opportunity to organize an activity on campus. This fall is going to be the first chance in years to actually swell the ranks of programs and the number of programs throughout the country. our efforts started today, and we’ve got four months to push it forward.