[This is a section for the late book, to keep the team moving even as the school year concludes. It echoes what I want coaches to prepare for after the television program, but it also needs to prepare them to close the circle and prepare to attack next year.]
The Year End Push
There are some things you can do during the final month of the school year, whether or not you’re competing in a national championship. The tasks here are to preserve contact among the team over the summer, retain knowledge within the team structure that might be lost, leave the team in a position to pick up quickly at the beginning of the school year, and ensure a larger
Band or Remind or group chat
If you haven’t created a group chat, or email or some form of group communication, this would be the time to do so. There are activity specific apps which provide for group chat and information distribution (Band or Remind are two I’m learning on the fly as a parent of a dancer/flautist/shotputter,) but the features of those aren’t necessarily required over a simple group chat in any number of social media. The key here is to decide on one and use it.
Practice?
One of the things that COVID managed to force onto any school activity is a basic familiarity with Zoom, Teams, and the like. If you were able to do practices over Zoom during the pandemic, then the barrier to summer practices has already been overcome. An online buzzer and a Zoom session was possible during the year, it’s certainly possible now.
Retaining Data
Knowledge Retention and Knowledge Drain
As we discussed earlier, every time your team takes a break there is the possibility that unique knowledge walks out the door, never to return. The end of the year is particularly fraught with this possibility. Some of it happens by design, in graduation, and some of it just happens by accident. To the degree you can force knowledge retention over knowledge drain, you should. You’ve invested some of your practice into making knowledge shared between members of the team and thus redundant, but you should also spend some effort teaching the experienced members of the team to share their knowledge with the less experienced members of the team. Whether that takes the form of question writing, creation of study guides, or discussions of what can come up in future rounds, you want to promote the transfer of knowledge from players who are leaving to players who are not.
Recording what you know that is unique to you, and what has been valuable to you.
One way you can facilitate this is to ask your seniors what material has been most helpful to them in their development. (This could be anything from books in the school library to websites, literally any media they have found useful.) If they have written questions to help themselves, they should give copies to the team so that the knowledge is passed on.
The follow up with this is that these materials can be propagated back to younger members of the team through the group chat over the summer, and the team will have it available by the fall.
Recruiting your upstream
Colleges have begun to do this; some schools staff the national championships and make effort to connect with students going to their college at the tournament site. We can apply this same logic to your middle schools. If there is a middle school competition and teams, you want to make sure you know who competed in that for the middle schools that funnel into your high school. You can recruit them just as easily as any sports team at your school. You can add them to the group chat. You can invite them to summer practices. And you can give them the same training material which was recommended by your seniors.
Letters to your successor
One thing that I personally find fascinating is the tradition of the president leaving a note for their successor. We can use this tradition in two ways: one to help the team continue to function properly at the buzzer, and one to help the team organization to continue.
Letters to the next captain
Your captain has picked up knowledge of their teammates, and their teammates’ skills. They will know what is graduating with them, and what they knew, and what might be a hole for the team after they leave and other teammates graduate. While you as coach may know that information, but it may not be something you can actively coach into the next captain. But a previous captain’s advice might point them in the right direction more easily.
Letters to the next coach
On the off chance that you are not going to be there next year, composing a letter to the next coach is not valueless. If you get to this stage of the year, and you’re committed to keeping your team going into next year, YOU are the most essential component to building a team next year, because all of your documents are under your control online, and behind your passwords. Your physical materials are in your classroom, but you know where everything is. Essentially, if you’re hit by a car, without some way to communicate your knowledge of team management, losing you could be a critical knowledge drain.
Applying toward next year’s schedule
Independent of these improvements to the workflow, you can also begin accelerating the process of next year’s competition. Some events for the next school year will announce themselves over the spring and summer, and the calendar will fill up. The problem with many of these events is they schedule themselves too early for a team to attend when they begin planning their year in August. Once you have a communications structure with your team over the summer, the planning for these events, including setting the wheels of bureaucracy in motion, is possible.
The other thing that occurs at the beginning of every school year is recruiting. While we’ve mentioned going into lower grades, you should also be recruiting all the grades at the high school. During summer practice and discussions, the team can approach who they can ask among their classmates to join the team. If there is a school activities fair or activity recruitment during the first month of school, the team can organize how they will approach recruitment, and how they will present quiz bowl to the public. This can include how they will demo competition, or how they will create flyers for handout. If you direct the conversation here to the team coming up with ideas, you begin teaching them unexpected skills of marketing and persuasion that they will be able to use going forward.
Flipping a State
I saw that one of the perennial topics of conversation, improving Pennsylvania’s state tournament, came up again. As a veteran of the last seven (eight?) attempts to bring Pennsylvania to a new format or provider, I figured I would write down exactly what’s worked, and what hasn’t in flipping a system. I’ve had some luck in this, and several times I’ve bashed my head into the wall.
The advice here is not for the new coach, it’s for the player who is deciding to do outreach.
Recognize that most times in outreach nobody knows who you are.
The first time I was involved in this process was 1998. We wanted to bid for the contract to supply questions. And I was politely rebuffed with the notes that “they only purchased questions from in-state sources” and that they “wanted to keep their format as everyone was familiar with it.” But more important than these statements, which later proved to have at best a limited lifespan, they had no idea who NAQT was and why anyone would be interested in writing questions across the country.
This was the first time I’d run into an absolute blank wall, but it wouldn’t be the last. I sometimes think that everyone in quiz bowl needs to take a swirly in the Total Perspective Vortex before they decide to execute outreach. Even if you believe yourself well-connected within the community, you’re maybe aware of 10% of what schools are active in quiz bowl. For a state organization that is organizing one or two series of events each year, there’s no way that they can get to know 10% of their state’s players enough to trust their advice.
Build a network of contacts beyond who you can reach out to right now.
The key part of this is “beyond.” When the germ of the idea hits you to do outreach, everyone you know you can reach out to at that minute is not outreach, it’s just connecting your personal network. But that personal network is already in your favor. To really force change, you have to find people who either aren’t aware that the change is possible, or are actually initially neutral to negative towards the change.
Understand the structure, all the moving parts.
Sometimes the reason that you fail is that you don’t understand that there’s more than one institution controlling everything. Pennsylvania’s structure is actually a patchwork of leagues arranged alongside athletic conferences, television competitions, single day events organized by an Intermediate Unit, a competition which views itself as only a qualifier for a national championship among four leagues, and even events managed by one IU for another IU’s schools. The state even has a split between two teams in a match or three. The overarching structure was created as an end point, but that final competition was built to join together disparate competitions.
Aim at multiple levels, multiple locations.
If your goal is to change Pennsylvania, the above paragraph shows you why aiming at the top isn’t the way to go. It’s a longtime fallacy of the circuit that the top level of competition is influential downward. Pennsylvania shows this doesn’t work. When formats change in Pennsylvania, it’s not because a team was impressed with the state championship, it’s because one IU ran the tournament for another one, or the league or the TV station got a new question provider, or there’s a new head of programs at that IU. Only one team goes up to states, so there’s limited chance to pollenate ideas back from states to the local IU, and it happens at the end of the season, when there will be no communication between teams until the fall. While these points are specific to Pennsylvania, you can see how they are generally applicable. The communication of a need for change is something that can be done locally and migrate up the chain to a larger body, but championships at the end of the year are not the opportunity to propagate a cause beyond the teams present.
Since we worked out that the top level doesn’t influence earlier levels, we focused on the most local tournaments possible. We contacted leagues, worked each sale, and kept working each league. Since the local leagues are organized under the IU system, they help feed the state tournament, and as we built up our connections with each IU, we got the attention of the state tournament organizers within their IU. And once that path was built up, we were able to engage them.
Work with the structure and work outside the structure.
While we kept pressing on the structure of the state tournament, we also built up tournaments not part of the state tournament format. I helped build tournaments at colleges that had teams, and worked with admissions offices at colleges that didn’t have teams to host events on their campuses. By building that up, we were able to make connections with several teams in a league, and bring the idea of coming to college-hosted tournaments to the other teams in their league. Once that subject was broached, it became possible for the league itself to change providers.
The parallel track method, working to create new events outside the structure of the state structure isn’t always possible, depending on the state, but as long as it’s not outlawed, it’s the most effective method of cross-pollinating the state format with new ideas.
Recognize that sunk costs have long-term effects.
One of the things that became apparent was that at least one of their past question purchases was a question bank. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s just a database with some large amount of questions, and based on some rules and distribution, draws out questions to fill an event’s needs.
For those of us who produce new questions each year, the question bank seems quaint and inefficient. Question banks are typically sold to have questions for four to five years without repeats. Guess how long they are typically used for? Over ten years.
Realize the plan will take a long time to come to fruition.
Over the course of the year, the time spent thinking about quiz bowl by someone on the circuit is a couple orders of magnitude greater than most league managers, state officials, and the like. The circuit can reach a decision on change much quicker than these organizations. The circuit doesn’t pause after the event, only to pick it up six months later. The timeframe of change will be glacial, even if you’re lucky enough to get the timing right.
Recognize when the situation changes
Between 1998 and when we started getting their attention, the underlying logic of their objections changed. First, it became clear that the state wasn’t consolidating into a single format, so if they really “wanted to keep their format as everyone was familiar with it,” such a thing wasn’t going to happen. Second, the writers they were using in state reached exhaustion, and they had to find a new source for questions, out of state. I will admit that second piece was a missed opportunity for us, we weren’t persistent enough towards the decision makers of the state tournament, while we focused on flipping leagues. As a result, a question bank was bought, and there wasn’t another chance to change the system for a decade or so.
The opportunities for change are limited, and the timing matters. NAQT was able to get into Pennsylvania’s state event not because our timing was right, but because someone else’s timing was bad enough to provoke panic. The state tournament was for years a qualifier for Panasonic (the national championship between all-star teams of states, based on the Florida Commissioner’s Academic Challenge format) When that event collapsed in the 2010s, Pennsylvania sought a national level event to elevate their winners. That was really the first time they listened. They needed a nationals, and they needed the question bank restocked, because the current events questions were creakily a decade out of date. The situation changed for them, and we were asking the right questions of them at the right time. Even that’s not a perfect ending, we’re not exclusive providers now, that bank is persistent.
A similar situation took place in Indiana a couple years back. Indiana’s Academic Super Bowl format is popular around the state, but it has a size problem. Because Academic Super Bowl teams are split into units for simultaneous rounds in English, Social Studies, Science, etc. a school needs at least four teams worth of membership to operate. It also traditionally requires multiple coaches to chaperone each team throughout the competition. The change came when the IASP had a retirement, and a new head was elected. At that point some schools were going to quiz bowl because it required fewer resources. And the new IASP head saw that, and saw it not as a competition to their existing Academic Super Bowl, but something that could better serve the needs of smaller schools, and so they backed it in addition to Academic Super Bowl. The resulting cordial relation and cross-pollination has enlarged participation in both activities.
Recognize that those resisting the change you want have a valid viewpoint.
In principle, there’s nothing wrong with the idea of “we want to make sure our producer is local,” or “we have a format we don’t want to change.” Any organization at that time would much prefer someone closer to them, someone they knew better, and someone to whom they could direct feedback. Prior to websites being commonplace, all NAQT was to them was a voice on the other end of the telephone. Their internal logic is consistent, and valid. Our conclusion is different because of knowledge we have, and they don’t, but that information isn’t relevant to the decision that they’ve already made.
Recognize that some people you think are resisting change don’t know that change is even possible.
Inertia is the most powerful force in most quiz bowl organizing. If you don’t have communication with other groups, and you don’t have experience with other formats or ideas, there’s nothing to affect the inertia. So when the time comes to buy new questions, what is the pressure in their situation? To find a replacement. A replacement, something that fills the exact same shape of the hole. Not something different that might be better but might be worse. Inertia is a powerful force.
Never believe you have moral superiority.
I never use the phrase “good quiz bowl” because I don’t want to put the seed in their mind that what they’re doing is “bad.” I can’t control that once it starts. It can be interpreted and has been interpreted as a moral judgement on the quality of the product.
People who are dealing with the task of quiz bowl less frequently than the circuit does are no less committed to giving players the opportunities that quiz bowl provides. You don’t want to make enemies of them.