Last Monday, Catie began two weeks of band camp at her new school. This put me into the mind of quiz bowl camps, mostly to block out the American Pie reference that every parent has quoted when their kid is out of earshot, then immediately mentioned their being uncomfortable with quoting it. (I’ve now immediately replied to this with an exasperated “That’s why I didn’t say it.” five times.)
On one hand I’m thinking that by inviting them to participate in quizbowl camps, this might be a way to integrate television-only teams with the circuit. But I also have no illusions about how inappropriate it would be to have someone spend their first summer, after learning non-televised quiz bowl exists, ensconced in a high level camp. A coach who would advise that is really fooling themselves and not in a positive way. Nothing against camps that bring together players from around the country, but if a player’s experience is just one year, with a TV program being their introduction, they’re not far enough in the arc of their development to use what a camp would provide.
That's not to say I am against some sort of program for all teams over the summer. The problem the team and coach face in their first summer is discontinuity, and that’s why teams at a high school have camps or summer practice, simply to continue development and integrate next years’ students into the team. The problem in setting up a summer practice or summer camp is that unless you've planned well in advance and scouted the students coming to your school extensively, you won't be integrating new students into your current team. That's a major reason that athletic teams and bands use the time, and it demands a commitment to do it well before the end of the prior school year.
Am I suggesting you as coach create a camp for your team during the summer? No. Am I suggesting you create an environment where your team can create a camp for themselves? Oh, yes. If competition and practice have sparked interest in some players of your team for next year, and it will, then members of the team will continue to have that interest and impulse throughout the summer. The motivation will be there, and it will either manifest as a couple of students going off by themselves and practicing, or they bring the entire team in on the act. You and the team want the latter outcome, because players are going to develop anyway, and you want knowledge acquired to become knowledge shared throughout your team. You don't necessarily need to be there guiding them, but you want to facilitate good outcomes occur.
COVID has managed to train everyone on the things necessary to create a meeting and practice online, which is all summer practice should be. For the book, I'm going to have to go over this more rigorously, but here's the high points.
- As coach and a school official, you have access to some way to schedule online meetings and distribute invitations to the team members. A regular online session is cheaper and easier than trying to match everyone's schedules.
- If you have alumni of the program who have gone on to college, invite them to come back and share their experiences with the team.
- If you haven't already, insist that players rotate the moderation duties between rounds they read. This gives them practice they will need, and gives you some degree of autonomy.
- Have a ready supply of packets they can read, and have a document which notes which packets were read when, and to whom. This allows you to use these for practice next year, and know who should be reading these to the new team members.
- Neither expect nor assume there will be full attendance in the summer. Make no judgements about commitment or progress in summer session.
- Recognize you don't need to be there, once this is established. In fact, you want that to happen. Part of the process of growing a team is getting team members to manage the process themselves.
- If you find things that are useful for quiz bowl (videos, articles, podcasts, etc.), share them in the session's associated chat. Yes, you are salting the whole team with study materials. If the English department can have a reading list, you can have a suggested reading/watching/listening list, too.
A cautionary note: Some state organizations do place limits on when teams can compete and practice, but even the few that do that sort of regulation don't consider the idea of a team practicing away from the coach in the summer, and were written before COVID made videoconferencing commonplace. Besides, that could become "independent study" by you simply not being there. Read your state organization's regulations, and then scrupulously dance in the territory the haters can't believe is legal.
This week I’ve been processing through hundreds of newspaper articles every night, reviewing where high school seniors are going to college. This has been a lot harder than in past years, as the question “Where are you going to college?” seems to have been scrubbed from a lot of interviews, and graduation ceremony information, and students are a lot more reluctant to commit to an answer, as far as I can tell from the articles. This combined with the general lack of articles showing up in my searches is worrying. While I think that a large portion of locations have recovered to hold tournaments this year, I think there are areas which normally give me an excellent sample of seniors have a discontinuity in team participation. When the teams don't show up, the search terms don't appear in articles, and don't appear in my daily digest.
The other troubling trend I've seen this year is a lot more instances of competitions that are normally team-based honoring their winner to find that it was a one-person team and the only representative from that school in the competition, no coach, no teacher, no official representative of the the school. It's pretty clear the "team" doesn't exist. As someone who did do a lot of going solo at events in college, I am empathetic, and want to encourage them to continue play. But almost in the same breath I want them to have teammates, immediately! I want their effort to mean something to the school, and for it to influence the school to continue sending people to that program.
I can understand that these are events that individual students seek out and enter, and to make the event bigger, the hosting organization doesn't put restrictions on the individual like asking them to get official status from their school or a chaperone with the official title of "advisor" or "coach" from the school. But when a team event does this, it takes short-term gain and sacrifices the long-term viability of a team at the educational institution.
Speaking purely as someone with a vested interest in vibrant programs at schools that are able to produce years of seniors with interest in quiz bowl, this is a worrying trend. All of the organizational effort to make a team robust, and long-lasting is instead directed toward an individual, who will eventually graduate.
Also, in both organization and performance, once you prove you can do it by yourself, you tend to stop looking for teammates.
I noted to someone at NAQT earlier this year, that a higher than normal percentage of people who move on from competition to organizing events tend to be empire builders. That is they usually want to do more than just one event, and have a whole magnificent plan. I'm not sure what changes for them between playing and organizing, but it seems to me that the first empire they should be building is their own team, to build it strong enough that it lasts after they leave.