Week 128: The stories that the game tells
plus the cats, and the smart taking from the strong
I wrapped up my annual study of newspaper articles on Monday, and my method of reading every article that google news flags as relevant to my search of names of quiz bowl spawned something like 7000 articles since January. Now not all of these articles have mentions of quiz bowl, and not all of them are the gold for which I’m panning. I’m looking for three things in each of these articles, a high school senior, with an interest in quiz bowl, who is telling the newspaper where they are going to college. Along the way I find lots of other things, but about 200 of those articles hit what I’m looking for, and I know these are people who we wouldn’t know about otherwise. But in addition to the standard information that comes from graduation announcements, students of the month, scholarship announcements, and tales of matches, I occasionally find extraordinary things, like the year I found a team endowing a scholarship at their high school. This is the good things from this year.
What did I see this year?
The Good things
A school with 100% Senior participation in quiz bowl
It’s Karval High School in Colorado. One person in the school’s senior class this year and she played Knowledge Bowl for her school. It’s a simple enough story for someone from a small school like me.
An actual signing day.
Erskine College in South Carolina flipped the script on National Signing Day, by “signing” a senior to play quiz bowl next year. This was such a great flip of the script, I don’t really care if it’s a publicity stunt.
Lots of schools coming back to compete, and lots of events coming back after a COVID break
It’s just a generally good feeling to see the paragraph explaining that a league was disrupted for COVID, because that means that if the article was written, the disruption is behind us.
Retirements and passing
Sadly, I ended up reading a lot more obituaries this year. I should figure that’s a consequence of not seeing them as much in past years. I also saw quite a few more retirements than in past years. Those just serve as a reminder to me to get the book done, because there will always be new coaches who will not have been shown the ropes.
The places that you never knew had competition
I casually mention Jamaica’s Schools Challenge competition here because I feel like I’m the perfect distance away from it, close enough through reports to enjoy the passion it inspires in the press, and far enough away from the annual drama when a winner has to be decided. But this year I found another country which was beginning competition: Guyana has started a competition for ninth graders and hopefully its success will build and expand the competition.
What teams are doing to get to nationals.
A pattern I saw a lot of this year was a team holding a Trivia Night fundraiser to fund their trip to nationals. I do like this as a plan to incorporate the local community and fund the team, as it’s much more thematic than a GoFundMe campaign. It also opens up the connection between quiz bowl teams and the quizzing and bar trivia communities, bringing those adults to the school rather than taking your quizbowl team down to the bar. It also opens up a possible business opportunity for someone to supply these events with questions.
What are the problems we face?
In spite of these really good new types of articles, the total amount of gold in the stream seemed down this year. I’m trying to parse the reasons for this, and figure out ways to correct for it.
Cities which normally produce lots of stories, which didn’t this year.
Scranton, PA, Watertown, NY, the state of Kansas, the state of Washington, and suburban Chicago. These were five places where historically I’ve really gotten excellent coverage of who’s done quiz bowl and where they are going to college. This year, not so much. And while I’m used to these sources ebbing and flowing over years, it seemed like there was an underlying lack of students making sure that quiz bowl was one of their listed accomplishments. Whether that means a lack of opportunity, or a lack of trumpeting their achievements, I won’t be able to tell for a while.
Are newspapers not covering schools in the same way?
There’s really a limited window for good stories to come through about graduates who played quiz bowl. A small number of articles rise in January about people who have been accepted early decision, but the bulk will only appear from April 1 to June 15, and once that date rolls around the search conditions flood with 4H quiz bowl at county fairs. The simple count of articles which appeared in this time period was down this year. That points to a lack of opportunity.
Are newspapers not employing an education desk?
To answer this question, I have to introduce data from a different task. When I send out press releases about championship tournaments, I send emails to people recommended by the school attending nationals, but I am also using information from the previous year, and the school usually chooses someone from the local paper who works the high schools beat. With most schools in some form of remote learning, that beat was not necessary as school opening policy was THE major local news issue, and the other typical stories weren’t happening. As we come back to schools in session, I’m wondering if these beats will return, because if they don’t, that’s a large amount of information useful to us, that won’t be gathered.
Are newspapers just taking press releases and converting them to articles?
This particular possibility I can emphatically answer in the positive. I try to test that the press releases that I send out for NAQT’s championship tournaments both reach the right people at the newspapers, and that they produce articles. Of the 400 or so press releases that went out, 50 produced articles that I could find and link to. That’s a good percentage, and I’m pleased that it’s able to run that high. At the same time, I’m a little worried that these are just getting passed clean through without being reviewed; that’s not because I think we’ve got any issues with them, it’s that part of getting interest in quiz bowl in the local community relies on getting the press aware and interested in the local team’s story. If a newspaper is simply rubberstamping a press release, a relationship between the team and the local press isn’t being formed.
Are newspapers taking things off their archives faster?
If your newspaper is hiding articles behind a paywall after a certain period, I’ve mostly gotten around it, given the most common paywalls just overlay over the page and don’t disrupt the page source. However, those that aggressively go after security, I know to go after immediately, rather than let them expire. The problem is that I’ve been caught out on lots of papers this year, where the deadline seems to have shifted from 30 days to 14.
Is my aggregator failing me? What are my blindspots?
When I started doing this annual project, I started with RSS feeds, and word of mouth. I still use word of mouth, but I’ve moved from RSS feeds to aggregators, to a fabulously complex Yahoo! Pipes query (RIP to the greatest webthing I ever programmed.) and now to a series of Google News daily updates. Lately, the drop overall has me worried that there’s blindspots in the way the query is done. Previously I had worried that I was going to miss a local competition’s name, and not have it come up. Increasingly I’ve been worried that being tied to Google News meant I wasn’t finding everything. I put this theory to the test and used a couple other news aggregators to see if Google queries were missing articles. This only revealed two articles in the past two months, so I’m thinking it’s a minor problem I could fix.
This morning I had to consider what I think is a bigger problem, that I haven’t got a good solution for. My methodology relies on finding lots of newspapers which publish articles about quiz bowl. These articles are very local, meaning the paper is covering an area where less than ten school districts are the covered readership of that paper. For a newspaper that covers a larger area, an article about a quiz bowl team in that area has to be much bigger to rate an article. When those articles appear, they’re about the local league, not individual teams. This means that articles which give graduate information about where they’re going to college doesn’t appear in larger newspapers, unless they appear in bulk. This means there’s a blindspot in my data collection that newspapers, and media in general can’t fix.
My birthday, and Huey, Violet, and Lily
Many thanks for the birthday wishes, and I’m now going to tell a story in reverse. I'm very glad none of you splurged on a hand made present. As the day was winding down and I was going to bed I heard our male cat yelling to be let in out of the rain. Even though he had gone out just a few minutes before, I gave him the chance to come in and he ran in.
After I got into bed, the wet lump of cat came crashing onto the bed and laid down. A few minutes later, he had moved a few feet over and I realized the wet spot he had left had a smaller wetter lump, and he stared at me as if to say “the wetness, that’s how you know it’s a fresh kill. Happy Birthday!” Yes, for my birthday, the cat I call "Huey, my less-idiot son" had given me a freshly drowned mouse delivered to my bed. DormouseDash
I can understand his angst and trying to get his status back. One of the great pieces of our family lore (which, I admit, sounds suspiciously like something a North Korean dictator would make up) was that: when I was born, Scotch, the cat in residence believed her position was threatened by the arriving baby, and to demonstrate her worthiness, proceeded to slaughter eight baby bunnies and line them up at the front door.
Now I must explain the source of his similar angst. With Margaret's passing, the house was once again under full occupancy for cats, and I was handed the other two queens that were still in my aunt's house. I hadn't announced this formally since both have been alternately shy hiders, then speed demons, making snapping their pictures a problem. Tonight I finally got both calm enough to sit for a portrait. So welcome to the house Miss Lilly (the black and white and under the couch cat) and Miss Violet (the almost all-black body radiator, whose full name is now UltraVIOLET CATastrophe, and no I don’t care how geeky that is, that’s an awesome full name for a cat.)
This leaves only Violet's brother Mr. Dazey, whom we can’t take because another tom will probably drive Huey to either drinking or killing like Scotch. If you'd like a well-mannered, elderly, gentleman black cat who needs to get off the street and into a good home, let us know.
Pete Carril
Pete Carril passed away last week, and I ran out of time to note his passing. I first encountered Carril the way a lot of people did, during Princeton’s run in the 1996 NCAA Tourney, when his team took out UCLA by systematically frustrating the Bruins, and executing the same simple set of plays over and over again. It was the first and probably only time I actually understood a piece of basketball strategy. If you do something that less risky, and succeed at it repeatedly, your opponent has to react. If their reaction is to do something requiring more effort, is more risky, they will make mistakes. If you slow down the game, each mistake your opponent makes is a greater squandering of the resource they cannot afford to lose, opportunities to catch up. And once that trap is set, the opponent’s mistakes are like a feedback loop that makes a comeback that much harder.
Carill’s Princeton teams taught me the value of the psychological pressure exerted by competent execution is equal if not greater to the psychological pressure exerted by spectacular play. I used that insight for years as a player, and I always tried to teach teams not to fall into the trap and apply the pressure themselves.
I had written a question about Carill in 1997 leading with his teaching book “The Smart Take from the Strong.” It’s always been at the end of my stack of Books to Read. I think I’m going to have to read it soon.