Week 132: Entering tournament season
and remembering the 21st day of September.
There are certain emails that flow through my inbox at various times of year; this is the time for people rushing to get their events on the calendar for November, or those not realizing they should have been rushing to get an October event on the schedule. It’s also time for the unusual requests for high school and college affiliations for the year. (Seriously if you are even thinking about playing for multiple teams over the course of the year, let us know now, it’s just easier to take care of possibilities in advance.) But what’s been unusual about this year is an all-time high number of new coaches introducing themselves to us in email.
There’s two possibilities to address here: One is that we are actually experiencing a larger than normal turnover of coaches as we exit COVID, and the other is that the turnover isn’t unusually large, and it’s being reported more publicly.
What we may be seeing is the ordinary level of retirement augmented by some extenuating circumstances. If a coach started coaching the team in 2019, 2020, or 2021, very little of their time was ordinary. It’s very possible they didn’t really have a team, except on paper, and by fall of 2022, they weren’t interested in continuing in the role, making this moment a good time to get out. It would have been an ordinary of turnover in those three years, but COVID delayed their decision to now.
Another factor that may be affecting this is that there seems to be a stabilizing factor in engagement with the circuit. This makes sense, the more events you go to, the more connected your team is to the circuit, and then the more easily you can continue on in a position until retirement. I’ve noticed that as we have contact with more leagues, the turnover rate among league coaches is much higher. And as we get engagement with more leagues and teams that aren’t necessarily connected to the circuit, this becomes more visible only in the data I see.
What’s good about this is there is a transfer here, it’s not an end to a program at that school. We've actually seen only a handful of cases which either don’t have a new coach chosen, or doubt about the existence of the program in future.
Part of the problem is that for a lot of these new coaches, they are starting from scratch. They have been given the assignment, but their predecessor retired last year, and they are asking for help because they are working without supplies, practice material or the knowledge of how to gather those. Part of that is the downside of switching to online packet libraries for schools. A retiring coach might get rid of all their practice packets, but they’re far more likely to pass it on to someone. A set of online packets won’t be lost in a coaching transition, but the knowledge of how to access it certainly might be. While they come to us to get access to their questions, we’re probably not answering the questions they don’t know to ask, like what are the events we’ve been asked to attend, and who were the contacts at other schools. That sort of information is highly likely to be lost, and a new coach wouldn’t know that that information is missing.
My concern with the latter is that we may have been alerted because we were the ones who asked their predecessors to let us know if they were retiring. Other hosts, programs, and coaches didn’t do this during the end of last year, and that means that a lot of connections that were preserving these local networks are currently broken. This is sort of the worry I had about an emerging hub-and-spoke system developing, we don’t want teams entirely communicating with a national entity for advice, because they should have connections both local and national. A national organization shouldn’t want that sort of system either, because the national organization won’t have the situational knowledge to best help guide a team to local success.
The part of this that bothers me is now simply, this would have been the time to have the second book done. Something that can guide a coach if they only have a week to prepare could be used by someone who has a month to prepare, like these new coaches do. But it’s not ready yet, and I regret that.
This Saturday, the local quizbowl season begins with a college novice event. I’m doing my part to help organize it and read for the tournament, but I’m also supplying the host CMU team with book prizes. I have always done that for the events in town, but my taste in books is rather unusual, as I end up invariably choosing more than a few books which are dry for someone looking to read, but perfect for someone looking to write. They’re books for quiz bowl, and I make no bones about the fact that they would be useful for players.
My natural cheapness meant I not only didn’t buy many books the past few years for prizes, but I also raided my aunt’s house for the collection of World’s Classics reprints, which sat on the bookshelves. I’ve had a big stack of these waiting to clear out, and this week they’re moving out of my office.
While listening to the Penknife podcast, about writers who murder, I ended up hearing about how the drama and history sections of the bookstore are miserable loss leaders. I’ve probably been their main buyer of those sections for a long time, but now with a stack of books from my aunt’s house, I may be pushing them out of business just that much faster.
Five years ago, I actually got something accomplished. I put out the announcements of the first book on September 21, and the first sale hit a few hours later. I’ve been happy with the sales, and they’ve helped supply the teams at Pitt and CMU, who proofread sections of it with some pocket change. As I’m now slowly converging on a second book, I’m remembering the struggle to put the first book together, and the sudden realization when it had all the pieces I wanted to include filled in. When I got to that point in the first book, I could lay down the barrier, things that didn’t fit could go into the facebook group following up pieces of the book, or go into a second book. I think part of what’s filling this in that I am aiming for completeness with this. There isn’t an after really planned, so I have to make sure there’s no missing instructions. Being a year after when I figured I would be complete with this book it’s tougher to feel like I’m closing in on the goal. Since I’ve been splitting the idea of this book in three, I’m thinking I might need to have that sudden realization about one section, and use that to push me forward for the next two sections.