Week 133: How to Lose Like a Winner
And my aunt's house remains a font of inexplicable wisdom
I spent Friday night doing parent duties at the Homecoming game, selling chicken sandwiches for the marching band, and then sat in the stands as the team slowly collapsed into a 20-6 loss. This would be the fourth loss in as many games for Seton-LaSalle, and while this game was better for them (every other game they’ve been down at least 21-0 by end of the first), it wasn't good. It got me to thinking about the problem of taking a beating in competition. While it's not applicable to the first week problem, it's definitely a position a team will find itself during their first full year of competitions.
As a coach, you will find defeats (plural), troubling, because it's something that isn't present in televised quiz bowl. In almost all cases there, the defeat is present for everyone, and more importantly: defeat is singular. One match loss, doled out to every competitor but one, it's crushing, it's the end of the event, but it's one loss. An individual loss is diminished further once you go into round-robin play, but the cumulative effect of multiple losses is even harder than the one loss in television. With 50% of all quizbowl results being losses, there’s a good chance they may chain together for your team. Once you go into circuit competition, and have lots of matches, you face the possibility of lots of losses.
While I understand Charlie Steinhice’s rules:
Winning beats losing
Losing beats getting stomped
Getting stomped beats not playing
I also realize that you can’t align your team’s experiences with that hierarchy without actually going through all three.
The rule I go by is: A team must be prepared to lose, without expecting to lose.
The rule is the same whether you're talking about circuit competition or television competition. If you are prepared for the possibility of losing, you see what you did wrong to cause that outcome. If you can do that, you can take something from every loss, that can be applied forward. That preparation for losing even works when you win. In contrast, expecting to lose removes from the player the possibility that change is possible. It puts the player and team in a passive role compared to the team that beat them. Passivity is the one way to guarantee a loss in quiz bowl. Action and risk taking always have a chance of wrecking you, but there are never enough mistakes made by your opponent to let you win 0-(-5).
So how do we cope with repeated failure?
Know when it's happening, and act to thwart the negative effects. If you're at a tournament with multiple matches in a day, you need to check in with your teams after each match and how they are feeling, see what they have learned, and what they need to learn from the experience.
Monitor and mark progress to find the winning moves in the loss. Breaking a match into individual questions and seeing how many of those individual questions were wins is a good way to move the team forward from a loss. You need to know when they need encouragement, and when they need to push themselves onward. If you have the knowledge of the game on a question by question basis, you can do a post-mortem and identify the questions and categories that killed them. A prerequisite to this is having someone on the team recording the score and taking notes.
Recognize that there are losses to the questions, and there are losses to the opponent. If you simply don't know something, and the other team didn't either, that's a place you can improve. Maybe the last clue there is all you really need. These subjects, where no one is scoring points, are some of the easiest ways to advance your team, because a little knowledge on a few subjects is all that’s necessary, until someone else comes to the same conclusion.
Recognize that your opponent is sometimes your best teacher. If your opponent powers a tossup and 30s the bonus on you, that's a place where you can improve by emulating the opponent. Note the answers they gave and the questions they answered, and take that out some other opponent the next time the question subject appears. If they know the answer on an earlier clue than you know the answer, learn the earlier clue for next time. The odds are not likely that when you hear it again, you'll be playing them again, you’ll probably be playing someone not as good on that subject as they were.
Recognize when your team needs to take a break. Most all-day tournaments have built-in breakpoints: lunch, rebracketing, and playoff announcements. If your team is entering a point like that with multiple losses take advantage of the break to get them to clear their heads. If your team is far from a point like that, give them the break they need. Get them momentarily away from the buzzer and the competition room. The schedule of most events allows you to use that time between rounds for a little bit more than simply running to the next round, use your time wisely.
Never give up on your team's possibility for growth. Do not become frustrated yourself. They will get frustrated well before you, and we need someone in that dynamic to break that cycle.
One of the things that's been difficult with cleaning out my aunt's house has been that there have been antiques and souvenirs which were accrued through years of State Department travel, which we have neither the ability to evaluate their worth, or who might be interested in them. This has led to a couple of invitations to experts and collectors who might have had interest in some niche section of the items, but not enough to make it worth their time. Even if there was something shockingly valuable to a niche market, the odds of that happening were so low as to not make it worth a visit. Well this week, my mother spent time in the bookshelves of my aunt's house, and pulled out some things she wanted to read. And that's how I ended up staring at a 1952 edition of Masterpieces of World Literature feeling very much like one of those collectors.
For those of you who remember the era of Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia dominating the question writing in the literature category, Masterpieces of World Literature, the single volume version of Masterplots was the acetylated Benet's, the real hard core quiz bowl junkie stuff. You could write around Benet's paragraph summaries of literature, and many writers often did, working themselves in to textual cul-de-sacs to avoid using the clues Benet’s highlighted. However, writing around the three page summaries of a work of literature that the Masterplots series provided was impossible. And I know this for a fact, because a well-thumbed set of these volumes lay in Cornell’s Uris Library Reference Room for most of the early ‘90s. If your team didn’t have a literature major, a semester of reading through these and taking notes was the next best thing. Prior to the literature canon expansion of the late 90’s it was possible to get very good at lots of literature questions without actually reading anything except these, because there were enough writers who used the same trick to write the questions required to complete their packets.
I had bought one of the old Masterplots sets for $50 when it showed up at my local Half Price Books, and it’s still in my book collection in the basement. While you could still write ten thousand questions out of it the need arose, the book is too old for it to cover the literature category completely.
I remain utterly baffled by this being in the house. Not only was this something that was in pristine condition, but it was something that libraries had, not a family residence. A 1952 edition of this book could have been something one of my relatives could have bought for college, but none of them studied literature to any significant degree. When I asked my mom why she wanted it, she shrugged and said “I’m supposed to have read some of those, might as well find out what they’re all about.” Fair enough, and it’s probably better to let Catie do her own book reports than have that temptation in the house.
At one point there was a scanned copy of questionable provenance circling around quizbowl circles, in some reviewing today, I think I found that copy, which someone posted to archive.org a couple years after I became aware of it. It’s the same 1952 edition my mother now has. I leave it to you to figure out if it’s useful to you.
https://archive.org/details/masterpiecesofwo000703mbp/page/n7/mode/2up