This week I got to thinking about the idea of recruiting new players and how to do that after COVID. I’m going to have to tentatively consider that activity fairs still exist, because it’s actually the most favorable arrangement for quiz bowl. If your location has gotten rid of activity fairs, I’m going to have to suggest getting involved with your school’s social media, and that’s is not as fun or as likely to give you exposure to the general population of your school.
Let’s start by focusing on the activity fair after your team appears on television. This gives you better material to go into the fair, and also represents a point where your pressure is not going to be recruiting for you, but still wants the team to generate positive results. It’s probably the first month of the school year or the beginning of the semester, and all school activities are presenting to some percentage of the school in the gymnasium. You got one table, and you have some of your team which competed on television last time. Here’s the basic guidance I can give you to this situation:
Make sure your on-ramp is smooth, and minimize barriers to entry, participation, and establishing a routine. Prior to the activity fair, work out your practice schedule for the next couple of weeks. Create a handout that has the schedule of practices for the next few weeks. Put practices into your schedule that are inviting to new players, and give recruits a consistent schedule they can follow (i.e. “every Tuesday at 2:30 pm” rather than, “Tuesday the 9th at 230, Thursday the 18th at 3, then Tuesday the 23rd at 230.”) If you split practice into two sessions on different days, to give your new players a practice of their own, move your experienced players to the new day, if you split your practice into two rooms, move your experienced players to the new room. This is just psychology, your most interested people are going to be the most flexible to change, and if they can’t make the new day, they are the most likely to come back when the schedule normalizes. People who don't know if they're interested yet will see changing a routine twice as more of a barrier to their participation.
Be conspicuous. The base design of the activity fair is a table with maybe some handouts and maybe something on display. You have much more to provide than simple handouts, but you need to have handouts to explain the activity. Beyond that you want to engage with the people passing through. Remember that quiz bowl is a orally delivered competition, and most of the other activities present can say nothing more than “take our flyer.” Prepare a set of simple, short questions, and read them to your current team. By making noise, you are showing off the activity in a way that attracts people from a distance, and are doing it more effectively than other activities, which can only engage students when they engage them.
Use media. If your team was on television last year, you have something to display during the activities fair. That is something almost all the activities at the fair lack. If you can stand up a pad displaying your team’s match on loop, people’s eyes will gravitate towards it. You don’t need the audio, it will distract from what you’re doing, but it will draw people in.
Use demonstration. Set out a buzzer, ask questions, and make people use the buzzer to answer. Choose the easiest questions you have available, and ask them to get the attention of people passing through. The point here is to show your activity in the context of actually doing it. Part of the battle of getting people to compete in quiz bowl is that they can't imagine themselves being good enough at it, so they never pick up the buzzer. Putting them right in the situation means they don't need to imagine themselves doing it.
Use bribery. Buy a bag of candy, and award it as prizes for each question answered.
As a general rule, you want to always be recruiting new people to quiz bowl. I make a point of overrecruiting for the first week, but there’s never a time that having more people involved with the team is a bad thing. This is especially true when you’re starting the year, since club activity and attendance is often used as a budgeting evaluation for those who hold the pursestrings. Because quiz bowl’s major expenses are at the end of the year, but budgeting is at the beginning of year or semester, having a big opening month of membership can make your year or turn it into a non-stop quest for funding.
From a less mercenary point, having people recruited early and throughout the year provides the team with a constant influx of new ideas and known things that can be shared with the team. If you leave space in practice for players to share things that they specifically know about that no one else in practice does, new players become a source of new blood and new information for this part, and they become integrated into the team as they hear from other members of the team.
During a practice this week, I saw a player answer a question on the Indian state of Assam, based on the fact that it is known for production of tea. He then loudly noted that he didn’t know anything else at all about the state of Assam. This is a common reaction in practice, and when it happens , you can teach less experienced players that this is perfectly good. If you say something in response of the form: “You know exactly one thing about that, and fortunately that’s the one thing that they ask about, But that can always change.”
A simple task that a coach often has to do: “How do I teach the team a small subject which I don’t know myself, and I don’t know of a ready source material I can point to?” This comes up often, and usually emerges when you notice a set of common answers from the same subject that your team doesn’t know. You become aware of a couple of answers because you’ve heard them in the same sort of question on the same subject a couple of times. But you don’t really know much other than those couple of answers, so you don’t know how big the hole is here.
For an example, we’re going to consider that our team has been repeatedly missed questions about violins and terms used referring to music played on violins, it’s happened in tournaments a couple times, and then it was a bonus in the most recent practice. So we have “violins” and the two answers, unfamiliar to us, “pizzicato,” and “col legno” which we have written down.
If you go into a browser and search for "glossary pizzicato col legno" and review the links that your search results, you will find that it will list short glossaries of music terms focusing on playing stringed instruments. You have to review several of these sites because you want to take your test conditions (the first two search terms) and see if any of the sources cover terms which spark your memory of the team missing other questions in the same subject. Once you have a couple of these that you like and you find reasonable complete, you can select one or two of these to present to your team. You could turn these into a study guides, flash cards, or even write a series of practice questions to capture the information for your team. Your team could even do part of this for themselves, and write the study guide or practice questions so they know it, and can train next year’s team with the material. Your goals are to highlight the knowledge to your team, put the information into a form they can learn from, so they don’t miss those questions as often going forward, and retain the study material in your team’s archive so that next year’s team can solve the problem for themselves.
This is all pretty mundane processes, you identify a need, and you try to provide the basic level of knowledge for your team, and figure a way to incorporate the knowledge so that it can be retained within the team even as the players the material helped graduate out. Sometimes the solution in quiz bowl is not miraculous, it's incremental, and it's not an overnight improvement but a slow series of steps. But as you do the process, you get better at doing it, and identifying when this mundane process will help your team to get better, now and in the future.