A short one this week that might actually be a short one.
The practice this week was short on new material that will be interesting to you. I didn’t include a study sheet or a second round of questions. I had a number of small statements I had to make to the team, since this coming weekend is the tournament. Most of these were things you'd have been familiar with if you had been to a tournament before.
Simple logistical things we need to get them ready for the weekend:
"Carry some money for lunch or a snack if your caffeine level flags. This is something like five to six practices end to end. You're going to feel exhausted sooner than you think."
"We need to be there at 8:30, so we have to leave the school at 7:45."
“Make sure you have your forms emailed in by Wednesday night.” Yes, forms. Makes us feel like an actual organization.
A couple of situational rules for doing things during the tournament:
"Have fun, remember to shake hands after a match."
"Make sure you know you've buzzed in before answering. The buzzer is your right of way. If the other team buzzes in and you say something, they can take your answer."
And some generic pep talk items:
"You may not have as much experience as some of the teams in the field, but you've done more with your experience in practice than the other teams have done with theirs."
So we really didn’t have time to go over new study materials. We recapitulated the quick attack questions from the Scrambled States of America game, to fulfill my plans for that. I let them have the map for 10 questions, then took it away, and forced them to focus on their memory. That worked very well, and I think I will need to include that tactic in basic strategy for television. It fixes a lot of problems in one action.
But the big thing I did was that I prepped them with a set of scoresheets. While it's necessary to have at least one person in the room keeping score, I want to make sure that all the players have paper in front of them, and some sort of writing implement. This is not just for scorekeeping or computation (which I've not really touched on with them,) but also because I want them to have a place to note in realtime, what questions they didn't have any ideas on.
I'm going to be reading these questions to other teams in another room. While I'm going to see all the questions, and I'm going to be able to look at their scoresheets, since they're going into a shared spreadsheet, I won't see them at the same time, and I won't necessarily be able to connect the information. Now I have a rough idea what general subjects they don't know as a team. If they record what they don't know for themselves individually, or what they don't feel confident in answering, and I see it written down after the tournament, I can start to shape the practices to remove those holes in their game and their confidence. Seeing an entire tournament's worth of data is really going to be invaluable to the next tournament. I want them to see it as constant development, and this is just a nicely concentrated set of development iterations.
The other reason I want that information is for after the tournament. Since we're still not even a fully staffed team, now just three 9th graders, we must promote ourselves to the school. A full report of the tournament must be ready for Monday morning's announcements at the school. A picture of the team and a summary paragraph has to be sent to the school's social media team, so that students and parents see there's a team, and a space for more participants.
So we’re 60 hours out right now, and I’m a lot more nervous than I was in the failed runup in December. The field is larger than the one they would have played at Pitt, and there’s some teams doing this for their first year. But unlike those, they’ve never faced a live opponent, and that is an unpredictable factor.
One of the great quotes I heard from quiz bowl stories was an exchange between Patrick Friel and Joe Wright as Swarthmore exited a room and Pitt entered. Joe asked whether the team doing a double shift in the room was doing well in their first tournament ever. Patrick replied “well, they lost to us, but they have the skills to pay some of the bills.” And that’s exactly where I feel with them right now. They’re not going to get rolled all day, but I don’t know how they’re going to start the day, I don’t know how they’re going to finish, and I don’t know what I’m going to have say after the preliminary rounds at lunch. I just know they’re each going to have at least one brief moment of triumph somewhere during they day, when they realize they really can do this. Then they’ll have to learn how to chain those together. And then I won’t be nervous, because that bill will be paid.