Week 154: Well, that could have gone better.
We will build from the foundation we just pounded flat.
They did it. They played their first tournament Saturday, and they had ten little victories but none of the big ones. They weren't discouraged by this and neither was I. I could be worried if they didn't have the little victories, but no one on the team was shut out over the day, nobody gave up, and everybody was simply more tired than defeated by the day. I got to tell them that no tournament day will ever be harder than that, and I have to admit they took it better than I would at their age. It may look like a tornado came through the place, but aside from my bad advice, we’re still standing.
The bad advice.
During practice yesterday, the first thing I did was apologize to them. I apologized because I gave them the wrong advice for the situation they were facing. I had given them the advice to do three things on tossups:
1) Don't let a tossup go dead, always have some sort of guess.
2) If you have an answer you feel confident in, "For 10 points" is the point where you want to hear confirmation of your answer.
3) The risk at the end of the question is negligible, if you have a guess and your instincts are being confirmed.
This set of strategies will work if your team has some knowledge, and your opponents tend towards the same sort of "wait for confirmation" strategy in those last clues. The problem is that it assumes your opponents will let questions get to the "For 10 points." That was precisely what didn't happen.
Of the four teams that Seton LaSalle faced in the morning pool, the first two were already qualified for HSNCT, having placed second and third in the previous tournament at CMU. The two other teams they faced in the pool had already qualified for SSNCT and were already in the field. None of these teams were likely to let questions get to "For 10 points," so even if they had an idea, they waited for confirmation rather than shooting, and never got confirmation. We're far enough along in the year that new players and teams have experience to get out of that strategy, and there were no teams with similar experience levels at this tournament.
Another factor which jammed this strategy was shifting from an A set (The Pitt tournament in December that we couldn't attend) to a regular set. Because there's a tighter length limit on A sets, the "For 10 points" comes earlier. If the team was targeting the For 10 points as a marker, a longer question meant there was much more content before the For 10 points. I asked them to concede too much territory to the other teams, and I shouldn't have.
The right strategy for this combination of experienced teams and longer questions would be to take chances and start firing earlier. I prepared them for a tournament earlier in the year rather than one where the other teams were playing aggressively, and that was bad advice.
One of the things I've repeatedly told them, is "Make all the mistakes you want, but try very hard to never make the same mistake twice." In thinking it over, it was galling for me, because it was the same mistake twice, though separated by 30 years. The first college nationals I played in, we were short on a few categories and we focused our attention on avoiding negs. So we played tight, cautious, or if you are willing to admit it, a little scared. We had been to some circuit events, and we were used to the slightly longer questions. If you combine those two things, you find yourself doubting yourself, and working in a very tight window of a couple seconds at the end of the question. Even if your opponent is aggressive and collecting a few negs, they'll average out to a net positive if you're not forcing them to make decisions. I think we only won three matches that year at nationals, and it was three teams playing more cautiously than we were.
So how do we learn from this?
The team has to move more aggressively and act on a shorter cycle. To that end, I spent Sunday with my notes on the packets. I yanked out the clues that I felt were likely to repeat themselves, either in direct information ("no one should be surprised if they clue Shakespeare with that particular work")** or in type of information given in the clue ("writers clue rivers by the cities they pass through.") I put that in a document, and started looking for connections in writing. Had I not been an idiot and left this document on the printer, I would have fed those clues back to them in practice, with the idea that these were things they just had the answers to a couple days earlier. In other words, reinforcing the lesson that everything repeats, and feeding it back at a higher frequency. But I was an idiot, and so we'll do that next week.
This strategy also seems like the fastest way to get them pursuing 50-50 situations on buzzing. Giving them clues that are showing up as clues and forcing them to react in practice will help them to react in games, and if those are where they have to outrace an opponent, it at least puts them in an aggressive stance.
Does this conflict with what I want them to do when they get on television? Yes, by a lot. The questions are even shorter on television, and until matches are back in a studio, the value of speed on tv is purely limited to a single lightning round. But we're not getting to that until next year at the earliest, and there's another tournament ahead of us.
So now we have four weeks to the next tournament. And I'll use the Belichickian phrasing, because we want to keep this on an even keel: On to Pitt.
** Please note that I'm not pointing out specific details from the tournament any more than the obvious, since the tournament questions are still being used. (and if you're worried about Shakespeare being mentioned above, wouldn’t it be more significant information if the works of Shakespeare weren't mentioned in a tournament?)
On Thursday afternoon, before the tournament, I picked Catie up from the van dropoff and drove her home. As is her wont, she commandeered the radio by putting her phone on charge and letting the audio apps take over. What was different about it was that she immediately moved to one song: "Flowers" by Miley Cyrus, and then immediately moved on to Bruno Mars, immediately pointing out to me the similarity of the chorus.
I'm not sure whether she had made the connection herself, or someone else did it for her, but the practice is having its effect. She's noticing things. Things that could be questions.
I pointed out that she had pulled together the exact structure of a bonus that she could encounter in future, and I got the intonation in her voice and nod of reflection to see that I was right and she may not have thought of it that way, she would be thinking in that way from now on. It's a very distinctive intonation she has when something is interesting and just grabbed her attention, but I’ve known it since she was 5 and had the Hogmother Apple Dumpling at Hogfather's BBQ. She's learning to observe, and turn these things into notes at the back of her mind. I don't know how good a player she will be, but she's shaping up to have every instinct to be a good question writer, and that's one skill that will serve her well. It’s already helping her in school. I can see the processor works, now it's a matter of filling the hard drive.
If the scoresheets are to be believed, I'm proud of her for a very specific reason. During practice two weeks before the tournament, I explained why one answer for a tossup was acceptable in one case and not in another because one is an adaptation of the other, and why that "do not accept or prompt" is there.** Her first points are credited on a question that covered that same topic. The other team is marked with a -5, and Catie has a 10 next to her name. She played the do not accept or prompt reversal perfectly. Her second points of the tournament were on trash. Every previous tournament over the past ten years, I've told her that there's one question in every tournament I know she'd absolutely obliterate, mostly when Disney princesses are mentioned. I called this one (pop music, non-current) while reading a match in another room. Delivering punishment for her opponents' technical mistakes and scoring primarily on trash... Ben Folds was right: "You're so much like me...I'm sorry."