Week 159: We are the tortoise now.
After the second tournament
[Note that throughout this I will not be revealing content, but I try to point out things that appear frequently enough that it would be more significant in its absence. Since IS217 will be played in a couple more places this year, that's as far as I can go.]
The tournament went well. We gained in little victories, a 50% increase in tossups answered, but we are still waiting for the big one. And with Allderdice apparently not doing their tournament at all, we're done travelling for the year, so we will be waiting for a while.
The coach was unable to come to the tournament this time, but with abundant readers and scorekeepers available, I was tasked with following the team around. This gave me a little better perspective on what we need to build on. After two rounds I had filled the scoresheets' blank spaces with twenty or so study guides that needed to be written (a sheet each on six particular authors, and a dozen maps of the world), or pulled out of a thumb drive. I noted sets of questions I needed to pull and books I will need to drain.
The tournament
I had thought of taking a towel and stuffing it in my mouth, Jerry Tarkanian-style, to avoid letting my impulses and answers slip out. I was able to prevent this by putting my right hand over my mouth for most of the morning. By the afternoon, I had gotten myself into a routine in writing down ideas and charting matches that I didn't need to do something with my hands. I had forgotten how stressful that is. It's one thing to be in the audience when teams don't know something that you do, but it's another order of magnitude to sit there with knowledge they would have had if you had had more time, or thought of it earlier. It's part of learning to coach, but the only solace you have is that SOMETHING would have been there that you forgot to teach them.
When you are starting out as a player, nothing is more stressful than the moment when you realize you know it, and you know it way earlier than anyone in the room, but you can't pull the answer. Those are the ones that leave the scars, and you never forget not knowing that. For coaching, the worst is watching that happen to a player because you shared the experience with that player. Catie had two of those on Saturday. One was an answer we knew from our annual trips to the county fair, and one was one that we saw when on vacation. The former didn't hit. Despite my best efforts to will it to shake loose from her mouth, she couldn't pull the trigger. And we both stared each other down in the aftermath. "Everything's fair game in quiz bowl. Anything can come up." The latter question took us to its end, and I could see the same motion of her head as she tried to make the answer leaver her mouth, and I suppose I had the same "provoking an aneurysm" look on my face as before. But right at the end of the tossup, she buzzed in with the right answer, and explained how she had considered, then rejected each of two possible wrong answers. Catie is still full of the pause of recognition, and not quite trusting that her mind will provide the answer when it is needed, but right there is where I'll claim the fever broke a little.
The wager and the pizza presentation
During last week's practice, I found myself in a boastful mood, and having seen a question about [We will call it REDACTED, because 217 is still being played.] in the new set of practice rounds, I made a bet with them. If [REDACTED] didn't show up in the tournament, I would bring a pizza to next weeks practice. While not in the realm of Jim Rooker's unintentional walk probabilities coming back to bite him, I felt good about [REDACTED] appearing. It's in the 99 Critical Shots, and it's shown up three times in the practice packets we've read so far, and 3 times in four sets is 75%. Well, Catie did not let me forget that I made the bet. And though I mentioned it to them during lunch that if you didn't have a guess in the same category as [REDACTED] you could do worse than guess it, I couldn’t luck out and have it show up..
When it didn't show up, within seconds of the last question, Catie ladled it on. And I made a plan to make it a learning opportunity. I went to Harry's Pizza, which is my wife's favorite, and is as close a facsimile of a particular style of pizza as you can get around here. And I wanted to use that distinct style as a lesson.
One of the character traits of quiz bowl players and writers is how we assign things as specific to a place, and we compare and contrast those things, because they're useful as geographic clues. Pizza is rife with regional styles, and those styles become clues which point to geography. Food, music, literature, all have their 'regional styles' which are really regional in name only, but that name is something that can be an answer. So understanding pizza or barbecue styles as regional characteristics and clues is a valuable exercise. And for that reason, I gave them this little speech as I opened the box.
What we have here is a direct descendant of New Haven style "apizza," which was started with Frank Pepe's Pizzeria Napoletana. This is from Harry's in McMurray. Harry worked at Frank Pepe's in the 70 and 80's and came here afterwards. Thin charred crust, comparatively light on the cheese, large size. I didn't us get the other common topping at Pepe's, which Harry’s keeps on the menu, the clams.
New Haven is close to New York style, which is not as crisp in the middle, that allows it to be folded without breaking the crust up.
Lots of geographic regions have their own pizza style, and these get used as clues for the geographic region.
Chicago Deep Dish is a very thick pizza with a high edge crust from being in a deep dish pan. There's typically a large amount of cheese and a chunky tomato sauce. Giordano's or Pizzeria Uno are the nationally known chains which specialize in this.
Detroit style pizza became noticed recently when Pizza Hut decided to take the style national. Its a rectangular pan pizza, with brick cheese up to the edge giving it a carmelized crisp edge. The pans were originally designed to hold auto parts in factories. The one you hear about from Detroit as the progenitor of this is Buddy's Pizza.
St. Louis style pizza is known for being weird. They use a process cheese known as Provel, and the crust is practically a cracker. The restaurants that get mentioned as providing this are Imo's.
The summer
With this practice being the last of the school year with an impending deadline, I immediately efforted to create a new deadline. In order to get on the local TV show, you need to apply on an online form. I will be applying on their behalf, I would feel better if it were a letter co-signed by the principal and faculty, but the form doesn't have space for that. I wouldn't apply if I thought the team wasn't ready or willing, so I checked with them after the pizza. They were willing to go further, and I was glad for that. They get the fact that this is a journey. And they can actually see the thing I’m seeing, they’re getting a little better at this every time I see them.
The thing I added in this conversation over what I had promised last week was an explanation of why getting a deadline out in front of us was important. I asked them to look at the teams we played during the Pitt tournament, and the CMU tournament. I asked them about the ones that were going to nationals, and noted that they would be practicing. I noted the ones that weren't going to nationals, some of them, maybe all of them were done for the year. Full stop. They are the hare, they got ahead of us and they’re resting because they need a goal in front of them. And they will not start again until either the fall tournaments show up on the calendar, or the new school year begins, or until they find out when they'll be on the TV show. And I said "That's Labor Day at the earliest. That's five months from now. Five months where they'll be, at best, exactly where they are right now, just a little better than we are. We know we have to catch up. We're like the tortoise right now. I think you can catch them. And I think I know how to get ahead of them."
The Press Releases
It's press release season again, so I've been busy sending things to newspapers and local television stations so the media knows that their local schools and students are participating in national championships. It's getting better with each iteration of muscle memory. I've collected lists of stations for about half the metropolitan areas, and I now know where I have to direct the messages to get the best response. It was something I never had to do when we had a PR agency supporting us, but we've got the ability to do it. Maybe not as elegantly, or as targeted, but we're doing more and reaching more people simply because we had to do it ourselves.
The other thing having to get a little less local has brought us is the realization that the work we did in targeting TV stations means a connection for a college team in an area is also the connection to the media for middle and high school teams in the area. That is going to be a big help in promoting quiz bowl going forward.