Today was the last regular season game of Rebel Ultimate, and they ended the season 4-3 with a possible playoff game. Catie's been playing on the new Seton LaSalle Ultimate Frisbee Team for a couple of months now, which means I've been sitting in the stands watching the team play, while explaining to the other newbie parents why they're not just running down the field. One of the things I had to explain repeatedly, after learning it myself, was how ultimate handled fouls. Fouls are called by the players themselves, and can be disputed, and the action in case of a foul is to reset the situation and attempt the most recent possession again. The rules of ultimate, by design, eliminate the need to have an official on site. This has been the most intriguing bit of the rules to me, because I tend to look at any ruleset for its adaptability to quiz bowl.
I think we're pretty far down the line of quizbowl development that we can't expect to run tournaments in the style of ultimate, without a separate adjucation structure, but it's occurred to me that between quizbowl practice and quizbowl tournaments, there might be a space for an adjudicating set at the level of ultimate.
Now I know what you're saying right now: "Isn't that the role of the moderator?" Well, this is an observation I've had for a long time: most people, who have never competed in quizbowl, and are then pressed into service in moderating a quizbowl match (either in practice or in a tournament,) don't feel comfortable acting as both reader and judge. They feel they don't have enough familiarity with all the words used, and they don't think they can handle the close but no answers properly. We can ask them to read the rules, but applying rules you just read at speed is not going to be a successful task. Unless you're like me and spent a hundred hours in the email threads where the rules were compiled, someone moderating a match is not going to know the rules as well as a player.
It's a crucial growth problem for quizbowl: if we must rely on people who have confidence in their abilities to moderate, we won't have enough people to sustain the circuit, much less expand it. While we're very good at retaining people willing to help out at touranments from the set of people who played quiz bowl, we really need to recruit people who find it interesting when they see it. We need to make it easier for teams to grow out of comparatively sparsely populated territory, areas without large numbers of teams or people familiar with quiz bowl. But if we could just give moderators a single task of reading the questions well, they're going to feel better about the experience, and they'll be likely to moderate more events.
If we could create a level of self-regulated, low-stress events, the moderators could focus on simply reading and not adjudicating the questions. Meaning you'd have a wider pool of people who could help form teams who are not themselves going to be playing.
What this would require:
A better environment for adjudication. Players would need to be a lot less eager to protest. But in order to have that you need:
A set of questions which is tailored to not need adjudication. This could involve a much more constrained set of answers, or a editorial policy that tries to remove as much abiguity from the answer as possible.
A set of questions that is even more moderator friendly. That means much more emphasis on pronunciation guides, eschewing complex terminology as clues, and otherwise giving the moderator the ability to learn one task at a time.
These aren't impossible tasks, but they do represent a pretty fundamental challenge to quizbowl. Players have gotten a lot calmer over the years about using protests, or rules lawyering to flip the results of a question, but we're still not nearly as chill about it as ultimate. The ability to appeal to a higher editorial authority is pretty well ingrained in the fiber of quiz bowl, and part of the adjudication ultimate lays down is that you have to figure any problem out between teams on the field without any higher authority. Anything that limits the answerspace is greeted by writers as an infringement on their creative freedom, and chafing under any guidelines is often a reason that question production, especially for introductory tournaments is more time consuming. And the requirement of making questions easier to read almost requires a viewpoint that most writers can't come from, that of someone unfamiliar with the canon of clues, able to judge question phrasing solely by its rhetorical ease.
What this could do:
It could enable a team to be created from a lot fewer resources, it opens up the possibility that a teacher or coach or parent could lead the effort to build a team, without having been involved in competitions in school themselves.
It could open up a market for questions that could be played in such events. And that is an opportunity for writers.
It could even open up a new layer of competition, requiring fewer resources than a tournament requires.
Consider this as a model: a series of small sets (2-5 packets) available for scrimmages weekly. The questions would fulfill the standards above, and teams could use the packets either as practice, or to scrimmage another team through zoom or some other online service. The teams would supply a moderator for each meeting and they would either moderate a half of one game, or alternate reading packets. The teams would keep their own scores, and have to agree on the results, but since the scores wouldn't be submitted to a central repository it really doesn't matter. This also self-regulates team behavior, if a team cheats or disrupts or rules-lawyers themselves into position, they may not have someone to scrimmage against next time. This would develop readers who could then help out at local events, having gotten tons more practice reading.
It still has the major fundamental problem of where the questions will come from, but this could be a system to expand quizbowl into lots of new schools, lots of new players, and lots of new staffing. It could get events off of Saturday, and into weekdays. And it would leverage the technology we developed during COVID to not merely be a substitute for in-person quiz bowl, but it would augment it without cannibalizing.
Another week of practice got scrubbed this week due to absences (Catie was the only one in school on Tuesday, and she could just hear me talking about this, so we rolled it for this week.) While I was waiting for Catie to get out of ultimate practice, which runs after quiz bowl, I did some more building of study guides. I ended up writing up a basic study guide on the topic of annual international awards. This is one of those meta-lists that I think is a good force multiplier for starting teams. Looking at winners of a prize like the Nobel Prize for Literature, or the Booker Prize, or the Pritzker Prize, gives you a bunch of names that could be grouped together as particular set of answers, or clues that point you to other members of the group. With that the history of how the award came to be, how it has developed, and how the award relates with the field it celebrates forms another set of knowledge which can be included in questions. Major prizes are key clues that are often given when the answer is a winner of the prize, simply knowing whether someone is a winner, or a notable non-winner of a prize is often a clue that enables eliminations of large swaths of answers.
The second wave of press releases for SSNCT went through last week. I've gotten pretty good at doing this, as I've been collecting both television station information for most metropolitan areas, and I've got a large stack of newspaper connections at local papers from years of teams submitting their local media information. The problem I ran into a lot with this year's SSNCT is the sort of endpoint of coming out of COVID and the general decline of the newspaper industry. For SSNCT, there's a few mainstay programs that qualify every year, and there's a fairly regular churn of schools which won their local league, or got back up to a level to qualify in their local tournaments. And both of those groups have the problem that they think the media contacts that they gave last time are still at the local paper. It's not really the fault of the coaches, when we have the request for media connections on the registration form, it isn't something you think about, and if it was filled out already from a previous championship attendee (as these would have) they're relieved, because they don't have to research that sort of stuff, even though they shouldn’t expect six year old contacts to still work. So it falls to me.
That was what I was doing for most of Sunday afternoon, sitting in the cafeteria of Bethel Park High School, typing away and looking up local newspapers as various members of Catie's dance team did their solos for the weekend competition. I found myself grasped by melancholy as I realized how many of these reporters were no longer working at the papers I knew them from. And I found myself frequently cursing the inadequacies of the news tip web submission form. Between asking for images before the event, putting field character limits that prohibit actual detail being transmitted, programming from HTML3 days, and the "three pages viewed and we paywall you" structure guaranteeing you won't find the right page in time, the form for submitting a press release to newspapers ranges from merely impossible to use to an abomination in <BLINK> tags.
I’ll be at it again in the airport Sunday night, putting the post-tournament press releases together, taking some comfort that the work I did to fix up the links in pre means I have less to do post.