Week 167: Build your fallback plan first
plus word roots, problems with press releases, and a note on independence.
We cut practice short this week, due to the first organizing practices of the summer sports taking place. I’m okay with that as long as we got some time to prepare for summer, and we did manage that. If our plan works out, there will be once a week practice meetings among the three girls either in person or on zoom. In addition, I’ve been assembling the backup plan for the team, because we want the absolute worstcase scenario (that we don’t have practices during the summer, or can’t schedule it) to still result in an action plan. So here is what I presented to them during the short practice, and I hope you find something in this you can use for your team.
The target goals here are repetitions in similar categories and difficulty to what they will play in the beginning of next year. This will either be the local TV program, or a novice level tournament, and we won’t necessarily know which until the end of summer. The team will need enough material to be able to turn whatever they choose to pursue into a habit, and to have enough supply to get to August, when they will all be in activities at the school and can work together on site.
I don't want us to lose anything to a layoff. I know we plan to run practices in the summer somehow, but in case we don't I want you to have a set of fallback measures that you can use as a substitute or improvement to these practices. The worry I have is that Hometown High Q might come calling as early as August for a September 1st taping, and if that happens we need to be ready. Here are some things that will provide repetitions of questions and answers during the summer that will help in the fall and beyond.
Episodes of Hometown High Q will be airing on KDKA TV 2 at 11am Saturday mornings throughout the summer. Record and watch these as they are the best example of what we will play on should we get the call to compete next season.
I will keep filling quizlet over the summer. I've got a backlog of things that need to go in there and be formatted. I may also be able to make simulated games of Hometown Hi-Q through material I've got written to go into quizlet, but that will require some work.
nocard.org is a website that allows you to search for questions by subject or answer, so if you want to learn a lot about a single subject to cover it, go to nocard and ask it to provide questions for a specific answer.
Pluto.tv has a channel dedicated just to Jeopardy! episodes. This is free and available 24 hours a day.
The Jeopardy J! Archive allows you to search for answers and questions which match patterns and run through them. This also allows you to search for category names, so a common category name like "Books & Authors" will generate hundreds of clues and answers
The podcast Trivial Warfare Blitz is back after a hiatus. This runs a very simply formatted competition with very short questions. If you speed up your podcast player, this is a really good way to get a lot of repetitions of questions in, in a short period of time.
When August rolls around, College Bowl will return for its third season on NBC. It will have questions of length and difficulty similar to what Hometown High-Q will do, but will execute at a much faster speed and have a lot broader subject matter.
Similarly, if The Chase runs new episodes on ABC during the summer, some of the questions there will be similar to Hometown High Q difficulty, but run at a much faster pace. Especially in this format, I want you to observe the difference between how the Chaser answers questions and the contestants answer questions. The Chaser is not afraid to attack the question once they have certainty, while the contestant typically runs the questions to the end, pauses to collect themselves, and answers. This is the advantage the Chaser has over the contestant. It's also the advantage you must develop over your opponents with less buzzer experience.
The situation I noted at the beginning of this is something that I know happens, and I know forms one of the biggest barriers to moving a team from television to the circuit, and is one of the biggest barriers to building up more teams in general. If your program begins taping in September to fit a season’s episodes in the school year, and that show’s tournament structure is single elimination, the schools eliminated in the first couple taping sessions are nearly impossible to approach for other events in that school year. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but we should recognize they geared up in a short amount of time; having lost and having no knowledge of other events, they will break down in an even shorter amount of time. It’s the least fair outcome of televised quiz bowl, and it’s one reason I really want to finish this book.
The handout for this week was Greek and Latin roots, with a reminder to visit this series of Youtube videos: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, which I covered in Week 22 of this. I can’t emphasize to the team how important root words would be in a television match, it’s one of the absolute guaranteed slots in the local format, so having that in hand before taping is a profound advantage, one that I intend them to have. And to line it up with last week’s thoughts on answer selection, most of the questions on word roots tend to present as science questions initially, and the science questions tend to either be biological or chemical elements, so a medical approach is an excellent starting point to complement what we’ve already presented about the periodic table.
I’m hip deep in the final push for press releases and coming up against three trends which are making the press release to newspapers less effective:
New teams to the championships are not filling in press data
Established teams who have been to championships before are not updating their old data.
The existing data, due to staffing layoffs and moving on at newspapers, is highly out of date, and the point at which this is realized is exactly when there is the least time to fix it.
I tend to run through a hierarchy of targets for the press releases. First is those provided by the team, since those usually have some fundamental connection with the team, and provide the best coverage. Second are the education desks within newspapers, since they may have the same connection with the school, if not the team. Third is a general press release recipient, and fourth is the general assignment editor. Each of these is facing problems in future. There is a much higher churn in local newspapers since COVID, and that makes team connections out of date, and leaves education desks either staffed by people without a connection to the schools they cover, or the desk is unstaffed, as it’s one of the first beats to be cut when the layoffs come. The general press release and assignment editors are expecting news not features, and so while we can see interest emerge from that path, it’s less likely.
These changes have had some effect on the MSNCT and SSNCT, but since more local newspapers are the predominant targets there, the majority of the problems don’t become prominent until the HSNCT. Here you have many clusters of schools covered by the newspaper of a metro area, and those metro papers not giving the time to a story that covers many school districts at once. This year my bounced email rate spiked to over 30%.
Just to give an idea of how this happens, let’s consider a single market, El Paso, Texas, which has four schools competing. One of these was an established power, the others range from third time attendees, but not since the 2010s, and new attendees, who didn’t give any media information. Because I wanted to ensure first time teams got a real shot at publicity, I had to piggyback all of their information on the press contacts of the longtime attendee. And then 36 hours after my message, I was informed that the reporter was no longer at the paper. While this sort of problem can be triaged and fixed, it is an exhausting process when the failures spike and a cycle of trial and error before reaching a connection reduces the reporter’s time to craft a story.
I’ve been trying to figure out ways to improve this process this week, and I’m becoming stuck. Some previous improvements are stalling in the post-COVID environment: our outreach to television stations covering all teams in their metro was effective when there were just a few schools from that metro attending; once you got past five teams, the story was hard to tell on screen, and so it wasn’t told on screen at all. High rotation of reporters means they aren’t likely to have a memory of what an NAQT championship is, meaning a major portion of getting attention is teaching a reporter or editor just why this is so important to the school, and why getting to nationals is such an achievement. A high school national championship seems like it should be the easiest sell as newsworthy, but it’s becoming the hardest of our events to draw attention to.
As we get to the end of the school year, I’m kind of surprised that we haven’t been asked by the school administration for a status report. In the sections of the book where I describe the role of the pressure, I had always figured that even after you succeed in establishing the team, the pressure would be with you. It was certainly my experience with college teams that even if not looking over your shoulder, there would be some sort of pressure checking in at a regular interval, seeing that the org was following its own by-laws, or was spending the student activities fee money wisely. When we drafted the plan for the administration, we laid out a four-year path. Structurally, we’re ahead of schedule, in terms of results, a little behind, and a lot will ride on our ability to recruit next fall. But they haven’t even really checked in on us. My expectations of what they will need have become the biggest pressure acting on the team.
I think we were a lot more independent than they expected. Certainly if you know someone who will let your team borrow a buzzer, knows where you can get a buzzer that works on your phone, who knows where the free archive of questions is, and which sets you should start with, that certainly cuts startup costs down to size, and ups the efficiency of the startup phase. I was prepared to make things happen because I had to make it happen before on limited resources, and now they know how to make it happen as well. But overall, we were more independent of the school than even a college team.
So I am left with a bit of a question, which does not bode well for next year: if we did this with efficiency, keeping our costs low, so we didn't have to worry about bothering people for money, did that actually hurt development? Does a quiz bowl program benefit from needing to beg for funding, from needing the occasional attention of the staff of the institution? Is a certain amount of dependency on the institution a necessary component of a long live program? Does having to bother people help keep you in their minds, so that when they see a student who could benefit from this, they recommend them?
I’m having a feeling that if we don’t get on the show next year, and get the requisite publicity in school, we might have to change some of our tactics.