Short one this week.
Over the past couple weeks I’ve been observing a phenomenon, where people associated with quiz bowl have reacted to the annual SickosCommittee rundown of non-NCAA college championships in two ways. First the quizbowl faithful post up a large amount of support tweets to promote quiz bowl, thinking it’s being missed, and then, when they get the posting with Quiz Bowl, they’re confused because there’s references to College Bowl that don’t match anything they remember.
A variation of this has been what happened in March when hsquizbowl discussed the existence of televised quiz bowl. Everything was discussed in terms of “I don’t know enough because there’s nothing local to me,” or “I will cast all my opinions from the most proximate program to me and ignore all other data.” When it comes to quiz bowl, especially on television, I appear to be a SickosCommittee of one.
Here is my rationale for why televised quiz bowl matters, besides “I’m writing the book about this so I’d better be interested”:
If you took the 40+ stations from around the country which have a televised competition, you would see that in a school year, they serve somewhere between 1500 and 2000 high schools. For comparison (from the segment on CBS Mornings) the circuit is serving around 3800 schools. The intersection of these is less than 500. If we could bridge the gap between those two groups, we could probably increase that intersection to 1000, and we’d at least have each group’s awareness of the other increase. That 1500 is approximately the same size as Knowledge Bowl teams, or Academic Decathlon teams, but it’s easier to find the information about the teams competing, because most of the TV stations broadcast matches on the internet. These teams are also covering the same material as circuit quiz bowl, with different emphases.
I want to list a set of possible competitions which might be near you which you aren’t aware of, some of these are
Is there a league of teams competing in your city?
Is there a television program in your city, is it on the PBS station? Is it on the local cable access? Is it really just coverage of the local league?
Is there a tournament in your city at a college? At a high school?
Is there a newspaper that sponsors a competition for teams?
Does a college give scholarships for performance in a league or tournament? Does a charitable foundation give scholarships for performance in a tournament they sponsor?
Is there a radio station which holds competitions? (There’s actually a surprising number of these out there.)
All of these are attempting to make quiz bowl more visible to the general public, and it’s surprising that the circuit isn’t making contact with these organizations.
I stumbled upon the National Spelling Bee Friday night. Due to aggressive local scheduling conflicts, the local station didn't seem to be broadcasting either section of the Spelling Bee the past two years, so I missed the first section of competition until Friday night, when I got to see the word definition rounds. After checking the rules to see if this is included in local versions (it looks like it is in most local bees, but not as an absolute requirement,) I can see where this is the study skill now most directly translatable to other competitions, especially those that are televised.
In reading articles on it, I can see where some spelling bee coaches are dismissive of needing a new, somewhat orthogonal skill set to advance, and look at it kind of like the verbal section of a college entrance exam. But since I'm coming at it from a quiz bowl viewpoint I see it as a skill that transitions past the NSB's grade 8 sunset, and can be applied for television, and even for circuit quiz bowl, and from there it can migrate into into other specialized competitions, specifically Science Bowl and Certamen.
I hold that you can collect a number of skills through competitions prior to high school that are useful for quiz bowl. Flexing those skills through quiz bowl allow you to apply those skills to any academic competition where questions are answered. Spelling Bee, the late National Geography Bee, and MathCounts all can have skills transferred to quiz bowl, and those combined skills: educated guessing, intelligent listening, metacognition, finding clues in text, and relying on your teammates skills to balance out holes in your team, all contribute to success in quiz bowl and specialized competitions like Science Bowl, etc.
But what you can’t do is use these earlier competitions to develop if you don’t know they still exist. Going from ESPN, where I expected it to be, to preempted for the Nightly Sports Call, is a serious problem. And that problem affects quiz bowl and makes it so more people say “I don’t know enough about it because there’s nothing local to me.”
I missed out on the World Quizzing Championships again last weekend, because my car is in for service and I couldn’t travel to Washington DC and strand my wife. I’m debating whether I should offer to host the Pittsburgh site next year, since most of the locals who would have gone, would have gone if someone organized it, and Steve’s schedule (Steve Perry, frequent best USA player at WQC) didn’t permit him to organize this year. Congratulations to the best USA player, Victoria Groce, who also is most local to the Pittsburgh site, but probably will leverage her appearances in future.