Week 178: Refining the pitch to recruits
And another exercise
One of the problems I've been having in connecting the thread of this book has been coming up with a convincing argument to leave televised competition and explore more competitions. While there's the reason that having additional events is its own method of securing a yearlong presence for the team, and there's the reason that a hierarchy of events leading from local to national championships is a way to test your players and your team, there's a certain case to be made that if the book gives you a large advantage in the environment of televised quiz bowl, why should you abandon that advantage for a different challenge. While I'm trying to write against that viewpoint, a lot of my arguments have been based on assuming that the book will sell well enough that whatever advantage secured on television would be temporary until a larger portion of the field also read the book. So I've been looking for a way to present the transition to the circuit as more fulfilling, even if it may not be more successful initially.
Combined with that, I've been working on the pitch to the new students for next year at the school. And part of that has been me looking at the electives of the school and the other activities and saying, "What makes quiz bowl rewarding beyond simply answering questions and getting on local television?"
Everything television quiz bowl does is already set up. The rules are there, the exposure is there, and the event is there. Everything the program supplies means that a team can reduce itself down to a surface level process: the acquisition of knowledge, and the testing of it. It's not that it's a simple process, it's that televised competition is a process where you get lots of things done for you. And while that makes it easy to participate, it eliminates a lot of the challenge and activity which keeps you engaged with the competition. I'm going to treat that as the surface level: you learn things in school, you are tested on it. And while you can do more, there's lots of things that won't really help.
If knowledge is the currency of quiz bowl in all its forms, the problem is that the only thing that televised competition shows is the hoarding of knowledge. There's nothing that requires you to go beyond that first level to sustain your team's existence. And this is where I found the difference.
The components which make up a television program: a studio, a set of questions, hosts, the equipment, the prestige, and the recruiting of local teams to compete all were structures that were singular to a program. Some of these were achieved by having internet and enabling faster communication between teams. Because the circuit was built without those most of those structures in place, the circuit built their own structures. And so they learned to do new things with the knowledge they possessed. The circuit needed questions written to compete on, so they applied their knowledge from old questions and created new ones. The circuit needed to figure out how to make those questions better, so they borrowed skills from journalism, and they needed the questions to be less confusing and able to be read by people with less experience in moderating, so the writers took from public speaking and rhetoric. The circuit needed a way to compete using these questions, so they developed skills in logistics and hosting. And they developed the analysis skills and pedagogical skills, not to improve their own game, but to evaluate what's important, what comes up over and over again, and what the next player on the team needs to know to pass on that to next year's team.
A lot of these skills that are picked up and used by circuit quiz bowl are taking the surface level skill of collecting knowledge, and then applying the collected knowledge in different ways.
So when the circuit seems a lot of work to a potential recruit, we need to counter that it allows a lot more opportunity to build skills off of the knowledge gained. When pitching new people on quiz bowl, there's lots of focus on the competition, lots of focus on testing what you know, and lots of focus on the enjoyment. But there isn't a lot of pitching of the basic value of quiz bowl to improve skills in using knowledge, both that which someone has coming in, and developing through training. I think by omitting this, we've missed a big section of potential players. Consider these items to keep in your quiver while recruiting your team this fall.
Playing off the idea from last week of OTW, I'd like to discuss an advanced technique. To do it you'll need a box of index cards, and a container to hold them, and possibly a phone. This technique does two things:
- It extracts knowledge from each of your players, unique to the individual and shares it with the entire team.
- It prevents loss of knowledge due to graduation or quitting and maintains knowledge retention over time.
Procedure: Hand out a card to every player and then ask your team members: "Can you think of something that you know of, could be big could be small, but it's something that you're confident that no one else in this team knows about?" And as soon as everyone has an idea, they write it down on the top left of the card. And you remind them twice not to put their name on the card.
There are two parts to this, and you really don't have to choose which of the two is necessary, as long as one of the two is possible:
- Putting all the notes about what you know about the topic on an index card, so that someone can understand the topic.
- being able to speak before the group and give a 30 second to 1 minute speech about the topic.
Next practice, each player will either explain to the team what's on their card, or they will have written their speech on the card. After each card is explained, it gets put in the container. The container is community property of the team. Anybody can look at the cards in the container at any time, but the cards always go back in the container. While we don't necessarily do this every week, we hand out cards on enough of a regular basis that the team becomes accustomed to the process.
There are a couple of twists to the collection of cards you can apply to this. You can record the speeches for your team's posterity instead of keeping a container. You can go through and organize the box with recipe card dividers. You as the coach can contribute, and in fact, you may want to sow the seeds for this by introducing a box with a few cards already written. And nothing, absolutely nothing, should stop a motivated student from taking multiple cards at a time.
Explain to the team the goal of this is not to make you a better player, it's to make your teammates more knowledgeable of things that you know. That means that they will be able to use that knowledge in practice, and in later competitions. And that means a new player who is eager to learn will find a ready source of things that they didn't know before. You want everyone to contribute, and feel their contribution is valuable, because it will be.
The reasons I consider this technique advanced are as follows: It's not something you can install on the first day of practice with new players. It demands a certain knowledge of your teammates in the question asked, a certain level of experience to know what would be useful for their teammates to have in that box, and the team members have to have a certain level of trust in their teammates and especially you that their ideas aren't too obscure or weird. It's a generalization of the college technique of writing your own questions to read for practice, but it's scaled down to make it an achievable goal that can become a habit. Its value is mostly achieved after months or years of habit, so the people who benefit from it won’t really be people who start it.
If we were to break down some of those skills in the first section and see where they apply here, we can see a lot to recommend this technique to improve the player and the student.
Quiz bowl is journalism or a specific form of non-fiction writing
A question is a form of journalism, compacting the facts on the topic which is the answer, and doing so in a way that is both logically ordered and entertaining. Writing a question or writing on a topic involves fact checking and editing yourself for both clarity and length.
Quiz bowl is public speaking
A question once written must be read aloud. Since there's not a vast network of readers available, eventually everyone who plays quiz bowl gets called upon to read a packet. Fortunately this is some of the least nerve-wracking public speaking required, with an audience that has to do it themselves some time. Quiz bowl is almost accidentally one of the best treatments for this. And this exercise whittles it down to a 30 second statement they already have scripted for themselves.
Quiz bowl is teaching
Any exercise in quiz bowl where you are creating something for another player is an opportunity to teach, to decide what they need to know about a subject to identify it, to present that information to them, and to learn how to make your thoughts clearly understandable to another person.
Quiz bowl is team building
For this exercise to work, your players have to be invested in their team's success, and part of that is developing a trust in your teammates that you have a common goal. The teammates have to offer up something of themselves for the good of the whole team.
Quiz bowl is division of labor
This exercise is designed to be something that partitions a fairly audacious task to tackle, teaching dozens of little pieces of information that could help a team, and splitting it across the team in a way that the person best suited to each job takes the job.
Two uncollected thoughts
I’ve completed the newspaper search portion of the annual contact list. I’m now waiting for reports from people who usually report in a few dozen. I was struck this year by how few newspapers devoted the level of space to graduations that they normally do. Normally three of four newspaper groups go all out on student activities and college choice for their local seniors, and those areas generate dozens of leads in a week of articles. I was wondering if this was an actual problem of the special graduation sections not being produced, or the questions of activities not being asked of seniors. Either is troubling, but the former would be slightly more troubling, as it would indicate a lack of education reporters on the task. Fortunately adjusting my search parameters indicated the latter was more likely true. Where I think I’m settling on a conclusion about this is that the sections I relied on in the past were built to be a special print section first, and when they were typeset, having activities for small print details was valued. Now as they are expecting most of their traffic not merely from online, but from mobile views, that data is not showing up in the articles.
Back in the early 2000s, during college football season, NAQT held Conference Championship Tournaments, intending them to be ways to align events for teams, and encourage schools without teams in a college conference to form them. While it was a solid idea, the biggest success it had was with a smaller conference with more of a basketball alignment, the Big South Conference. I mention this because for the larger NCAA conferences, Friday pretty much left this idea permanently dead. It might still make sense for a conference with a smaller geographic footprint to create a tournament, but for the new power 4 conferences left in the wake of Friday, I’m slightly worried about the conference travel costs of other sports, and I have no illusions about the prohibitive travel costs such a scheme would impose on quiz bowl teams. It’s simply not feasible… unless maybe…if you did it online?