(I ended up pulling this out of last week’s edition because I thought I’d need a bottle episode. If it’s a little ragged, that’s because it got filled in Thursday and didn’t get polished. This will necessarily get a polish before going in the book. After this, I’ll come back and explain why there was a need.)
Second Chair
The classical model of play in the '90s was that most teams had two main scorers in their lineup. Three scorers were possible, and an advantage to your team, and four scorers of equal strength was rare, but when you kept it working you had a lineup that could win tournaments and nationals. You rarely saw one player with a lineup of complementary players for long, and that was why two seemed to be an essential part of the model. The college canon at that point was too big for all but the top players to cover by themselves, but with two players you could each cover two of the big three (History, Literature, Science) and then cover a couple of the mid-sized categories (Geography, Music, Art, Current Events, Mythology/Religion/Philosophy) to match.
A second strong player is able to serve as a sounding board on bonuses, can suggest possible answers to the team, and generally back up the strongest player for those moments when they falter. In the course of an all-day tournament, even the best players have moments where their energy level slips, or their instincts go awry. Having a second or third player who can cover those moments is essential to having a team that can face adversity and not go under.
The high school circuit packet distribution is about as broad today as the college circuit tournament was then. So the basic layout of your team could be expressed in mostly the same way. Your team needs to cover all of the big three, and can get away with holes in a couple of mid-sized categories, and several of the remainder. You may have players on the team who both know a category, but usually one of your players is getting the points in a category, while the others know the material but are getting outbuzzed.
When the oldsters talked of shadow effect, they were talking about this, one player has the same knowledge as the other, but one consistently acts on it faster, and gets the points, or blocks their teammate from buzzing in and getting the points.
The player who casts a shadow effect on all the other players is almost always the first chair of the team. (We're inventing the term to cover the phenomenon.) The first chair is answering questions in the categories they feel comfortable with, and they are providing the strongest source of scoring to the team. I've come to this terminology because this is separate from the designated roles on the team (captain, scorekeeper) and it has a certain ambiguity of the role depending on the team dynamic. First chair seems obvious to determine during a couple practice packets, but the roles behind that often depend on having someone able to take on the role of second chair.
Second chair can be filled by anyone on the team, but it has a few requirements. It's a position where you are getting a shadow effect from your leading scorer. It's a position which requires someone to be with the team for a longer period of time. It is not something you can figure out before your first tournament, or maybe even before the first year of tournaments. Second chair is a position that's hard to fulfill, and easy to screw up. It is not a position one ascends to through effort, as much as it is their correct role as the team is currently composed. Part of that is the realization that you are the right person for that role.
I was in the unique position during college of being the first chair for the team, then moved to the second chair for most tournaments, but back to first chair for tournaments where parts of the distribution favored my skill set. This probably doesn't happen much now, if you're confined to circuit events or televised competitions. However, the transition between the two still could see a passing of the torch, so it's worth including this in the book.
During the game:
The mantra "Better you than them."
The most powerful mantra I developed in playing second chair is "Better you than them." That is to say, it is far better to be beaten to a question by your teammate than by an opponent: better you get the points than they get the points. Buying into this philosophy is key to the role. If I ever felt like I was getting beaten to something I treasured, or felt to be my category, I repeated that to myself as we scored 30 points on the bonus.
During practice:
The second chair needs to be in attendance and observing.
In order to be a good second chair, you need to know what your teammates know, part of that is seeing all of them during practice and seeing where they are getting points, and getting points ahead of you. The more you time you spend observing, the more data you have, and the more guidance you recieve on what the team needs.
The second chair needs to be aware of not only their limitations, but the limitations of the first chair, and beyond that the other teammates.
The skill to develop is metacognition, knowing what you know. That demands time spent in practice learning what questions currently stump you, and separating those from the things you were beaten to by the first chair, and those things that no one on the team knew. You also need to start knowing when your players actually know something, or are just guessing. A few lucky guesses in practice should not be interpreted as knowledge of the material. The coach and all the players should feel free to interrogate anyone about whether that answer was a guess or actual knowledge. A lucky guess in practice may lead to the category being assumed covered when it isn't.
Second chair is a recognition of responsibility to the team, that you're going to keep your strengths, but seek out new challenges by learning the categories where the team is weak.
While I find specialization to be both an end-state, and a disappointing one at that, second chair on a team is something that requires flexibility and constant development, and is something that could lead other roles within the team. I see them as the unhealthy and healthy reactions to realizing someone on your team is much better at this than you are. While it may be that working to improve as second chair would be indistinguishable from specialization for a time, its a much more dynamic process. Often specialization is treated as a process with an end condition: "After I've mastered this category, I'm done." Expanding your knowledge as the second chair is just taking the list of things that aren't known by the first chair and taking a small piece at a time, realizing that you'll never reach the end, but you're always learning."
It takes time to develop an order, but that order is neither permanent nor fixed.
The biggest hole in introducing this to your team is that this can't be introduced as the first thing. In order to establish a first chair and a second chair, you have to have some degree of experience. Your team has to be familiar with each others strengths and weaknesses, and how they cover each others blind spots because of what they know about each other.
It is possible for the second chair to overtake the first, but the circumstances of that have to be right. Either the first chair doesn’t study while the second chair does it to an extreme over a period of time, or the packet distribution changes wildly between events to the disadvantage of the first chair. Neither are sudden occurrences, or likely occurrences, but when they happen they are the product of the second chair taking initiative and learning to the advantage of their team.
There can be multiple second chairs.
The classical model discussed above could support multiple second chairs, to the point where you could have the first chair backed up in multiple categories by different teammates. For instance, if three second chairs were covering one of the big three.
What are the other roles of the second chair?
A second chair can be positioned on the B team to qualify a second team at an event. If schedules conflict the second chair can become the first chair. The second chair, having such strong knowledge of their teammate's strengths can be a team captain who knows how to designate.
How should you develop yourself to be second chair?
What is it that you don't know?
Asking this question, marking down the questions you don't get in practice, and grouping the questions gives you a metacognitive inventory of your limitations.
What is it that they don't know?
This is also something you can find out through practice, marking down the answers that go dead for the team, or which aren't answered by the first chair, starts to fill in the map of subjects which would benefit the team if ANYONE would take them up. And if ANYONE would benefit the team by taking them up, you might as well be ANYONE.
What do you want to learn that they don't know?
This is not to say you abandon learning things that the first chair knows. It's that you prioritize what you both don't know. Studying new material that adds to the team's collective knowledge is a faster improvement than duplicating the knowledge, but that knowledge is only duplicative as long as the first chair is playing.
Separate the guess from the knowledge
If you suspect it was a lucky guess, ask!
Are there any tasks which the team needs that the first chair doesn't do?
If there's something the first chair simply can't do or doesn't concern themselves with, that is a potential duty that is needed.
How did the first chair get ahead of you?
It's always reasonable to ask someone: How did you know that? Often the answer to how someone knows something is common to a bunch of pieces of knowledge.
What is the first chair doing to stay ahead of you?
This is also a reasonable question to ask of the first chair: What are you studying now? Whatever the first chair or some other teammate is studying now is something that might not be a hole by the time the next tournament occurs.
Is there a category you both don't know, that is broad enough to split?
This is how to tackle a large category that is a hole for the entire team. A common division of labor for teams without a science specialist was physical science vs life science. The first chair would cover one side, the second chair the other. Once each had a little familiarity, they'd move on. This also separates it from specialization. You don't want expertise, you just want to make sure your team isn't taking zeros.
How can you get ahead of the first chair?
This is the one question that can lead to conflict within the team, you need to have bought into "Better you than them," and the first chair has to have bought into the same argument. But if you both believe in that, iron sharpens iron, and you both benefit from the practice
The psychological enemies of the second chair.
You can in this position become envious of the first chair.
You can become impatient for the first chair to pass, or believe they are taking opportunities from you. Typically the first chair comes in to the position from seniority or merit, but there is always the possiblility that you were somehow passed over.
You can become worried that you'll never get your chance to be in the spotlight.
You can become enraged because your teammates are answering questions about something you love.
All of these are normal human responses, but they should all be checked.
The mantra "Better you than them," protects you against developing a conflict within your team, as much as a mantra of "No shame only points" protects against potential conflict with other teams.
Now the final bit:
Everybody can follow the rules of second chair, and that includes the first chair. The steps of being the best second chair possible: Observing your teammates, finding where the team knowledge can be improved, and going out and improving through study is a way to attack the problem of team improvement.
If the toughest opponent you face is in your practice every week, your team will win a lot more games than they will lose.
My wife lost her best friend over the weekend. Now I know she sometimes has designated me with that title, but she's been friends with Judie for at least twice as long as she's even known me, and there's things that people who have worked together for decades will bond over that trump marriages. She succumbed to cancer after getting diagnosed a month ago, and while we had hope, we knew it wasn't a hopeful situation. In that month we went from planning a final trip, to Dana planning to care for her at home, to finally getting her family rushing back to town.
I had prepared for that possibility, that was why I had a piece ready to go for polishing last Thursday. What I didn't have preparation for was happened on Saturday. My dad, who went into a rehabilitation center for a compression fracture he sustained in a fall, had a stroke. And so on Saturday, I was in the emergency room expecting to see him for the last time. I spent Saturday night telling relatives and those he had helped get started that he would be going to hospice on Monday. But Sunday afternoon came around and he was talking. No memory of the last five days, but talking normally. And then Monday rolled around and hospice didn't make any sense, so now he gets out of bed just to show he can, even with the pain of compression fracture as he stands up. Tuesday he's walking, and tomorrow because they don't know what else to do with him, they're probably sending him back to rehabilitation.
Nothing about the last week has made sense, and I'm just kind of numbed by all this. I'll revisit the text above at some point, but I just want to put this week away from me.