We’ll start tonight with two moments from the tournament this weekend at Pitt. During the awards I snuck over to talk to the coach who is hosting the event next month for Beaver County schools. I offered my help as a reader, having a free weekend, and he politely but firmly refused. He then explained the situation. He is plotting this out as a possibly supplement and replacement for Academic Games in the county. As Beaver county has no native events, and only the host school which comes down to Pitt is hosting, they are going to have to rely on the current Academic Games coaches to learn how to run a tournament, read rounds, and scorekeep, and generally organize themselves into teams for an alternate competition from their experiences. I understood the point. I’ve on occasion argued that quizbowl does not work as a top-down enterprise, a lot of things have to start at the bottom and build up. If you have someone there who knows every bit of the procedure, or if you have someone who knows exactly what to do in every situation, the other people will defer to the experienced. If you’re starting a program with lots of people and very little experience, you want them to learn the procedure, and then have to trust their own understanding of the procedure. They’ll have to learn as a group, and that means they will gain experience as a group, and be able to run this for themselves. And maybe, just maybe, there will be a few Beaver County teams at the next tournament I attend.
The other moment from the weekend was a momentary post on the tournament discord, when I caught the frustration of one of the readers who drew what they thought was the worst match they had ever seen. While I was momentarily piqued by the slap at my team, and prepared to snark with second hand tales of the John Marshall-John Marshall match (decided 10-0 on a question on John Marshall,) I relented. If that was the worst match you’ve ever seen, a 50-25 pitch, you’ve lived a blessed life as a reader. And it was what one should expect from the two least experienced teams in the field, with three empty chairs between them. They are there to learn, to make mistakes, and to get experience, entertaining the moderator is not the point. I know my team knew that, I hope the other team did as well.
Part of the goal of the book is to move teams from once a year television teams to part of the circuit. But in doing that, they will always be the team with the least experience, who have to know all those first time around the circuit strategies, and all the things that come up over and over again, which shock the blasé expectations of some people who forget they had to learn this some time too. Unless I’m very lucky and manage to move entire fields of shows to circuit competition, there’s going to be some teams which are giving the circuit a try giving some moderator the worst game they’ve ever seen. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t smirking at the prospect.
When I get done here tonight, I’m going to finish looking at the last trench of TV coaches from 2019-20 to see if they’re even at their listed schools, and I’ll forward them to the tournament hosts in the area. It should give them a hundred new schools that they can invite to their next tournament. Even if they don’t come, it’s worth it to tell the team at that school that if they like quiz bowl they play now, there’s more they can do, either in tournaments, or helping at tournaments in college.
As long as the circuit is not walling itself off from the possibility of teams coming from outside this book has a purpose. What this weekend made me realize is, at least locally, that might rely on keeping my foot in the door to keep it open.
This week had the fifth episode air of the new television format, and this had the first instance of what I could term a structural problem with the format. To recap , the third round of the competition is a 60-second lightning round with the same overall subject given to all teams. The previous rounds have been: History, Geography, Music, and Medicine. This round was Vocabulary, and because of it being the standard vocabulary questions in the style of those that were used previously, they really did not fit the format.
The irony of this is that Vocabulary in the prior format had been well adapted to the format by using pictures of three possible answers. By displaying the choices that removed the need to adjudicate alternate answers, which becomes necessary for synonym or antonym questions. But more critical than that in this situation was that the question displayed the possible answers in the old format. This time it didn’t.
In the new format, the question was multiple choice, but there were four options. There were two different types of questions, asking for synonyms and antonyms. And the question was read out without benefit of displaying the words to the teams. So the team had to take in all of this serial information, and wrestle with the possibilities and retain all the information, and do this multiple times quickly in a 60-second period. Phrased that way, you can immediately see the problem in that. Additional compounding factors included the fact that synonym questions and antonym questions included both synonyms and antonyms of the words among the answers, and that this put a lot of stress on the reader to nail their performance, and keep the questions going, since they needed to average one question with six important must-distinguish words every six seconds.
This had the effect of flattening the scores of the round. Where I’d seen a couple very good performances hit 7 of 10 questions offered this both cut the number of questions read, and cut the number of questions teams got right. The top score on this round was three, and they only managed it hearing five questions, and actually parsing through their answers. This made this match significantly different in character as it was really done after round two of five. There weren’t really enough points available to teams to correct for being behind after round two.
I mention because it covers a part of my growth as an editor. In one of our earliest television production sets, there was a lightning round question which demanded the identification of physical constants from value. I actually cut it from the set after seeing a similar question get butchered during a tournament, noting that it took the reader ten seconds to read out the numbers for each part, how did we expect this question to be finished on air? The writer, who had never seen matches played on television, accepted the criticism, and submitted a substitute.
I’m sure there are those who view this estimate as overly charitable, but thus far the mistakes I have seen in adjudication and format decisions have all been things fixed only by hard-won knowledge. The one blown question on languages wasn’t prepared for a less likely alternative, that was not completely synonymous with the official language, but until a team forces you to face that situation by giving the less likely answer, you can’t prepare for that specific situation. Until you get get feedback from a show, you can’t even prepare for that general situation. This episode featured a mistake in assuming an established format would work, not considering the additional constraints the round’s format would place on the questions. To the degree that we’re still in the “mystery flavor” portion of this production, this is understandable, if unsatisfying.
The common thread in these two stories tonight is the point that is quiz bowl is a human product, played by humans for the point of education, and education comes only from mistakes and the correction of them. Beaver County’s going to have to make their own mistakes before they can make the system run smoothly. Seton LaSalle’s going to have to make more mistakes before they can put all the pieces together and win matches. And the writer of the program is going to have to make more mistakes before their engine runs properly.
After the first SCT, there was a minor controversy about a question I had written which didn’t land right. As I remember it wasn’t a factual error, but a way that the question was constructed that led to a second way to arrive at the answer, and it wasn’t quite as effective as I wanted it to be. At the time I got a rather lengthy and what seemed like a loud email, which got my dander up, and resulted in an equally loud reply that ended with “tournament questions are the only place to try innovations, and sometimes innovation isn’t correct the first time. But we need to be innovative, because the stagnation that comes without it is far worse.” The response was surprising. “Keep doing what you’re doing, the mistakes have to be made to get better.”
I sometimes fear that the current circuit has forgotten this.
I mentioned my cat Huey’s passing on facebook. I’ve been trying to figure a way to mention him here, but his only real connection to quiz bowl came during his arrival. Dana had been moving things from the storage unit into our still being built house when she found the three kittens abandoned in a box by the dumpster, and texted me the message: “Congratulations, you’re a father of three!”
If you’ve ever wondered why I had such a weird look on my face for about fifteen minutes of the NAQT 2012 ICT, now you know exactly how long it takes for a text versus a picture to be sent from Pittsburgh to Chicago.