Week 212: Continuing with Pete Carill
And the last bit before the deadline
Continuing our tour through The Smart Take from The Strong by Pete Carill:
Page 75: "There's a difference between the guys who play to win and those who play not to lose"
This is pretty generic advice, I'll admit. But this has a simple analogue for quiz bowl. When you are playing to win, or to extend a lead in quiz bowl your actions and your intentions are aligned. When you are playing only to preserve a lead or are playing not to lose, you will have a hesitation when you consider whether to answer or not. You don't want to have that enter your players' minds. It's fear of the possibility of buzzing in, and it's a regression to the earliest state they may have in competition. They conquered it to get to a point where they were able to take the lead, they can't let that fear get back in control of their actions.
Playing not to lose is reactive and is reacting to the opponent making winning moves.
Page 91-97: The Principles of Defense.
In this section he lays out his five principles of coaching defense:
Remember what your players can do defensively.
There is no single absolute. The results counts no matter how you do it.
The more speed you act with, the more pressure you apply on your opponent.
Whatever you emphasize you get better at to the level of your knowledge.
Force of coach determines quality and intensity.
I have always equated the tossup question with defense. I've stated that the tossup's main value is not that is scores points, it is that answering it correctly denies your opponent the opportunity to score points.
1. Remember what your players can do defensively. This is learning what they already know, and finding out what they don't . You have to find out where there are holes in the team, and use practice and study to reduce those holes. Coaching your team starts with knowing what you will need to coach and what you will need to review with them.
2. There is no single absolute. The results counts no matter how you do it. In so many words: No shame, only points.
3. The more speed you act with, the more pressure you apply on your opponent. Especially true for quiz bowl where a faster buzz is often a more powerful buzz. Speed in quiz bowl is a weapon, as it keeps your team mentally in the game, and it makes your opponent play and respond to your speed, which they may not be comfortable doing. I have told the team frequently, by running practice as fast as possible: if you can run it fast, you can run it slow. But if they can't run it fast, they're going to try to catch up to you, and that's where mistakes are made. Speed is pressuring, and a multiplier effect to any weaknesses the opponent knows they possess.
4. Whatever you emphasize you get better at to the level of your knowledge. There's a lot of ways to interpret the three 'you's in this statement, and I think he intended all of these to be true in some degree. I'll choose three ways, holding the first you to always be "the coach":
- Whatever the coach emphasizes the team gets better at to the level of the coach's knowledge. Simplest interpretation, as you fill them with knowledge, the gap between what you know and what they know reduces.
- Whatever the coach emphasizes the team gets better at to the level of the team's knowledge. Practice improves the team and allows them to become more knowledgeable about what they themselves know. Their metacognition of their own knowledge, and their confidence in that knowledge, improves their play. It is up to the coach to keep them applying that knowledge to their game.
- Whatever the coach emphasizes the coach gets better at to the level of the coach's knowledge. The coach must be improving their own knowledge to keep their coaching relevant. This is hard enough for basketball, but for quiz bowl it's an order of magnitude harder. This doesn't mean you the coach have to become an expert in everything, but it means you have to know how best to direct the team's queries on how to get better. I'm hoping that the book that is to come will at least help coaches know how to find the guidance for their team, so that, at least for questions about how to get better, the coach always has one more answer than the team has questions.
When you as the coach manage to launch the team that they can manage their own development, and help train the younger players with the knowledge they possess, this statement can apply new definitions to the first "you." When that happens, your team will be able to propel itself without needing you, the coach, to do everything. And that's the best possible goal for you, the coach.
5. Force of coach determines quality and intensity. This is the question of what experiences are you giving them, and how are you running practice to give tnem experience. If you have a constant supply of study materials, and a lesson to impart with every practice, and a surplus of questions to ask, they will use the components you give them to develop. Forcefulness in a coach is the product of the tools the coach gives the team, and the skill in teaching them how to use those tools.
Page 180: "If you're going to need to play catchup at some point, you'd better practice it beforehand. Never try to force your team to play in a way that you haven't practiced."
This is an excellent rule that is hard to implement now. There was a time that this was easy to do in quiz bowl, with a clock. A drill that we used to run when I was in college when we had a bye in the schedule was the simple idea that given two minutes of play time, it should be possible to get through enough questions that you could score 100 points. You'd need a lot of luck to do this, but it was possible, we probably pulled it off about 20% of the time we did it. For it to work you needed to have a fast moderator, a willingness to buzz fast, and the ability to work through bonus parts and answer with incomplete information. It's a lot harder to pull this off today, even with powers available. Questions are a lot longer, moderators are not as fast, and bonuses take much longer to develop.
The one time it came in handy was a tournament at Princeton. We somehow found ourselves down 300-10 at the end of the first half. With eight minutes on the clock, we missed the first question of the second half, and simply resolved to play as fast as we could for the rest of the round. We then proceeded to hit nine tossups in a row, and collect enough bonus points to bring it to a 10 point game with a minute to go. At that point our luck ran out, and the other team slow played the bonus to squeeze enough time off the clock. Final score 380-340.
Would we have been able to do that without practicing that sort of situation? Maybe... Would we have been able to conceive of doing that without practicing that sort of situation? probably not. We'd have thought, "all we have to do is exactly what they did to us in the first half", then we'd have botched the first step, and wouldn't have pushed.
Page 129: "The players have to know and watch. You plan to do something and you create options so you have alternatives when the opposing team stops you from doing one thing. We try to create a flow or movement to cover all possibilities. The challenge is to retain the opportunity for creativity. The capability to react and take advantage of new options. The players have to know all the improvisations."
This is actually analogous to the 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, but if you think of the opposing team being the writer and moderator and not the other team over there, this fits perfectly. The writing of a bonus question is in a way an improvisation through a set of facts, and the writer has employed the opportunity for their creativity in choosing their path through those facts. When your players know all the facts associated with that bonus subject, they know all the improvisations that can emerge from that, and can play their part in answering any question that could be asked of them. When they're really good at this, they can start predicting where the questions will go even before the question is asked.
With one week to go, I'm dropping things in to the team on their break. I finally finished my long journey through The World Almanac of the USA, and turned it into 100+ flashcards on quizlet. When I finished the list up, I titled it "Americana History" which as typos go, is a really good one. I was about to describe it as the type of history clues which would end up as the 30 clues on the show's 30-20-10 round. Where the book dug deep enough to have really good clues, it shied away from anything more controversial than the Civil War, and sort of burnished each state into a portrait of progress through history. In other words, nothing that couldn't be shown on television in any market if there was a show there.
The remaining tasks were simpler. I gathered the pictures of the presidents from the Library of Congress public domain images, and put that into flashcards. I cooked a batch of title focused questions using a python script, and turned that into a Kahoot quiz. As I've noticed that the Math round questions have tended to be half-vocabulary and half-computation, I processed a math textbook glossary into flashcards, and made a couple slideshows for the types of computation that have shown up multiple times.
Even though we're playing with the house's money at this point, we shouldn't wager foolishly. All of these moves were things that had a decent chance of showing up because they had shown up before, or were things that seemed tailored for television. Maybe we'll be lucky again.
Next week at this time will be prerecorded, the last section of Pete Carill. I'll be writing up the taping immediately after on Wednesday afternoon, but I won't release it until the airdate.
OTW
New OTW this week at the end, since I dropped a PBS program, I will add articles from one.:
# Poem OTW: This is just to say
https://poets.org/poem/just-say
# Poet OTW: William Carlos Williams
https://poets.org/poet/william-carlos-williams
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Bauhaus
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/bauhaus/
# Painting OTW: Homage to the Square
https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/173
# Mythological Figure OTW: Echo
https://pantheon.org/articles/e/echo.html
# Bridge OTW: Tower Bridge, London
https://www.towerbridge.org.uk/
# Mineral OTW: diamond
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/diamond/
# National Park OTW: Joshua Tree
https://www.nps.gov/jotr/index.htm
# Presidential Election OTW: 2016
https://www.270towin.com/2016_Election/
# Battle OTW: Actium
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-battle-of-actium
# Star OTW: Arcturus and Spica
https://earthsky.org/tonight/follow-the-arc-to-arcturus/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Gemini
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/gemini.html
# Chemistry History OTW: Separation of Rare Earths
https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/earthelements.html
# History Podcast OTW: Affair of the Necklace
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/3.4-Necker_and_the_Necklace.mp3
# In Our Time OTW: Napoleon’s Retreat
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008jd2
# You Gotta Know OTW: Schools of Western Philosophy
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/schools-of-western-philosophy.html
# Team History OTW: Baltimore Orioles
https://www.mlb.com/orioles/history/timeline
# Opera Synopsis OTW: Boris Godunov
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/boris-godunov/
# Art Controversy OTW: The Rite of Spring
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/music/riteofspring.html