We conclude our extraction of wisdom from The Smart Take From the Strong this week. This is kind of a hodgepodge of ideas taken from the work and adapted from basketball to quiz bowl. There is one remaining thread that I had to consider from the book, but it’s not something I can complete without further consideration and incorporating the ideas of another couple of pieces that I started reading today. I actually don’t know if it’s worth incorporating here at the moment, more research is required.
In other news since we typed the rest of this up: we did tape today, there were some surprises involving who we played, and what we played, but I’ll leave that for the next couple weeks. Airdate is going to be April 27, when I will be at the SSNCT, so I will do the same setup I did before, and I will queue it up for noon eastern time, hopefully right as it is uploaded on the station’s website. And now on to Part III.
Page 108:"Sports do not build character, they reveal character. They can help you realize who you are, what your potential is, and maybe what is it we have to change about your habits to realize your full potential."
This is fairly standard motivation speak, but the point about potential and habits is something that needs to be said.
Page 122: Playing without the ball (and the coach):
The equivalent of playing without the ball in quiz bowl is listening; whether it's while your team can answer the question or you can't. I hope I've drilled into the team that this matters. On television, listening to your opponent's questions is valuable because your questions are supposed to be in similar categories. On television, listening to the category gives you the target to think of answers before your turn to answer comes up. In circuit games, listening to your opponents' bonus is a way to practice the question in-game, to pick up on answers that could be eliminated as repeats, and to learn new connections that the team thinks up.
The remaining bit of this playing without the coach present is kind of orthogonal to quiz bowl. In most cases, in your role as quiz bowl coach, you are not communicating with your team during play. Or rather you better not be. But you can expect your team to function in the same way as if you were in the room as when you are absent. They need to function responsibly and in such a way that they can analyze their own performance.
130:"Pay attention"
Just a universal good that should be repeated.
116: "Do not come to Princeton to be famous"
While the top line statement here to be adapted is "Don't come to quiz bowl for adulation." The bottom line of the section is more valuable for coaching : "In the end you try to get the kids to understand that they shouldn't worry about who makes the shot, only whether or not the shot is made."
119:"Speed follows luck and covers a multitude of sins."
Activity matters in quiz bowl. Acting with speed allows more possible answers to be sifted through, makes you predisposed to buzz in, and makes you likely to find the correct answer. You can work through the pause of recognition, be more willing to give answers, and be more attentive to the moderator. Speed makes you more likely to guess versus playing sedentary, and so you're more likely to get lucky on guesses. This is not to say activity and speed should be used recklessly, but you want to be primed to act, and willing to follow through on actions.
135: "You have to have some idea of where the ball is going and how to prevent your man from getting it."
A reminder from last week that I consider tossups to be defense. This is how I see every tossup I'm asked. I have to figure out where the tossup answer will be and through evaluation of the path of clues as they are read, I figure some idea of where the answer will be, and then I prevent my opponent from getting it by being there before them.
140: "What the fans want shows up in every sport, because sooner or later what the fans want gets translated into what the players want. The players want to be successful."
After reading this I kept coming back to this thought. Televised quiz bowl exists to serve an audience. It may be a conceit that there are fans of it, but there is a belief that you have to produce a quality offering that is judged as quality by someone other than the people playing it. The circuit exists entirely without the idea that there is an audience to satisfy, and that has led to the direct translation of what the players wanting being the engine of change, and rapid change to provide that. My worry is that without an audience, there doesn't seem to be a source of new players to continue the game. The players want to be successful, but if their measure of their success is only their own result, and not the results of others, who will care when they move on?
186:"At each step ask yourself, are you trying to teach an instinct, or am I teaching a skill?"
I've been struggling with this piece of coaching for two years though I didn't realize it. I recognize some parts of what made me a good player are sensation based. There was the way I could block out the sound of other people in the room and just focus on the moderator. There was the way the feeling in my stomach seemed to drop as the important clue went past. And the sound of whooshing inside my head when I realized that the other team was realizing the answer was coming. And I used all of those little bits to guide me to the right answer.
What I've been trying to do in practice is try to set up the situations that led to those sensations in me. I prime sets with the some of the same clues, I push the intonation on clue words that will come up again. But while these are good practices in practice, I'm not teaching them to follow those feelings when it feels like they've heard this before. Some amount of knowledge of your own body and mind is needed, and you don't need to teach the instinct, you need to teach to recognize that the instinct is there. That is the piece I've been missing in teaching them.
Page 35: IQ EQ RQ
In page 35, he lays out the three scales he judges players on, which he lays out as IQ, EQ, and RQ.
IQ is as we know it, intelligence quotient. and it's misapplied here as the knowledge of knowing what to do in each situation. I don't mind that it's misapplied here because it's misapplied to quiz bowl all the time. Quizbowl smarts are not smarts, Smarts in quiz bowl are taking your knowledge and sifting through it faster.
EQ is not as we probably think of it as emotional intelligence, but in this case it means Energy Quotient. In Carril's formulation, Energy Quotient is the legs of the individual, their ability to press themselves toward their goals.
RQ is Responsibility Quotient, the tenacity to drive towards goals that aren't just your own but good for your teammates.
In our case, IQ is the knowledge, EQ is the tenacity to acquire more knowledge and good habits because it makes us better, and RQ is the acquisition of knowledge, habits and because you know that this will make the team better.
If you find high RQ players, you have your captain, your team leader, because they will complete the tasks you need to have done, and set the example for your team.
I'll follow that with something found on page 137:
"You try not to throw the ball to a player who doesn't see his teammates."
This is RQ in a nutshell. If you don't have a high responsibility player that can't sense what their teammates bring to the table, you don't have someone who can work as a captain.
Page 54: In the section on Layups: "every player should have in their repertoire something that he can use to score. It may be a layup, but whatever it is, it must be something will contribute to successful offense."
I take this advice along two paths with respect to quiz bowl. The first path is that this comes close to my one advice, Everybody knows something. That is to say no one has ever sat down at a match and what they know is completely valuless for every question that could be asked.
The second path is that even knowing a little about a subject is valuable. Another bit in the section on layups is: "There will always be situations where that particular approach is valuable. So you should always be refreshing that skill." Princeton did a lot more layup drills in practice than most teams, because they were always valuable and useful in their system.
In quiz bowl, last clues are layups, capitals are layups. They're almost devalued by competitive teams as something you won't need once you get to a certain level of competence in a subject. Only thing is, I've seen enough national champions whiff the last clue that I know they knew once, and now it's just a tiny bit rusty. The little bit of rust is all that is needed to whiff. So refresh the skill, write practice questions to refresh the skill, write flashcards to refresh the skill.
(forgot the page)"Teach the specific skill." A good point for basketball, but less so for quiz bowl. The problem is for quiz bowl there's something like 10,000 specific skills needed at the start. For quiz bowl teach the specific skill that has lots of links between the skills and knowledge they will need.
Finally, there are two conclusions that I came to after reading, as such I can't attribute a particular page, other that it was between pages 20 and 60.
Dominance in quiz bowl comes from covering the subjects you don't like, and finding in it the parts of it you do like or you can understand.-- if there's something you don't like to do, or a subject you don't like to study, you're probably not alone in that opinion. When that opinion is commonplace, there's a lot of knowledge that people have built up a resistance to knowing. When those subjects are ignored by most people, even the base information is valuable to know because it's less likely anyone's going to know the early clues in the subject, and you can tee up the later clues, often without worrying that someone's going to jump ahead of you.
Antipathy towards subjects is inheritable. Try not to pass it on. --As a person, you will have some subjects which don't engage you, which you find no common ground with, and which you don't really care about enough to become interested in the details. Every one of those subjects is a weakness in your game if you were the player. Because you do not invest your interest and attention in those subjects, you won't teach them to the same detail and attention and interest that you give to the rest of the subjects. Whatever you are weak in, your team will be weak in, unless an intervening force is applied.
OTW
# Poem OTW: The Tyger
https://poets.org/poem/tyger
# Poet OTW: William Blake
https://poets.org/poet/william-blake
# YouTube Terminology Video OTW
# Art Movement OTW: Neoclassicism
https://artsandculture.google.com/entity/neoclassicism/m0190t4
# Painting OTW: Oath of the Horatii
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-oath-of-the-horatii-jacques-louis-david/pQHdi199vQiPkw
# Mythological Figure OTW: Arachne
https://pantheon.org/articles/a/arachne.html
# Bridge OTW: Charles Bridge, Prague
https://www.prague.eu/en/object/places/93/charles-bridge-karluv-most
# Mineral OTW: Talc
https://mineralseducationcoalition.org/minerals-database/talc/
# National Park OTW: Mammoth Cave
https://www.nps.gov/maca/
# Presidential Election OTW: 1948
https://www.270towin.com/1948_Election/
# Battle OTW: Battle of the Boyne
https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-boyne
# Star OTW: Sirius
https://earthsky.org/brightest-stars/sirius-the-brightest-star/
# Constellation Mythology OTW: Hercules
http://comfychair.org/~cmbell/myth/hercules.html
# Chemistry History OTW: Helium https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/heliumnaturalgas.html
# History Podcast OTW: The June Rebellion
http://traffic.libsyn.com/revolutionspodcast/6.08e-_The_June_Rebellion_Master.mp3
# In Our Time OTW: The Inca
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005t68
# You Gotta Know OTW: Baroque Painters
https://www.naqt.com/you-gotta-know/baroque-painters.html
# Team History OTW: New York Mets
https://www.mlb.com/mets/history/timeline-1950s
# Opera Synopsis OTW: Cosi fan tutte
https://www.metopera.org/discover/synopses/cosi-fan-tutte/
# Art Controversy OTW: Salman Rushdie
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints/literature/rushdie.html