This week's way we don't make 2044 is being composed in the breakfast area of the Quality Inn in Sandusky, Ohio, as Catie goes through with the third practice session for the nationals all-star opening number. She's at the waterpark, where the competition is, my wife is napping, and I'm waiting out the rainstorm here.
What if we don't have enough flow through the ranks?
By this I mean, what happens i we simply don't have enough people continuing on from getting started in quiz bowl, and taking on additional duties within teams, and transferring to new teams and developing within those new organizations. There’s always a level of pressure which occurs in quiz bowl as players simply stop playing, due to graduation or other activities taking their time, or the circuit becoming hostile to them. And if that happens to affect more players than normal, you will see a lack of experienced people to keep the fundamental tasks of the circuit rolling. The experienced people are typically the editors, tournament directors, readers of championship tournaments, when those people leave before accruing enough experience, less experienced players are pushed into the roles, often to a deficit of quality in events; dissatisfaction with those events then also increases the pressure on players to leave.
It would be a bit worse than not having a continuing circuit, it would be a circuit that either knows it was better before, or one that is unable to think of a way to be better, because it doesn’t remember the mistakes of the past.
This is a problem that I always worry about. But where others worry about the situation at the end of the process: national championships, I worry about the situation at the beginning of the process. Those first tournaments that introduce people to quiz bowl are often in short supply and often subject to rookie management. That short supply tightens the funnel on quiz bowl’s growth, and limits the opportunities for those with the least experience to compete against others with the least experience.
I accidentally saved this question for dance nationals week, because part of the question is analogous to a dance team. In watching the nationals, and watching the parade of local tournaments as Catie has participated in them, I see a lot of problems quiz bowl faces, that could be solved by the judicious application of some of the design patterns of dance competitions into practice and competition.
At a competition like this, you have a production line that involves everyone on your dance team, and you also have solo performances, group performances, and the competitions that aren't your entire company are split between senior and junior age groups, and experience based groupings within those. So someone could start with dance at 4 or 5 at the studio, maybe get enough experience to join the team at 7 or 8, work some groups , get confidence in their ability to have their own solo, or get added to a portion of the production. At 11 or 12, they might begin working with the seniors, and by 14, they'd be part of the senior routines. By the time they're a high school senior, they'd be a captain of the team, helping the team organize and train the younger members in the studio and get them ready for their numbers.
A dance studio starts earlier, and takes a longer time to develop its talent than quiz bowl, and it assigns a larger and larger amount of responsibility on the team members as they get older. A dance team also forces interaction between the newest competitors and veterans of the team as mentors and as teachers. It forces the senior members of the team to teach the junior members, even if it's just as exemplars of proper technique, but it's also the discipline of knowing how to manage your time prior to performance, and how to be where you need to be, when you need to be there. A lot of this soft skill training is necessary to keep the entire enterprise moving, and for the team to achieve its results.
The two management models of quiz bowl, a coach-centric approach, and a player-centric approach are combined by this. These two models tend to become antagonistic to each other in quiz bowl. Internet forums for quiz bowl tend to be player-centric, and not designed to allow conversations among coaches. Official organizations that exist over multiple years are not conducive to leadership of teams that will graduate the next year.
A dance team actually combines these two models successfully, and part of that is sharing the responsibilities of organization and tasking team management tasks to experienced dancers. Essentially a dance team has a lot of feedback mechanisms in its structure to allow a team to develop all its members to the best of their abilities.
The big hitch in the model for quiz bowl is the transition from high school to college. Everyone has to switch to a new system between high school and college, and unfortunately we've sold the college game as a quantum leap in responsibilities and difficulties, which makes lots of skilled players reluctant to continue in college. This effectively kinks the hose for transition to college, and we lose most of the momentum. (And yes, dance teams have a similar loss as dancers move to high school, but we're talking like a 20% loss versus quiz bowl's 10% retention as we move to college.)
Please note that by skilled players I don’t limit it to those who are high scorers. The skills I’m including this are the people able to recruit their teammates, those who read during practice, know how to scorekeep for the team, or have shared what they know with their teammates. These skills fall in between the coaching tasks of activity administration, coaching the common clues, interacting with the administration for funding, and organizing a space for practice.
The high school to college transition in quiz bowl currently filters through one type of player, and filters out lots of other players who have skills which would be useful in college. The problem is that those filtered out often have the best skills for keeping a team thriving. And the people who are filtered in are less likely to be skilled in building the administration of a team and keeping it viable.
In the later sections of the book that is to come, I’ve been showing how a coach can delegate some of their tasks of team administration to team members, both to relieve their workload, but also to give delegatees the skills useful to running a team themselves.
We have to achieve four things in the pipeline in the next twenty years to unkink the hose:
1) Increase the retention rate of players from high school to college.
2) Increase the percentage of school students who want to try quiz bowl, and make events that will retain them from the beginning. Note that this means we also are trying to increase numbers throughout a student's academic career, we tend to only think of recruiting the freshmen in September, when there's never a bad time or a bad grade level that can't be recruited.
3) Shift the emphasis from what you gain when you win, to what you gain when you practice. What you learn on the way to the win is the same as what you learn on the way to a loss. The outcome doesn't take away your new knowledge.
4) Deemphasize the rewards of winning, or increase the total number of winners.
I think 1) is possible with emphasis on connecting the circuits together, and simple diligence on programs like the Freshman Contact List. 2) is achievable through conscious pursuit of more events with simpler questions, which would also achieve 4) in a non-patronizing way. But 3) is tricky, because it involves stepping back from the buzzer and seeing what is actually happening in practice to get to competition.
The soft skills I know of in quiz bowl:
Writing Questions
Research/Journalism/Non-Fiction Writing
Moderating
Public Speaking
Playing
Listening
Evaluating Risk
Observation
Metacognition (Knowing what you know)
Recruiting
Practicing
Division of Labor and Teamwork (I may not be a fan of specialization in quiz bowl, but that’s because people see it as an end condition. I’m fine if you approach it with the understanding that it’s a temporary focusing of effort, rather than a permanent responsibility and shirking of other responsibilities to the team.)
Teaching (The player sharing what they know with their teammates is a direct form of teaching that goes unnoticed in practice.)
Organization
Managing the team calendar (making sure people know about events and are able to go before committing to the event.)
Managing team deadlines (packet submission, registration)
Managing team finances (getting funding from the school, travel)
Recruiting new team members from the student body.
Recruiting additional coaches from faculty, staff, and parents.
If you can incorporate these skills into your team’s daily operations, you will have them fulfilling duties in the program that benefit the teams, and benefit themselves. And if they are aware of what they are getting out of the team, they are more likely to continue with the team, and continue after they move on to another school.