When I started this excursion into the future of quiz bowl, my fourth problem was originally this: What happens if there's no transition state between people who play quiz bowl and people who write quiz bowl questions. This situation would emerge if there is a small number of teams which use writing as part of their training, ot the point that they are also the schools form a circuit unto themselves. Essentially you’d have a circuit where everyone on the circuit is a fluent writer of questions, every team would host some event, and there’d be no team which was simply attending without hosting at some point in the year.
The reason I dropped this from the list was simple, that it's not how the trendline is happening, and it would be pushing against the basic current even further than the current state of affairs. In order for a separate, self-sufficient set of programs each writing enough questions to satisfy the demands of their colleagues on separate self-sufficient circuit, you have to have sufficient writers working the entire year. As I've pointed out before, demand for questions is practically infinite. And that level of demand makes any circuit that achieves that in a state of unstable equilibrium. The demand means you can't build a practical surplus, and if you have writers writing to fulfill the expectations of that sort of circuit, you'll be producing questions that won't work outside of that highly competitive environment. The level of constant maintenance to maintain the state of such a competition would be more than the customers could manage.
In its place, I'm going with a more personal problem that may trouble the circuit: What if I've hit the edge of the map?
In the quest for outreach, I have to confess, I often find the quiz bowl circuit amazed that they've discovered some new group or event to conduct outreach toward, when it's a group I talked to five years earlier. I should be fine with that. I understand that having the time to actually look for new people is a luxury of having an established and functioning system, so if I'm able to explore more of the internet looking for competitions and teams new to me, that's something I'm obligated to do, and bring that information home. But occasionally, I'm finding myself repeating Indiana Jones' maxim "they're digging in the wrong place." I shouldn't have that intonation about it. They're not in competition with my outreach, but I sometimes feel like I'm not being believed when I tell someone what's happening somewhere and who they could talk to.
In the past year, I've seen four companies fold, and I've had to research where they had their competitions and customers. I've found where there are leagues of similar competitions which explains why there isn't necessarily demand for quiz bowl in those areas. And I've seen competitions in places where I've never expected to find them. But I haven't run out of possibilities, and I haven't run out of undiscovered country.
But what I've seen happen to the undiscovered country is it's starting to exist below the level of the internet's ability to notice it. Changes to search are aggregating the results to the largest competitions and making it difficult for evidence of smaller competitions to be found. It's starting to be in places I know we can't reach as easily, and in places where there's a language barrier.
While it was cool to see a Liberian national team compete on zoom, it wasn't a unique experience. I learned about competitions in Nigeria, Ghana, and Uzbekistan in the past month. I learned about a radio station's 60th season of quiz bowl competitions, and I learned about attempts to export a Lithuanian competition to the rest of the world. But all of these were almost accidental discoveries that only happened because I was looking every day for other information. If I was to finally have say a yearlong drought of new information about competitors and competition, I’d have reached the end of my ability to explore the world. And when I hit that, the rest of the circuit is going to hit that.
We know what the low-hanging fruit is, we've picked it all in years past, and we know the bushes and trees where we can harvest it in future. Those are our existing members of the circuit. We also know what the medium-hanging fruit is, we've walked through the world and found those trees, and that's what we've got to search through this summer. That medium hanging fruit also includes television teams. But what's left in this analogy are the trees so tall, so remote, we can't even see from here if there's any fruit to pick. And while we could carry a ladder out there and look, we've got a lot of fruit to pick here. And some people get discouraged, and some people get disheartened, and some people get complacent, and just stop where they are.
At some point, possibly very soon, the low and medium hanging fruit won't be enough, and we'll have tapped them out. And we're going to have to change our primary growth model of the circuit from gaining allies who are close enough or familiar enough to the concept of quiz bowl to be friendly, to convincing people of the value of quiz bowl without them having any experience with it. In that scenario quiz bowl will be fighting for resources of student time and funding, and coach time and attention, with more than just a school's other academic competitions, but with all activities. That means we have to have a product that is still valuable to a student and a school with less resources spent on it.
One of the points I've made with activity budgets in the past is, that unless you make the case for quiz bowl integration into the life of your school, it's a luxury good. It's not an essential addition of value to the school if it's just giving an experience to your most gifted students. Any number of activities could provide that experience, if it's just a travel activity for your students, and not an activity based in practice and learning additional subjects and skills through practice. A school would only need one of those activities to serve that group of students, and so quiz bowl is suddenly in competition with a number of other activities.
If the case is never made that quiz bowl teaches a unique set of skills to the team, just any activity could do this, quiz bowl is always at risk, because it could be substituted with another luxury, or be first against the wall when the budget cuts come.
When it comes to that point, we need to be ready to present the case why quiz bowl, versus some other more expensive, less instructive activity, that is simply more familiar to the powers that be. And we will need to have our arguments polished, sharpened, and ready to be fluently delivered. If we can do that, we will be able to gather the tall fruit we need to grow quiz bowl.