(The original title of this was “295 letters to go.” which trimmed down as I was writing more letters, but it still indicates that I have a ways to go, and indicates why this week’s entry is so short. It’s probably somewhere around 300 if I do everything below, minus the five specific letters I wrote in the past couple days, hence the number. Since I chose the preliminary title, I spent time today on two more letters, but that new number is, like the previous one, just a guess.)
We’ve pulled into the homestretch of summer around here, my wife referred to last weekend as practically fall, and I gave her a nasty look. But she may be closer to correct than I feel comfortable. Catie going to the new school in two weeks. I had planned August as the major launch of the school year’s plan for the school year, because I’m used to the beginning of school being the weekend before Labor Day. And this week I realized I have a huge number of things I want to try to complete before August ends.
Let us enumerate the things that need to go out in August.
First, we of course need to complete the list of college freshmen. I’ve gathered most of my share of the list from newspapers, but I like to go back through the first six months of the year and gather the student of the month articles and the articles recommending students for service academies. The problem I have with articles from the beginning of the year is of course that until April, college choices are mostly speculation on the part of the senior. But I’d feel a fool for not including that information if I had it. Normally this part of the list is done by the 7th, but there are two new factors which slowed me down this year.
The change to google search, adding AI capabilities to search, has affected results taken from the webpage, but not those captured by daily digests. I use a daily news alert to scan terms relevant to quiz bowl, and those results used to match exactly what a search of Google’s news page would produce on a given day. When they rearranged search, I discovered that the results don’t quite match up. The problem with this is I don’t know which is going to be a better return on investment over time, and I’m hesitant to choose one method over the other until I know which is better.
The second thing that I’ve found to be true this year is that my normal digest has become utterly useless at spotting graduation mentions of quiz bowl. Normally local papers are reliable in mentioning this, but June papers were not pinging the digests with dozens of graduations, as they had in previous years. The interesting thing was when I combined the terms in the digest directives with “graduation 2024,” I found the notices I expected from the papers I expected. But that then means I have to check search for all terms in addition to the digest. And this takes more time.
Because of those things, I’m about five days behind my normal pace. I’d usually have sent my information over to merge with the information in the NAQT database by now. And so I guess I’m going to need to put extra time into this in the next couple of days.
The second thing that’s going to take some time this month is reaching out to radio stations. When last I checked there were over 10 radio stations around the country which aired quiz bowl. Most of these are not merely broadcasting competitions, but organizing competitions among local schools. You’re forgiven if you didn’t think this animal existed. Unlike most other competitions where the local newspaper lets you know about them occasionally, a radio station competition usually only advertises its existence on the station itself, and almost never on the station’s own newsfeed. In most cases, the only mention of a station’s programming visible on the web appears when the show has an anniversary ending in zero. Without that, you either need to know about a show from an alumni of the program, or by searching deep into the listings of quiz bowl on search.
The reason I want to hit these early this year should be obvious. A radio station that nobody knows exists is at precisely the greatest risk of becoming stranded without a provider of questions in this year’s marketplace. With four providers closed in 15 months, there’s a really good chance someone at one of those stations finally needs questions and is finding no signal on the other end of the line.
The third task for this month is to piggy back on the freshman list and spread alerts for the Collegiate Novice tournaments. While I’m somewhat averse to having all your Collegiate Novice tournaments in the first six weeks of school at most colleges**, I recognize that you need to advertise them to as many people as possible. So where we have good connections for new freshmen, and where we have people waiting for freshmen to show up and become teammates, we have to also trumpet the opportunity.
**My aversion to this is simple, most freshmen arrive on campus with little idea of how to organize an activity on a college campus, recruit members for their organization, and then secure funding for a new organization. And most bureaucracy guarantees that an organization for quiz bowl on campus won’t be funded well enough to travel in the first semester of its existence. Tournaments in those first six weeks could really only be attended by circuit-aware individuals, or by the newest members of already-extant teams. It would be better for the founding of teams if there were collegiate novice tournaments out of that window, say the early weeks of the spring semester, or even after qualification for nationals.
The fourth big must do email I need to do in August is preparation for The Super Saturday emails. In New England, the television programs have historically used a qualification exam for their shows, where only the teams with the top scores make it to the studio. When these started out, they were termed Super Saturday, and the event attracted hundreds of teams to the station to take the exam. COVID and technology have changed the system so that most Super Saturdays are no longer gatherings, but teams taking an online quiz.
When I first found out about Super Saturdays, I realized why a lot of things were true. I figured out why there were so few teams in New England, why so many college tournaments in New England had so few local teams, and why the few established teams so often needed to travel. For while it’s a great idea to drum up interest in televised competition, and a great way to involve lots of schools in the region, the early Super Saturday date means that most schools in New England are completely disincentivized to have a year-round team, until they stumble into qualification. And once that happens, a team is badly prepared to go on television against a regular attendee of the television program, and attendees of circuit events. It’s a little unfair, and it’s something that we can use the bully pulpit of marketing to let all the schools of New England that tournaments exist, and hopefully get them to consider more than a fifty-question exam as their entire yearly competition.
So these are my starting points for this month’s activity. I have twenty pages of things to do, but much of those plans require August work to locate the email targets. Some of these are just little handholds to climb the mountains, some like the ones above are big swings that may not hit everyone, but I have to do to keep the world moving.
So if you’ll excuse me, I have to get working on this.