Week 233: The Private History of a Half-Baked Idea
Probably a short one today, because I'm shipping letters all around the country this week. Some of them have even paid off already, but I've got a long list to go through before I'm done. I'm sending a few of them tonight, but after that I'm queueing up the rest to launch after Labor Day. I'm going to try and find a little time to relax over the weekend, but I'm not going to count on it happening.
My day job has seen fit to add Recuperation Days to the US employee calendar this year, and as such I'm looking at a five-day Labor Day weekend. I really could have used that last year when I used every hour of my three-day weekend to find and email every contact associated with National Academic League. That sucked but it gave me a general plan for search and rescue that I've had to use too many times since then.
I had planned the following piece as a bottle episode and it's kind of appropriate to drop this now for circumstances which I'll explain later. After I lay it out I'll explain why I'm not keeping it.
This is a plan for a podcast series, it was originally planned as a television series, but budgetarily it is better as a podcast. It's an attempt to solve the problem of putting reality show components into the quiz bowl format. Before you freak out, this is an attempt to solve one of the problems with the local televised quiz bowl format. Namely that it has to be local. To break free of the appeal that local teams on a local program have, and have a worldwide audience, you have to invest in giving the audience characters to root for. And that requires a serialization of the characters.
The name of the podcast would be "Quiz Bowl Pen Pals." It would require a coach starting a new program at a school (the home team), primarily recruiting from their lowest grade. The kids have no prior experience in quiz bowl, just what they came into the classroom with. Each episode would have four parts, an introduction voiceover of a status update where we are in the school year, then a practice begins. The coach would give their lesson to their two teams worth of kids, and their guests for the episode (their Pen Pals, a conceit I admit is dated, since they’re coming on a zoom call,) The coach of the home team then talks to the coach of the guest team about quiz bowl in their part of the world and introduces their players. In the third part, the home team coach's two teams would play a match amongst themselves, and then in the final section of the show, the winning team there would play their guests in another match with online buzzers over zoom.
The serialization effect of this program occurs as the team begins in the first episode from nothing, and obviously gets slammed by a competitive team. But the show is a practice, it's not a competition, there's no stakes, no reason to cheat. It's designed to highlight two broadly positive features of quiz bowl that don't show up on screen. This can show the development of a team, getting better with each practice, their two teams sharpening each other, but still making mistakes. It shows them being human, failing and succeeding and interacting with the community in a way that is not top-flight competition. Most importantly, it shows them learning. If you listen to the episodes in sequence you'll be able to see how a team that used to be challenged in an early episode is taught to overcome it, and then rise above it as they study that subject. The listener can do as they do with a local televised program, play along at home, but they also can see that they are getting better alongside the team. It also gives the listener the coach's eye view of the teams development.
This is the sort of program that slots naturally into the smart talk podcast queue, the educational and the trivia competition podcast queue. It would bring in different types of listeners into quiz bowl, and build the possibility of them thinking they could do something similar with their local school. It would be something that every coach could recommend to their students, and students could recommend to their coaches. By the production choosing interesting opponents, they could reinforce the idea that every school could have a team, and this is how teams develop, not as some behemoth rolling downhill on its competition, but in fits and starts, warts and all. If this school can do it, our school can do it.
Finally, if it developed a local audience, it's a recruiting tool for any private school, and a point of pride for any public one. It would give the school and team a little bit of celebrity in the community that couldn't be duplicated.
So Why Am I Giving this Up?
There's a saying I don't know if I coined or if I stole, but I use with great frequency: Every man has a foolproof plan which will not work. This is one of mine.
My chance to do this was in fall 2022, and I didn't have the microphones rolling. The essential appeal of this from its first episode is to see the arc of growth in the teams. There's not a way to have the home team have a little experience, the players with experience are going to dominate the proceedings, and that becomes hard to grow your entire team. Right now, Seton is too far from their beginning to start this over again.
My version of this plan would fail now because I'm not on staff at a school. This would have to be organized by someone with regular contact with students at a school. If I did it as an afterschool program, I couldn't be there making sure everyone makes regular practices, recruiting a team at the start of the year, and making the case that this benefits the school to whomever was listening. I’d be caught by surprise by situations as I did the taping, which is almost too much spontaneity. If I tried it this year, I'd need to recruit enough for a second team (which would require the students to do the recruiting) Without that second team, there's a lot less interaction with the home team in each episode, making it a less interesting program.
Right now I don't have the equipment to make this work, in terms of audio. I'm no longer equipped to deliver podcasts as needed, and I couldn't really transport it to a school and have it ready to reliably record every week. Post processing is also a problem. I don't think I'm up to editing a weekly audio show in addition to everything else in my life.
This whole thing hinges on the broadcast permission of parents. You need parents to buy into the vision of the program before taping, because the team is going to look like a team that is going to lose, and lose a lot to start. If the parents are going to think their darling is being embarrassed, they'll pull the plug.
To do this, you need questions. Questions that are new to your team, and the guest team, and either freely given, or created and used with permission of the writer. For this to work, these questions need to be a little easier and a little shorter than what we have; maybe not television questions but maybe television question answer selection with circuit novice length? The podcast frees you from program length, but you'd need to develop a consistent approximate length, and an hour is probably too long for both the listener, and for the students to be on microphone. But with current questions you're looking at about an hour for two matches, plus the lessons you'd need to include. Given enough lead time, I could write some packets, but to do the full arc of a season of episodes? No. And would someone else do it for the amount I could pay for this program? No, simply not a plan.
Do I think this has the core of a good idea? Yes. If it were complete crap, I’d keep it to myself. The idea of a network of shared practices over zoom, to both share study and coaching techniques and promote camaraderie with teams in different locations is so appealing to me, I’m including it in the book. The book is also trying to show the world the side of practice that never airs on television, but is essential to the on-air product; however I truly think an audio presentation of it would be better. But all of this is not something I have a prayer of achieving on my own, so I’m letting it out in the world.