I’m writing this short and early Wednesday morning because I have three major after-work tasks: picking up a rental van for moving things around, and then moving said things, and introducing the household to two new kittens, intended as a birthday present for Catie, but arriving ahead of schedule. It was originally supposed to be just one, but the other family got another stray distributed directly to them, so these two are coming together to us.
I had planned to limit my pursuit of leagues and events which needed to be alerted to the seismic shifts in providers, and be done with this on September 1. This became September 15, and then 16, and now a big run of them went out on the 18th, and another six are queued up for the 19th. As I try to sweep the last ones out the door, I’m feeling the diminishing returns kick in.
We're now getting down in the list of leagues where I have to dig quite a bit to progress. I have written a final list of around 30 leagues I want to contact, but I've gone through most of the low hanging and middle hanging fruit to put me on what remains of two sets:
The ones which have only the faintest bit of a web presence.
The ones which should have been most connected.
These faint traces have been hard digging, both to find proof that the league or competition exists, but to demonstrate that it’s active post-COVID, and has some email contact I can tease from the evidence. My normal tools for this would be to look for evidence of email contacts, a team page on the school’s website, evidence in the events calendar of the school, or on the league’s website, and newspaper articles, from the same archive I’ve gone through for senior college information. What’s left has already failed to produce that evidence, but I have something from 2019 that indicates it was there, and I don’t want to give up on it.
Just to give you an idea of how faint the faintest traces have been, some of the things that clued me in to a still running league.
A sponsor that was a realtor who put reference to the event on her website, but the league itself didn't post up about it.
A league whose affiliation with their athletic conference led to a single entry on the conference's athletic calendar.
A league whose only online presence in the past five years was a proclamation from the city's deputy mayor honoring the winner at a council meeting.
An instagram picture, propagated from a facebook page which noted the name of one coach, which led to a search of linkedin to confirm they’re at least at the same school as they had been two years ago when the last picture from the league’s facebook account posted.
I would like to note my dispassion, approaching white hot, for the rSchoolsToday athletic scheduler and its rival GoBound. Their ability to completely obfuscate where quiz bowl results are while taking up all the search results is unmatched. I have wasted so much time looking at an unfilled schedule, with empty events, links that don’t go back to their component schools, or any information about the organizing league.
For those of you who think “isn’t this unnecessary, won’t they look up something on the internet and go from there?” Well, it’s a faulty assumption to think they will immediately see the problem this year. If a league is relying on a question bank, they’re not going to know there’s a problem when the company that gave them that two years ago goes belly up. They’ll probably just keep tapping the bank, ignoring repeats and not realizing questions can go out of date. That’s why we have to get out in front of the situation, and engage them.
The other end of the spectrum here are leagues that I know are continuing, and I know they've got to have been contacted by someone because they've already scheduled their first match of the year. These are psychologically harder to go through, because I'm expecting a loss.
We're now in the point of the calendar where I'm expecting these to be rejections, to be a terse reply of "No we're good with what we have." I'm fine with that because it means they know that they are provisioned for this year. If I start getting fast wins this late in the cycle, and yes I know I'm talking about mid September as late in the cycle, then there's a problem. A fast win, “Yes, total stranger, please, I need to have questions for my league”, means I’m the first one to talk to them. That would mean a customer was already wobbly on their provider in past years. And could mean a transfer of customers was failing.
I remain committed to my statement in May. The first priority is not to convert leagues and events, the first priority is to make sure you know your provider is still in business, and will take care of your needs. That may seem weird, but this realignment of providers can either be orderly and quick, or spread out and chaotic, with rush jobs all along the way. I don’t want to spend the next year on the chaotic path.
I’m sure some of these emails I’ve sent out will be interepreted as trying to poach, but that’s not my intent. I am trying to be complete in my coverage, so some of these may be interpreted as feints to curry customers, but they’re not the primary focus. It’s to provoke a reaction, any reaction, to know that the problem is being considered by that customer.
There is only one feint in quiz bowl, and let me explain why it's not very effective. It's the feint of the fake buzz. The sudden reaction to a clue where you act like you’re going to buzz in but don’t. The idea being that it shakes someone to try to catch up and buzz in themselves, and their reaction would have been locked out, leaving them to answer a question they had no intention of trying to answer a half-second earlier.
It’s a nice idea, but it’s an egocentric assumption. It assumes that your opponent is focused on you, and not the moderator and the question. Even if they catch you making an exaggerated buzzing motion in the corner of their eye, they’re probably not going to react to that by buzzing. They’re going to react by looking over. You might disrupt their concentration, but that trick won’t work again, if their coach has anything to do with it.
And now off to kitten wrangling.