Week 242: "Simple doesn't mean second class"
and a few thoughts on scheduling conflicts
With Catie focused on band, winter guard, and her classes this fall, I've been going to a different set of Saturday events. As a result I'm forced to analyze an activity's ecosystem from the sidelines, and invariably this puts me into comparing it with quiz bowl. Competitive band season in our area ends next week with the regional championship in Hershey, but we bowed out with a third place finish at States in Altoona. (I’m saying “we,” as this season, I was repeatedly prop dad pushing the background panel to the 40-yard line and occasionally serving as ballast on windy days. There are no small parts.)
This Saturday schedule overlapped with one of the local tournaments, and I had tried to get the Seton team to it, but I was unable to get enough of the new team members to the event, and I also struggled to get the team to commit to telling me whether or not they could go. To add to the conflicting schedule, Mrs. Parker was going to see her daughter in Chicago, as it was a four-day weekend for the school. So even if I had not been going to another event with another school, I couldn’t have gotten them to go.
I’m sure this is not an unfamiliar position for many of you, but it was a new experience for me. The hard facts of schedule conflict had been mostly dodged by me. I was always willing to put myself out there to drive or read or whatever, because I had enough initial interest in going. This was all at best uncertainty as to whether we could go and whether we could gather a team, and the only solution we could reach was to postpone the decision week by week. I was at least good enough to cut bait early, and it didn’t affect the final field of the event. Our cancelled slot was replaced by the eventual tournament winner.
What this series of events did give me was a little perspective into just how much other activities jam up quiz bowl’s growth. I wouldn’t have been able to get a team together at Catie’s new school, even if I had the time. Between band, soccer, and football (which does still play a few Saturday afternoon games, as well as a lengthy practice session) fully 40% of your upperclassmen at the school are engaged in other activities during days that circuit quiz bowl competitions take place, at least until after Thanksgiving. And since Pitt and CMU schedule their fall events before Thanksgiving…
I'm also seeing this at Seton with the team, though we'd gotten a good start with recruiting the team, the practice attendance has been damaged by sports practices, and other clubs which share the Tuesday afterschool slot. While we could have probably arranged for the team to go to the tournament with a different staff representative (the new vice principal has been very interested in our work), we couldn’t arrange a quorum of students at a single practice who could say they’d be free for that tournament day. Either they were not present at the same time due to other activities, or they were partly blocked out of the schedule of a full day event.
The concern for me is not so much that I'll be able to see lots of events or even that they won't be populated with teams. My concern is that it is difficult to create teams which bring in players who are not committed to quiz bowl from the start. While we'll get the crowd for whom it's their primary activity, we're going to lose out on those who take it as a secondary activity.
I've always held that if we could expand out from Saturday, we'd be able to expand the reach of quiz bowl into other schools where Saturday is already occupied by other activities. When quiz bowl switched from primarily a spring semester activity to a year round activity, it did move the balance of activity into one where for best results, you had to participate in competitions throughout the year, and you had to commit your entire team to having that as your highest priority.
In working the marketing angles of quiz bowl, I’ve gotten into the habit of describing certain organizations as “secondary competitors.” They are not a competing company or format of quiz bowl in the sense that they provide events that are question-based buzzer-based competition, but a different academic competition, which only competes with quiz bowl for one resource, the attention and time of the competitors and coaches to compete, and more importantly, train. What I need to start considering is the “tertiary competitors” we face, which are not necessarily academic competitions at all, but do command the practice and competition time of students, and for whom even a little scheduling conflict causes quiz bowl to lose out to them over the entire year.
That’s one thing that a television program gives that even the most motivated student or coach can’t provide with the circuit. It’s important enough to a school when it happens to move other activities out of the way. It’s enough possible publicity for the school to disrupt the status quo and establish something, if there’s someone willing to keep pushing on the boundary that’s just been breached.
I read up on this obituary this week, for Dr. Richard Cash. While I was not really able to pull anything for question material from this, I did find Cash’s phrase “Simple doesn’t mean second class” to be inspirational and compatible with the spirit of the sections of the book I’m working on right now. It also seemed to be the way out of the depressing rut of what I just wrote above.
Deepening the rut was my trip over to reddit’s /r/Quizbowl page, which has sort of devolved into a cycle of once a month some underclassmen posts a “How do I get good fast?” request. What I don’t like about this is that it’s usually one solution, presented by one person, with very little variety in the answer, and assumes things that a player who is asking that question wouldn’t know, and won’t be answered by a single-line response.
The answer given is usually to grind, which is the answer to the question which wasn’t asked, and won’t help them. Grinding is the answer to “how do I get good enough to be a nationally ranked player, slowly?” The answer to that is long-term, and assumes they’ll be willing to dedicate themselves to that course of action over several years. It’s developing, committing to, and sticking to a habit, without telling them what the habit should be. Most people who ask that sort of question in a low-traffic forum aren’t looking for directions to follow for years, they’re looking for short-term instructions. Simple solutions which could become habits once you see an incremental improvement.
The question that is really asked is “how do I get better than the team I’m going to face at the next match?” That’s a simpler problem, with the obstacle in front of the player. That question requires simpler solutions that can be executed without needing to go every day.
When I started thinking about the following question: “What are the simple solutions you can use for quiz bowl?” I began to associate this with the question “What are the low-cost solutions you can use for quiz bowl?” which doesn’t quite line up, but I was perhaps smarting from the $8,000 bill for a band trip to Altoona1. They’re linked in my mind, because I assess simplicity to include concepts like “I don’t need to comparison shop between options,” or “I am not unique in my ability to obtain the solution, anyone could, if they knew it was a solution.” But the real part of a simple solution in this context is that it answers the question: “What do I already have access to, which solves part of the problem?”
The following are a series of thoughts on simple solutions which aren’t second class:
Curriculum, specifically the curriculum that students have already gone through in previous years, is the simplest solution to coverage of a lot of categories in high school competition. A review of material from a previously taken class is something that they have familiarity with, and reviewing what they had studied before is a vague form of spaced repetition. As the material is review, not new studying, it may be possible to proceed through it much faster, and with the confidence that at one point they knew this. We can expand this idea to literature that was on reading lists in past summers, the previous years’ school musical, and any number of things which had been subject of intense scrutiny before.
The fact that buzzers now exist as a website which can be integrated into practice and triggered on the school-issued laptop or on a student’s phone is a boon to team development. Not only does that allow the player to hold practice anywhere in the school, it also allows the integration of buzzer technique into other class procedure. This is even outside of the use in online competitions.
The fact that quiz/flashcard websites/apps like Kahoot! exist, are designed to be used in classes and schools, and have appropriate material developed to practice for quiz bowl gives a player the opportunity to work on additional subjects outside of practice, and gives the coach the ability to draw on others’ expertise in subjects.
Packet distributions are freely available, and give you the subcategories that are considered part of each subject. As you practice on questions, as yourself where each question fits in the distribution, and which subdistributions it fits. Rather than consider the whole of the quiz bowl distribution, break it into a series of manageable subcategories. A subcategory might have a manageable study guide, or a single thing within it that you know, or an answer you’ve heard before, and you can try that when it comes up again. This is not specialization, it’s organizing an incredibly unwieldy task along the lines of the distribution, and in doing so makes it a series of manageable tasks, that can become a habit.
I did ask what the cost was to the team to not go to Altoona. For me, Altoona has always been one of the more ominous places in Pennsylvania, for being the location of the Ur-Sheetz and for the schism-inducing Altoona-style pizza. I would note the history section seems to suggest that after the discovery of it by the outside world, someone attempted to kill it with fire, but by then it was too late.