Week 269: Size: S
Small schools, schedules, and resources
This week's newsletter is going in the book, but it started from two points of inspiration: I was asked to contribute a pull quote to an article about a team's experience in the SSNCT, and I had to help Catie schedule her classes for her senior year.
The quote I provided was this:
A lot of people make the assumption that a team from a small school can't compete against a team from a large school. That's wrong, there's differences, but almost all of the differences occur at the beginning when you're forming the team. You simply have to cast a wider net. Once you have a team working together to learn and practice, and gaining experience, they are just as capable of beating the largest school in their area.
And while I'm probably going to regret some portion of this as unconsidered (I wrote it out during the pre-dawn I spent in line at the DMV waiting for a Real ID / license renewal,) I stand by most of it. I meant to say "different obstacles" where the second "differences" is, "simply" can go. Quantifying "A lot of people" does a lot of lifting there, I know the assumption is made, but I haven't surveyed people to get random opinions on quiz bowl. And I finessed the point I wanted to call out here, that a lot of those people with that opinion, are people in those same small schools. Probably irrelevant for this local newspaper, as the team that inspired the article has overcome that doubt by getting to nationals. I meant it to inspire the fearful to not worry about the difference in size, but I ended up pulling the punch.
As long as I was thinking about it, I figured I'd put to paper the actual differences that a small school has to face, since it will have to go in the book.
What are the starting differences?
You do have to cast a wider net. This is just the most obvious point, if you have a large base of students, you're probably going to be able to find a full team of people who might be interested in competing in the first five minutes. Because you always have an inkling of where there might be interested students, but that location where you first ask is usually scaled to the size of your school, and you need a fixed number of players to have enough for a team. You should never get complacent about recruiting, but a large school can make the mistake of complacency and not suffer for it. A small school team that becomes complacent in building the team can lose everything quickly.
You have to work around other activities, for your player's time, your ability to travel, and your ability to schedule practice. In small schools, students have to wear a lot of hats for activities, and their schedule gets very full very fast. You may find yourself ready to attend a tournament, getting funding for a month from now, only to see your expected team all planning to attend a previous engagement.
You may have to compete with another organization for resources. As I dropped Catie off this morning at school, I noticed the school van and bus sitting in the driveway, having dropped everyone off. I realized, that was it for travel resources at the school. If there was a quiz bowl tournament on a day when the bus and van were needed for a sports event? Well, the sports event would get higher priority.
You have to search out diversity of experience. A finer point that diversity here isn't quite the controversial definition. Smaller schools draw from smaller populations, and they tend to be populations that are more homogenous, meaning they're more likely to do the same sets of things outside the classroom. Differences in experience outside of school can matter to building a team. Things like a parent's occupation, where they went on vacation, or a particular after school activity matter, to the degree that the knowledge a player has may be unique to them, and a consequence of seemingly minor differences.
You have to search out diversity of curriculum. In a small school there may only be one advanced class in each subject for each grade level. And the tendency would be to track the students into a schedule of all advanced classes. Your impulse would be to recruit students from that advanced track, but you get no difference in the experience of those students. They've probably taken the same classes together since kindergarten, read from the same textbooks and reading lists, and cultivated the same experiences, and had the same chapters skipped in the book. They may have different expertise and emphasis in subjects, but they all have the same things they didn't learn in school.
When casting your net look for students who don't haven't gone through the same curriculum as the rest of the team. Someone who moved in to the district last year might have gone through an entirely different subset of Shakespeare's plays, or got a semester of Earth Science in that other school instead of Astronomy. As you build your team, you can broaden their total knowledge by attracting students who faced a different curriculum.
You may be working from a disadvantage in some subcategories outside of the main curriculum and in the electives. Some courses which are available at larger schools may not have enough interest among the student body to justify running the course every year. And if you're counting on coursework to cover things like Fine Arts, Music, or Social Science in the distribution, you're going to have a problem one year or another.
This final part was something I thought about as Catie's senior year was getting scheduled. As she's looking at Forensic Science or Mortuary Science as possible majors or towards a medical technician career, she's hellbent on getting Anatomy & Physiology as an elective to pair with her required Physics course. Whether she gets that course is not really up to her, but up to getting enough of her classmates to also be planning on a medical-adjacent major, and being passionate about getting it.
When she moved from Seton to Serra last summer, we hadn't considered exactly this sort of shift. Both of them would be seen as "small schools" from any viewpoint, but Serra is going to graduate a class about half as large as Seton. Once you completed your required tracks at Seton, there were about 40 or so electives listed, though most were things like the third year of a language, where you're only going to see very dedicated students get to the end of the funnel. Still there's a reasonable number of electives which might be offered in a given year, but the viability of those classes depends on interest. Interest in this case could look quite random, and for Seton there's probably quite a few electives which would draw enough students to justify their existence in a given year. With Serra, there may be a few, but just simply having fewer students means fewer electives which hit that level of justification.
Now I think there's a good chance she'll get that elective, there's enough seniors leaning towards medical fields, but I'm not 100% certain of that. If she had stayed at Seton, there'd be no doubt in my mind. The last Career Day she attended at Seton had 20 different parents and alumni in the medical field (it's Pittsburgh, we’re now where they set medical series), but they failed to invite an engineer, someone who works with software, or a writer (I’m not mad, just disappointed.)
I'll admit this elective point is minor in quiz bowl recruiting, elective classes in high school tend to be taken in the senior year, so they don't create a large diversity in curriculum during a time that the team can take advantage. But if you were to combine this with a practice of older players teaching newer players what they (and they alone on the team) know, this can be a way of reducing the holes in team knowledge.
After chronicling all of these negative value obstacles, I will note one difference that comes with small schools that is an unabashed positive. The support structure of a team in a small school is much tighter, and much more willing to pitch in. Whether we're talking about faculty, administration, parents, or local press, once the team is established, everyone rallies to the cause, because that is how it is at a school of that size with every activity, team, or event.