Week 272: HSNCT and everything after
A lemur, a near crash, and a long weekend
The most interesting thing to see in the playoffs wasn’t Livingston A, it was Livingston D. And the most promising thing wasn’t either of those, it was Livingston B.
I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the eventual champions of the HSNCT get drowned out by the performance of their other teams, but in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, that was happening. All four Livingston teams made the playoffs, and they simply kept winning. Livingston collectively went 15-5 in the playoffs. In a situation where not only is no one a pushover, but everyone was a championship-playoff-level team, that’s extraordinary.
Part of that was that Livingston D ran from a 6-4 prelim run, and so they went into playoffs with a single loss eliminating them. But a 6-0 run is enough to catch attention, especially with the D attached to your team name. The eyes of the tournament staff slack channel were turned to the D team, and they were the story until the Super Seven.
Just look at these results:
Livingston A (2 12th, 2 11th) 1st place
Livingston B (1 12th, 1 11th, 2 9th) 13th place - T
Livingston C (4 12th) 97th -T
Livingston D (4 9th) 8th - T
If this doesn’t scare you as a potential opponent, consider how much development time Livingston can put in in the next three years with 6 9th grade players who have now gone through a deep playoff experience. That’s a lot of potential, stacked on a lot of experience gathered this week. That is a dynastic pattern waiting to happen.
You’d have to say it’s obvious that the seniors were both setting an example for the underclassmen, or helping to build them up more directly. One of the things I’m writing into the middle section of the book to come is how you use the accumulated knowledge of your seniors and well-experienced players to seed the knowledge of the newer players. Motivated seniors are additional coaches on your team, and as a coach you should be encouraging them to give their unique knowledge back to the team before they walk out the door. If that’s what they’re doing intentionally, they just demonstrates my case. If that’s what they’re doing accidentally, they still demonstrated the value.
There’s also the weird piece in this: what happened to their 10th graders? You can almost see a point where they might have been extremely worried that they didn’t have any new players last year. I’d have been slightly panicked as a coach, you always want at least one or two freshmen to stick around for the whole year, just to ensure continuity. Well, they probably will be able to recruit next year’s 11th graders just fine.
“Never work with children or animals” — W. C. Fields
W. C. Fields was right about this maxim, as I found out this weekend. I got upstaged by a lemur in front of high schoolers. This has already made QBWiki, and was the hit of the staff slack channel during the tournament, but I had to deal with a lemur on a leash outside.
As the room was set up, there was a set of floor-to-ceiling windows behind the moderator, overlooking one of the streets outside the hotel. We had put the blinds down to table level to block morning sun, but the street level was visible, and that was our critical mistake. I still don’t know how those curtains go up and down in that room, but I probably should have just pulled them down.
The Atlantacarnaval parade was taking place that morning, as it had for a couple of HSNCTs. The parade circles around Peachtree Center, and goes off in the distance, but it starts near there, and so people park near there to march in the parade. So some rooms get a lot of noise. We fortunately did not, as it looks like the parking lot across the street is reserved for people walking in the parade.
That is how, as the final minutes of the clock of round 5 ticked out, one team started yelling in the other team’s bonus about the fact that there was a lemur outside.
Five feet, nose-to-tail, of diaper-clad ringtail lemur on a leash, on the shoulders of a guy in a leopard-skin Phrygian cap, coming out of a Tesla.
Thankfully, that bonus killed the clock, because I have no idea what we’d have done to compete with that for the teams’ attention. That had all the subtlety of a mechanical infantry battalion. Both teams forgot about shaking hands, who won or lost, and even whether they should get their card. They just raced over to the window, and then their entourages, and then we turned around. Thankfully round 6 was delayed, and then delayed again because one of our teams got stuck on the 11th floor for a while, but even then, there was an extra minute so the new arrivals could see the lemur before it hopefully walked off.
We high-tailed it through round 6, and before the first half ended the lemur had left to join the march, that let us get through to the match with minimum disruption. Round 7 teams entered, and I told them what they missed, and I told them we should be quick because he’s probably coming back. I was right, which led to a suddenly extended halftime. And what’s worse, is he didn’t tuck the lemur back in the car and drive off. No, he hung out there for the rest of the second half and while we organized the bits for lunch.
As I was leaving the room, I realized that what he was doing was showing off the lemur to curious onlookers, and he had many onlookers as the paradegoers went in one direction and the anime-con attendees went in the other direction. He was using the lemur as a wingman. I just have to appreciate it for what it was, a masterpiece in attention-grabbing. I tip my cap to you, Mr. Phrygian-cap-wearing Tesla-driving lemur-wrangler, I was unfamiliar with your game.
I’ve survived some many interruptions in moderating quiz bowl, I’ve had a repeating fire alarm test, I’ve had a class of Kaplan students take over the room mid-match, I’ve had lightning strike power blips, and a rainstorm-started dripping ceiling. Players have gotten sick, and the buzzer has started to smoke. I’ve even had an active shooter close down the entire campus and the tournament. But this was the weirdest interruption I’ve ever seen, because it just completely wrecked both team’s attention, and I felt like it knocked the entire room off its axis, reducing everyone into a wildlife watcher.
We’ve discussed the role of the third official before, but my final match doing it this year brought out two new tasks. The first stemmed from the fact our room was delayed due to adjudicating a possible honor code violation. While we were paused, the audience got loud, and could be heard from the other playoff room. So the slack was asking our room to quiet down. Our first attempt failed to keep them quiet for more than 30 seconds, and at that point, as the only NAQT badge in the room, I had to do something. I turned around faced the audience, pointed to the airwall, and said unsmilingly, without shouting: “They can hear you.” After staring down the room for five seconds, I sat down.
Apparently, I can convey a lot of “I should have said ‘Don’t make me get up.’ but I’m up now, so you know you’ve screwed up.” energy. Good to know I still have that power in my toolchest.
The other role I fulfilled in that game was the orderly override power. During a late tossup in the round, I had to override the moderator and stop the clock. An answer didn’t match the answer line, but did match a particular promptable option, which required a specific question be asked of the player. I managed to stop it with a half-syllable of the rest of the question read to the other team, but it shouldn’t have gotten even that far.
I didn’t like doing it because it disrupted the match and made it look like I was pulling rank. It sounded very jarring and disruptive. And it shouldn’t have been necessary. The alternate answer was on the second line of the answer line, and the specific question to be a response prompt to the answer was on the third line. It was the third such alternate answer of four in the answer line, and there was no indication aside from quotes that this answer was generally promptable. The moderator missed it because she did the normal practice of reading from the top of the question and then just scanning the answer line for the pattern. The third official scanned it twice and missed the implication the first time. It was only when I started looking from the end back that I spotted the possible answer, and I was waving to stop the situation before I caught what needed to be done as a specific response to it. And I really didn’t like this because it made the third official necessary to normal function of the match, rather than superfluous.
One of my big things in the book to be is that a question that can’t be asked under the resources of the TV program won’t be included, because the station and the sponsor will never tempt fate. A complex answer line should be subject to the same law. If it requires an extra set of eyes to catch the subtleties of what the moderator is supposed to do in all situations, it’s something that probably shouldn’t be asked. This felt like it was written with the assumption that the moderator will always be perfect, and if not, it will always be read in the presence of omniscient experienced officials who could catch this before harm is done. The matches employing third officials are the highest stakes matches of a championship. We shouldn’t be designing the questions to tempt fate, especially in the highest stakes matches.
I was asked the question, “How many of these have you been to?” this weekend. And I realized, even with my being in recovery for the 2019 tournament, by making it I’m one of two possible people who have been to every HSNCT, and I’m not 100% certain about the other. It’s very possible I’m the last timber in this particular ship of Theseus. These are the things that hit you at 4am while you’re waiting for Lyft to take you to the airport so you can have ribs on Memorial Day. Ordinarily, I try to get that final lap of the building when everything is finally quiet and I can stop worrying about everything. I missed that this year because of a 2am fire alarm in the hotel.
Over the championship season, I heard people’s plans: that set of tournaments they want to build in their city, the new book they’re going to write on a really interesting facet of quiz bowl that surprised them to even exist, a life with a newly blended family, the healing of getting back with together with like minds of boundless curiosity, the escape from a chaotic life that going to a quiz bowl national seems so freaking normal that it recharges their batteries. Okay, that last one might only have been me. There have been years where I’ve felt like I have to be here, for continuity, to keep the streak alive, and so I can see this through. I didn’t have that feeling this time. I just wanted to be here, and that’s probably a lot healthier for me.