Last week I was feeling down about my production during break, but I managed to put it together and pound out a lot of text. As an example, I give you this rather long section which had been just a skeleton got fleshed out in a hurry on Sunday. This section covers what is necessary on taping day up to the taping itself.
Getting to the competition (physically)
The day of the competition, the first goal must be ensuring all of your team makes it from their home to the studio, and should even be prioritized ahead of you getting to the studio. If there is an audience, getting your portion of the audience to the studio is your second priority. You want to get the team there with plenty of time to spare for the first match (not necessarily their match.) Figure out when you need to leave to make the opening meeting, and pad that with 20 minutes (50 minutes if you’re far enough away to need to stop for breakfast), and that is the time you need to tell the team, parents, and onlookers to leave from the school.
It’s better to do transport as a group in a single vehicle from school to studio, since this allows a little additional time for you to bring up study items, remind the team of the format, and otherwise get a little more practice in. This is not always possible however, especially since a van or bus may not be available for a non-school day if you only had a week’s notice to get it.
Setting up transportation
What are you going to need to get the team physically to the taping? If we assume that you are using your school as a rally point for your team, you will need:
*To notify the parents of the taping.
*A form for the parent to give permission for their student to go to the taping.
An invitation for the parents to join the audience for the taping.
*Transport organized by the parents or the driving-permitted students to the school.
A bus, van, or caravan of cars to the studio. (This is likely a task for your pressure, as they can probably expedite transportation within a week to take place outside of school hours, and you probably cannot.)
Directions and information from the station about parking at or around the studio, especially for buses, as well as information about when the teams and the audience should arrive. This should also include information about when everyone attending needs to arrive at the school if you are all traveling from there.
That previous information to be propagated to anyone interested even if they are not traveling from the school.
The three asterisked items are also necessary in the event of the competition happening virtually.
[This document needs to be earlier in the book, but it’s here for the draft as it is tied to this.]
FORM TO PARENTS TEMPLATE:
The newly formed quiz bowl* team at [Your school] has been selected to compete on [station name]’s [show title]! We will be taping our first match on [date of taping] at the [station call letters] studio.** Your student has been selected to be part of the team, and we would like your permission to have them participate in the process.
We need [student] to be at the school on [day of taping] at [early enough time to drive to studio.] {If there is an audience}We would also like you to attend the taping, as part of the studio audience. We want to bring as many people as we can to root for our [team name]. {/If there is an audience} Taping will take approximately [however long the taping session takes as indicated by the station documents]. [Include any information from the station information about a dress code in this section, including if the team needs a change of clothes for a possible second match.]
We need your permission for [student] to participate, and have attached a form to the bottom of this document. Please sign and date this so we can finalize the team roster.
The team is excited for this opportunity, and we hope you will be able to attend.
[Your name]
Quiz Bowl* Coach
[Your school]
* This may require you to figure out if there’s a geographically specific name for quiz bowl competitions in your area. There will be an appendix to this listing what specific names are for locations around the country and world.
** If the competition is still virtual, you need to adjust this. Either that the taping will occur “at the school.” Or it will be taped from home, and the sentence should be “We will be taping our first match virtually on [date of taping], from students’ homes over [method of telecommunications].” If it is taped from home, the sentence about arriving at the school also must be omitted.
Getting to the competition (virtually)
If the competition is now taking place through telecommunications, you still need to assure that your team members can get to the competition. If the telephony method specified by the station is not that which is used by your school, you will need to test out each link in the chain well before taping. It may even be worthwhile to conduct a practice using the same telephony system that the competition will use.
The two approaches I’ve seen for televised virtual competitions are to either have players connect from home, or to have the team go to the school, and then compete in some common area which has multiple computer connections and/or cameras for each computer. In the either setup, the station may require the camera to be moved around the room before the game begins to ensure nothing in the room can be used to cheat. In either case, the coach needs to make sure these expectations are fulfilled before taping begins.
Networking and preparation onsite
Taping sessions are usually stacked together. Since most competitions are some form of single-elimination bracket, it’s more efficient to play some number of first-round matches to determine who will be in a second-round match, and then play that second-round match as the last match of a taping session. This also reduces the number of trips a team would need to arrange. Because of that setup, there are opportunities for a team playing later in the day to gather information about their match, and about other teams in the competition. Even if you’re not required to be there at that time, it is valuable to have your team present at the beginning of the taping sessions.
Unless there is a specified prohibition on having teams, coaches, or interested parties of teams not competing in a match being present in the audience for a taping of an earlier match, you should arrange to have someone there. This also includes the case where teams and coaches are sequestered until their episode tapes.
All of the patterns you have observed in the episodes you watched can be tested for in the rounds which are recorded before your team plays. That means you can get one final crack at reminding your team of what specifically can come up. That means you can get one final course correction as to which things are important.
To do this, you need someone in the audience who is able to chart the results. This is almost certainly best done by you the coach. While it may be one of your team, or even the pressure, you have a method you have created, and you would have notes that you would be able to understand and relay to the team, that a second layer of translation might miss. Unfortunately, you may have to farm this out to someone anyway, as there may be meetings with show staff or producers which happen while other episodes are taping.
If there is sequestration of coaches and teams, you won’t be able to chart and have value ahead of taping, but you should have someone on the outside recording the answers for you, as this will still be valuable as a post-mortem. As a final possibility, you can chart the match by taping it when it airs, but that’s well past the point when it will help your team.
The other valuable thing that can happen during taping is networking with other coaches. Prior to the day of taping, you have been isolated. You know there are other schools which compete, you may even have reached out to coaches who you saw on the episodes you watched, but unless you were lucky enough to get contact in five days, this is your first view of how quiz bowl teams actually function.
If the station people don’t make introductions, make them yourselves. Make sure your team meets the other teams, make sure you meet the other coaches. Other coaches are your gateway to other events, and if coaches organize events, they want local teams to come. Local teams are more reliable and the competition to get them to local events is less. While established teams with established events that they host can draw from far beyond the viewing area of the program, local teams are more reliable attendees for these events.
Local coaches also are valuable resources and independent advisors to whatever ideas you have to improve your team. They may also have access to local forums which you can join, and connect with even more local coaches. Since you won’t interact with more than a fraction of the schools in the competition on taping day, you will still need to introduce yourself and your team to the entire area, you start that process by connecting with coaches on taping day.
During the pre-taping period you will see some teams playing simulated matches, running through flashcards, or even watching old matches on their phones. Others may be reading through packets or reading study material. Don’t be surprised by any particular technique or lack of technique on display. The team that’s seemingly doing nothing may be resting because they practiced on the way there. But do keep notes of what you see. You may incorporate that into something for next year.
As for what your team should study? Whatever you feel you didn’t cover enough is a good place to start. I wouldn’t start a new topic Saturday morning, since you don’t really know how much time you’ll have.
[The one remaining bit here is the motivational speech before they go on the air. But that’s better for next time.]
Like most of the people in my timelines, I’ve dabbled in Wordle this past week. I had gone down the rabbit hole with a prior incarnation of this idea when it was the game show Lingo. But my experience with it was the original 1980’s syndicated game show that came out of Canada, and somehow ended up on a UHF station in Pittsburgh that you either had to be on top of the hill (as we were) or living in the same building as their repeater. (I can’t remember whether this was 29 post its life as the Juke Box Network or 63 before it was a QVC repeater, but either answer is indicative of my picking up too much from my dad’s love of trying to get the most obscure and distant signals off the antenna.)
Lingo’s game was slightly different in that they spotted you the first letter and made you use it for all your words. After playing around with a set of letter tiles, I had a set of 25 pairs of words which tried to cover most common letters (e.g. RAISE, ROUND or CLEAN, CHOIR) which you could use on your first two turns to maximize the chance you’d solve the puzzle in five guesses. This is not the exact challenge of Wordle, but it’s close enough that most of the challenge and thrill of finding out a strategy is not there for me. I’ve done this before, and this is only one new variation.
What I am finding fascinating about it is its purposefully limited feature set and resulting growth, and whether it could be adapted to quiz bowl. As a free, daily service, it’s picked up remarkable growth among people I know inside and outside of quiz bowl and/or quizzing. Usually there’s a barrier with all things that stops adoption on one side of that fence or the other, but this is apparently both light enough, and challenging enough to engage people.
The key features that would need to be adapted to a quizzing model:
It needs to be small and daily. Wordle has at most seven actions to do with it every day: Connect, Guess x5, Report Results. That’s a small enough interaction that it can done without taking time from anything else, and repeated enough to be a habit. It also gives a level of activity compatible with the idea of “generally accessible quizbowl” which we considered a few weeks back.
It needs a quick way to propagate it to build a base and grow. You can always share your results, and it’s used emojis smartly to allow you to give a box score of your game in a tweet which is both understandable to those who have been introduced to it, and colorful and attractive enough to bring in onlookers. The results you put in your timeline are Wordle’s best advertising to new players.
Its scoreboard needs to be optional. This is the counterintuitive part that all of quiz bowl missed. If you screw up, and maybe guess wrong, you are under no obligation to post your results online. This means all those attempts until you get the hang of it are hidden and you only need to broadcast your successes. Quiz bowl doesn’t have a true practice mode, where you can get better and then show off your skills, even something like a private room on a practice question reader shows some results, and there’s nothing that really allows you to choose private or public after you have results. Such a capacity would allow people to try out competition without needing to be part of competition from the start.
So what would this proposed “Quizle” look like? How about a standard single-digit number of questions a day, keyboard entry (not multiple choice) acceptance of answers, questions that incorporate graphics or sound, stat keeping which shows you performance by category and over time periods (maybe a rolling 30 days in addition to all results), and the option to post today’s results to social media. Create something like that, fill it with 5-7 simple but interesting questions every day, and give the audience a way to boast when they do a good job, and we’d have a way to introduce another audience to quiz bowl and quizzing.