Week 97: What to do with your hands
The taping, and keeping yourself sane during it.
[Two sections today, one answering the one piece in the narrative I haven’t really touched on here, and the other a supporting section to charting that is needed to set up the first section here, and other sections in practice.]
During the game
One of the earliest pieces of advice for coaching I ever had came out of a conversation shortly after the founding of NAQT. During a conversation with David Frazee, he noted about our plans for expanding into high school competition, “If we could just teach the coaches that it’s like soccer, once the kids are on the field, it’s our of their hands.”
It’s true that the majority of the coach’s duties occur outside of the actual game. For television there’s even less to do than normal. The only thing you can change, maybe, is your lineup mid-game. What advice you can give your team during the game is limited to taping breaks. You don’t know the exact material ahead of time, only the tendencies. It’s some of the most frustrating time for a coach.
Coaching quiz bowl is all about prep. Everything you’ve done up to this point is preparation. You’ve done the long term prep, and immediately before and during the game you can only do short term preparation, preparing them for what is to come, the match, or the next round, or the next few questions. But you can’t buzz for them, and you can’t win the battle for them, they have to do that themselves. And the coach, having done their duty for that day, bringing the team to the studio, is forced to sit there and watch with minimal control over the situation. After we’ve shown you all the buttons to push, all the tweaks and training, you’re strapped into the front seat of the coaster and forced to take the ride.
What you can do for your team is keep them from panicking. What you can do is keep them from focusing on you for guidance, because they have to have their focus entirely on the host, the questions, and the score. What you can do is not panic yourself. You need to be doing something useful, which doesn’t cause you to react to them, and doesn’t give them a chance to notice you’re nervous as hell about this.
Because it’s out of your hands, you need something to do with your hands. I suggest you do something you’ve done on multiple occasions this week. You should chart the round they’re playing exactly as you did the charting of other rounds. You’ve done it before, you can do it while watching them perform, and you need to focus on what you’re doing to give them specific advice as each round happens.
This is partly a trust exercise. If you’ve told them that you trust them, and they see you unflappably charting everything, they’re going to believe you trust them. Charting during your round is to give you something to do, something that you’ve done before and something that your team has seen you do. If they trust that this is normal, they will act normally. Stage fright is the one thing that can’t be accounted for in all of the practice that you’ve done, but you’ve controlled for it, and if you treat this as regularly as practice, you minimize the chances that stage fright will occur.
The data from charting is always for later. If they ask why you’re charting, tell them, “We need someone to do it for the next game.” You are not lying, you are planning for them winning. They may not have even thought of that possibility of a next game, but you’re giving them something to work towards.
Set this up by reminding them of the situation before the match. Remind them they are underdogs, but this week has given them experience, and you know they can play strongly. Remind them that the host is the person they need to be paying attention to, not you. When the game is on, they need to be reacting to what the host says, and not looking your way for guidance.
You shouldn’t be tethered to your chart, though. At each break, you should confer with them, remind them of the rules of the next round, and the risks and rewards of buzzing in each round. But charting also can have some value in those breaks. You can use your past charting results to tell them how they are doing against prior results, and where they need to be at the end of next round. If you found some pattern in your earlier charting, and it’s a break near the end of the game, you can walk over and say things like “you know, I haven’t seen them ask about planets yet in this round, and we know they like to. Be ready for that.” And then when that shows up, they’re going to get a boost of confidence, because you have prepared them for that.
[This section needs to be in the first section of charting practice, which we did over a year ago.]
The Magic Numbers
As you are charting the old episodes, please note the following on your sheet:
What are the scores after each phase of the game?
What would be the perfect score after each phase of the game? (You may have to calculate this from the total questions asked each round.)
In rounds where each team plays their own directed questions, what is the typical range of outcomes?
In rounds where the questions are open to all teams, what is the typical division of points to each team? Is this a round that can determine the whole match? Do winning teams typically dominate this round by good play, or do losing teams sabotage their game with poor play?
In rounds where the questions are open to all teams, how quickly are the teams answering the questions? [This leads into the section on anticipation, but how to anticipate is a later section.]
What, among the matches you watch, is the lowest winning score, and the highest losing score?
These numbers will help you to determine a model for performance in the game. They tell what a typical team scores at the end of each round in the competition, it tells you a benchmark value for winning teams, and losing teams. When you simulate matches in practice, it can tell you how close your team is to what winning teams score in their match, and what losing teams score in their match. Obviously you want to see your team echoing winning results, but it can also highlight the sections of play where a team lost it, either by bad play or lack of knowledge.
That number has two parts, what your team scores in rounds where they don’t have to fight for their points, and what your team scores in rounds where they must buzz in ahead of the other team. As you chart rounds in practice, you can mark the score down and compare it to the paths of winning and losing teams.
Note that your team’s scores in practice rounds probably will overstate their strength in buzzer rounds. That’s just a fact that even if your sparring team is putting up a good fight, they’re still going to be a little worse than the opponents your team will face. Rounds of directed questions won’t overstate results the results as much, but still might if your readers give them more time than they will have on stage. [In a later section we’ll tie these into the statistics of tossup score and bonus conversion, but here we just touch on it.]
In other news, my secretary, Margaret, has taken it upon herself to edit the manuscript. After I took a short break to let the dog out yesterday evening, I came back to discover Margaret lying on the warm office seat, having just added fifteen pages of comments to a chapter of the book. Her comments were mostly of the form: “ggggggggggggggccccccccccccccc[[[[[[[[,“ so not really helpful. I appreciate the enthusiasm she’s brought to the project, but I may have to play her off. I’ll now wrap up my typing for this evening, and put the blanket over the desk, and wish her a good night’s sleep on the chair.
And then I’ll close the laptop, before she sends out next week’s newsletter.