Outreach

Outreach is a broad term in quizbowl that refers to actions taken to grow the game as a whole through the establishment of quizbowl teams at new schools, the conversion of existing teams and tournaments playing non-pyramidal quizbowl to pyramidal quizbowl and good quizbowl practices, and the expansion and support of existing teams on the quizbowl circuit.

Need For Outreach

Outreach to Other Schools (External Outreach)

Currently, only a relatively small proportion of existing educational institutions in the United States (and the world as a whole) have active quizbowl teams, though forms of quizbowl maintain a relatively expansive global geographic footprint. Many other institutions have teams that play only one or two events per season. And many schools have teams that only participate in non-pyramidal events each year. The exact proportion of schools in each state that actively participate in multiple pyramidal quizbowl events each year varies considerably from state-to-state. Even in states with very high levels of participation in pyramidal quizbowl like Illinois, there are hundreds of schools that do not field quizbowl teams.

In other states like Arkansas and Kansas, almost all of the teams in the state play only non-pyramidal quizbowl. Attracting more of these teams to more pyramidal quizbowl events and convincing existing hosts in those states to change the types of questions used as well as potentially the format and rules for their tournaments is a major outreach challenge.

Outreach Within Schools (Internal Outreach)

Within schools, quizbowl must also compete against various other academic extracurriculars, including some like Science Olympiad, Odyssey of the Mind, and Academic Decathlon that have long histories of institutional support in certain regions. Maintaining a quizbowl team also requires a baseline level of organization within a school, usually in the form of needing to maintain a certain number of participants and a faculty advisor each year to remain an official extracurricular at a school. A number of formerly strong high school quizbowl teams such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Ezell-Harding have gone defunct after the departure of coaches or involved students. Expanding the members of quizbowl teams at schools to include more members is a key part of outreach as well.

See Also

• A Guide to the State of Good Quizbowl, State By State (as of 2017)
• An Excellent Guide to Outreach to Establish and Expand Teams At Your School