Alex Damisch

Alex Damisch
Noted subjects	auditory fine arts
Past colleges	Lawrence (2012-2016), Minnesota (2016-2017), DePaul (2017-2018)
Stats	HDWhite • NAQT

Alex Damisch is a former player for Lawrence, University of Minnesota, and DePaul and is an avid staffer of Midwestern tournaments, as well as national tournaments nationwide. Damisch was President of ACF for the 2020-21 season. They devised the Nationals Ironman status for those who staffed every national tournament in a year; as of 2021, they have achieved it twice. In episode 15 of Tossup 21, they extended the three-factor theory of moderating to include judgement, which is the instantaneous and fair application of the correct ruleset to timing, answerline correctness, and other situations.

In 2019, Damisch was a 3-time champion on Jeopardy!, where they won $35,549.

In 2020, Damisch shared the Carper Award with Mike Sorice for their work, including spearheading the creation of the Misconduct Reporting Form and helping to institute structural changes to the ACF constitution.

Career

College

As a undergraduate, Damisch attended the 2013 ICT DII as a member of Lawrence B.

Open

Damisch has continued to play in open events with frequent teammates Auroni Gupta, Matt Bollinger, and Ryan Rosenberg.

Organizational Work

PACE

In 2018, they filled in as Director of Communications for PACE. While there, they were responsible for writing the text of the Misconduct Reporting Form. To this day they help administer aspects of the form.

ACF

Damisch's time at ACF began in 2018 when they became the treasurer of ACF and logistics coordinator for ACF Nationals. In that role they were responsible for reverting the policy of all teams directly paying ACF for tournaments, which had been in place since 2012.

Following the 2019 ACF Nationals, ACF announced a number of changes to their constitution: these were all proposed by Damisch. These included:

• expanding the means by which individuals could become provisional members of ACF
• updating the constitution to be gender-neutral
• changing the role of the Communications Officer to handle social media and to reflect the creation of the new Mirror Coordinator position
• removing Outreach Officer and replacing it with the Mirror Coordinator, which absorbed some of the previous roles of the Communications Officer
• changing Meeting Chair to bethe position President of ACF, ending the process of the editor-in-chief of ACF Nationals serving as de facto leader of ACF

In 2019, Damisch became the inaugural ACF Site Coordinator (a position they devised). During this time, they reworked the hosting guidelines, created the stats guidelines, and included finals formats on the ACF site. Significantly, they created the ACF Collegiate Contact List, which superceded many such lists that had been maintained by the community in the past, and issued the first ACF Fall experience survey.

In 2020, Damisch became the second President of ACF (another position they came up with). That year, they were awarded the Carper alongside Mike Sorice for their work on the misconduct form and with ACF.

Tournaments

• 2015 NAQT Wisconsin State Championship (tournament director, attracted many teams who had played primarily non-pyramidal quiz bowl)
• 2017 EMT (writer, arts)
• 2018 EFT (logistics)
• 2018 WORLDSTAR (writer)
• 2018 NSC (assistant tournament director)
• 2019 ACF Nationals (edited music/other auditory FA)
• 2020 WORKSHOP (logistics)
• 2020 ACF Fall (proofreading)
• 2020 ACF Winter (proofreading)
• 2021 Spring Novice (edited music/other auditory FA)
• 2021 ACF Nationals (freelance writer, >20 questions)

References

Carper Award
Preceded by	Year	Shared between	Succeeded by
Rob Carson Kelly McKenzie	2020	Alex Damisch Mike Sorice	Matt Bollinger Jim Dendy