MACA

The Missouri Academic Coaches Association is an association of quiz bowl coaches and other academic competition advocates in Missouri. MACA is the successor to the Missouri Academic Association, which ran the Missouri state championships from 1992-1995 before handing over hosting duties to MSHSAA.

Missouri Academic Association

The predecessor to MACA, the Missouri Academic Association, ran a state championship from 1992-1995 before MSHSAA assumed responsibility for hosting the tournament. [1]

State Championship Results

Year	Class 3 Champion	Class 3 Runner-Up	Class 2 Champion	Class 2 Runner-Up	Class 1 Champion	Class 1 Runner-Up	Question Provider
1992	unknown, or division not held		Hannibal	William Chrisman	North Shelby	Palmyra	Answers Plus [2]
1993	Liberty	Fort Zumwalt South	MICDS	St. James	Bernie	North Shelby
1994	Savannah	Fort Zumwalt South	Bernie	Brookfield	North Shelby	Purdy
1995	Savannah	SLUH	Cuba	Cameron	Bernie	unknown

Current Role

MACA runs an annual coaches conference in late September or early October, where MSHSAA provides rules updates, veteran coaches and other experienced people offer informational sessions on topics such as how to improve your team, how to run tournaments, etc., and the membership elects new officers as necessary.

MACA sponsors a Junior Varsity State tournament held in the spring.

MACA recognizes exceptional players with All-District and All-State medals during the MSHSAA districts/state series.

Influence

Perhaps unfortunately for Missouri quizbowl, the influence of MACA on Missouri quizbowl has historically been fairly limited. MACA's Advisory Committee does have input on the selection of a question vendor for MSHSAA's state tournament, but because the various choices available often all have some features of bad quizbowl to varying degrees, this choice is often between equally negative options. Similarly, while MACA does serve as the Missouri quizbowl community's collective voice, that voice is often ignored by MSHSAA, an example of which being MACA's suggestion to allow the top two teams from each district to advance to state and to drop the idea of sectionals at its 2007-2008 meeting. In contrast, MSHSAA simply decided to split districts in two and impose sectionals.

MACA and Pyramidal Quizbowl

As pyramidal quizbowl began to expand throughout Missouri around 2008, MACA continued to do many things to to discourage the growth of quizbowl in Missouri. Some of its members endorsed a state championship which uses Questions Galore packets and is 20% arithmetic questions, host and attend publicly unannounced tournaments that compete with good tournaments in Missouri, and actively promote bad questions, bad game formats, and bad rules in Missouri quizbowl.

Pyramidal quizbowl has become more popular since NAQT started providing the questions for MSHSAA districts and state in 2011, and three of the four current officers of MACA are actively involved in hosting and attending pyramidal tournaments that follow the principles of good quizbowl. Even so, many coaches still resist the improvements brought by the increasing prevalence of good quizbowl practices and prefer tournaments to be run the way they always have been.

Tournament Calendar

Since the 2004-2005 season, MACA's website has hosted an upcoming tournaments list. Even 5 years later, many tournaments in Missouri are not announced on either the MACA list or on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board, which inevitably leads to unnecessary animosity between competing tournament hosts when the existence of an upcoming tournament becomes known months after another tournament on the same day has been publicly announced. This typically affects tournaments hosted by colleges like the University of Missouri-Columbia and Missouri S&T [3] who aren't usually included on tournament announcements sent by mass email. This has been detrimental to quizbowl in Missouri, particularly in the 2008-2009 season because all known tournament dates for that season were compiled at the MACA Convention in Fall 2008, yet this list was never made available publicly, leading to several conflicts with Missouri Quizbowl Alliance certified tournaments. [4]

Examples of scheduling conflicts

• January 24, 2009: The Washington HS tournament was not known until after Missouri had already scheduled the Tiger Bowl for that date (distance of separation: 93 miles) [5]
• February 21, 2009: The Warrenton HS tournament was not publicly known until February 11, even though the date for the 2009 NAQT Missouri Qualifier was tentatively announced on July 3 and officially announced no later than November 7, explaining why so few St. Louis teams had signed up for the legitimate state championship when Warrenton's existence was posted to the Missouri forum. (distance of separation: 99 miles) [6]
• March 7, 2009: The Missouri S&T Spring Tournament has been held on the first or second weekend of March since 2005, and was officially announced no later than November 7, yet two other tournaments within 100 miles were scheduled on the same day:
  • Rock Bridge High School in Columbia hosted its unannounced tournament on March 7 (distance of separation: 93 miles) [7]
  • Waynesville, who has even attended the Spring Tournament in the past, scheduled its tournament on the same day. [8] This was particularly notorious because Waynesville is 35 miles away from Rolla. Even more surprising is Waynesville posted its tournament to the MACA calendar, which probably already had the Missouri S&T tournament listed when it was posted. The scheduling conflict appears to be the result of a first-year coach apparently not being aware of the other nearby tournaments. Due to the proximity of the more established S&T and Rock Bridge tournaments, the Waynesville tournament was canceled due to low registration.
  • Both Rock Bridge and Waynesville have since become regular hosts of good quizbowl tournaments.

Because of the numerous problems with scheduling conflicts in the 2008-2009 season, Missouri-Columbia announced its 2009-2010 tournament dates on February 23, 2009 [9]; Missouri S&T followed suit on March 2 [10]. Additionally, a list of all known tournaments in Missouri for each season has been maintained on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board since the 2009-2010 season, to increase the visibility of tournaments that have been announced and to better expose scheduling conflicts.

Even with a revamped MACA website, tournaments are rarely added to the website calendar. The existence of tournaments not hosted on NAQT questions and not announced on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board is typically only known by coaches included on email invitations or if they are well-established tournaments held around the same time every year. Fortunately, with the continued use of NAQT questions at MSHSAA districts/state and increasing popularity of pyramidal tournaments, higher-quality tournaments have much less trouble fielding enough teams, and in some cases even have lengthy waitlists. Many Saturdays now feature numerous tournaments throughout the state without severely impacting each other's fields.

Officers

Position	2018-19	2017-18	2016-17	2015-16	2014-15	2013-14	2012-13	2011-12
President	Scott Allen (Hallsville)						Al Nicolai (Cape Central)
Vice President	David Dennis (Washington)	Kevin Stockman (Orchard Farm)			Alex Dzurick (MOQBA)		Bob Brown (Richland)
Secretary	Jason Loy (Sullivan, Tuscumbia)							Audrey Connor (Marshall)
Treasurer	Kevin Stockman (Orchard Farm)	Nick White (West Nodaway)						John Peruggia (Thomas Jefferson)

Website

In 2010, the MACA website was migrated to a Drupal installation after many MACA members expressed an interest in creating a more dynamic website. Coaches can now log in to a personal account and post tournament announcements and quizbowl related articles. Unfortunately, the new website has not encouraged more coaches to take a more active role in open communication between quizbowl participants in Missouri, and news and other content is rarely posted to the website.

MACA Website