MACA

The Missouri Academic Coaches Association is an association of quiz bowl coaches in Missouri. Prior to transferring duties to MSHSAA in the 1995-1996 season, MACA ran the Missouri state championship.

Today, MACA has done many things to to discourage the growth of Academic Competition in Missouri. Some of its members endorse 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.

That being said, because Missouri's Academic Competition coaches have direct input on the decisions of MACA through the election of its officers and through its semi-yearly rules meetings and yearly conventions, MACA is somewhat more responsive that MSHSAA, which regulates Academic Competition purely through the person of Assistant Director Stacy Schroeder.

MACA also recognizes exceptional players with All-District and All-State medals.

Influence

Perhaps unfortunately for Missouri Quiz Bowl, the influence of MACA on Missouri Quiz Bowl is 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 Quiz Bowl to varying degrees, this choice is often between equally negative options. Similarly, while MACA does serve as the Missouri Quiz Bowl 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.

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 [1] 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. [2]

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) [3]
• 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) [4]
• 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 HS in Columbia hosted its unannounced tournament on March 7 (distance of separation: 93 miles) [5]
  • Waynesville, who has even attended the Spring Tournament in the past, scheduled its tournament on the same day. [6] 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.

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 [7]; Missouri S&T followed suit on March 2 [8]. Additionally, a list of all known tournaments in Missouri for the 2009-2010 season has been maintained on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board to increase the visibility of tournaments that have been announced and to better expose scheduling conflicts. Hopefully, the revamped MACA website will also encourage more coaches to announce their tournaments online.

State Tournament Hosting

Before 1995-1996, MACA hosted the Missouri State Tournament series.

Question Providers:

1992: Answers Plus [9]

2006-2007 Officers

• President: Jeremy Gibbs (Fort Zumwalt West)
• Vice-President: Al Nicolai (Central (Cape Girardeau))
• Treasurer: Don Pippin (Crystal City)
• Secretary: Beth McCrary (Lexington)
• Newsletter Editor: Lori Chester (St. Joseph Christian)

Website

The MACA website was recently 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. It remains to be seen if the new website will successfully encourage more coaches to take a more active role in open communication between quizbowl participants in Missouri.

MACA Website