National championship
A national championship is an event purporting to award a title to the best quizbowl team in a particular country. Over the years a number of national championships have been held for college, high school, and middle school levels of play, with widely varying formats and question quality.
History of national level play
Don Reid developed the College Bowl format for American university students after success with a similar program for American GIs during WWII. The tournament began in 1953 as a broadcasted event on NBC radio. In 1953 College Bowl made the transition to television as the medium became more popular among American households. For 40 years the College Bowl tournament was the premier American collegiate academic competition. During the 1990's, for a variety of reasons, College Bowl's popularity began to diminish. The Academic Competition Federation was established in 1991 by college quizbowl players who were dissatisfied over the CBI's handling of quiz bowl and held an alternate national championship. In 1997 the newly founded National Academic Quiz Tournaments company held the first Intercollegiate Tournament (ICT) and aimed hold academic competition with the same organization as College Bowl but with better questions. Over the years good schools left the CBI sponsored tournament for good quizbowl and ultimately in 2008 the company became bankrupt and folded, after almost 60 years of existence. Today, there are two major college national championships, ICT and ACF nationals, and are slightly different. A spin-off of CBI, the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge, exists for historically black colleges.
For high school level play, there have also been a number of Corporate sponsorship has also contributed to formation and continued existence of several national championship tournaments from time to time like the Panasonic All-Star Challenge.
Active titles (scheduled to be awarded in 2014)
Defunct titles
|