VHSL Scholastic Bowl
The Virginia High School League, which governs Virginia public-school participation in extracurricular activities including sports and academic contests, began offering a Scholastic Bowl title in 1998. The VHSL championship is notable for being the only state championship associated with an activities association to be run on good Quiz Bowl questions, having signed a contract with HSAPQ to provide the questions beginning with the 2009-2010 season.
Structure
Since its inception, the tournament has used the VHSL's overall classification of schools into groups A, AA, and AAA based primarily on school size. In VHSL, schools can have their division adjusted from what their student body size alone should indicate if they are in a geographic region where most other schools are in a particular group, to make travel to athletic events easier; for state championship implications in Scholastic Bowl, this most notably affects Maggie Walker, which should be a group A school by enrollment numbers, but plays in group AAA in all VHSL events including Scholastic Bowl. As Governors' Schools, both Maggie Walker and Thomas Jefferson would play in Group AAA in academic activities even if they played down for athletic activities.
Each district produces two teams to send to regionals. Some districts hold a Saturday tournament for this purpose, some have a "regular season," and some have both, with each winner getting one of the spots. Two districts in southwestern Virginia have elected to not play Scholastic Bowl, choosing instead to play their traditional format.
Each of the four regional tournaments sends its top two teams to the state championship. The state championship consists of the top eight teams (in each enrollment class) playing a double-elimination tournament. The state championship has been held at William & Mary every year, but has not been affiliated with the quizbowl club created there in fall 2006.
Performance in Scholastic Bowl and other academic activities sponsored by VHSL (including debate, and forensics) counts towards a school's standing in the Wachovia Cup in Academics, an overall title awarded to the school with the best performance in all non-athletic VHSL events. There is also a Wachovia Cup for Athletics.
The tournament was first written and directed by Claude Sandy, a retired Academic Decathlon administrator with no prior connection to quizbowl. Tournaments in his 1998-2000 purview were noted for recycling questions and having less than 2 literature questions in an average match. Since Shawn Pickrell took over in 2001, the questions have steadily improved, though the odd distribution, format, and tournament structure still make VHSL events notoriously frustrating for teams more accustomed to regular quizbowl.
VHSL Format
The eccentric format used in VHSL matches consists of a round of fifteen tossups, ten "directed questions" for each team, and a concluding phase of fifteen more tossups. It is somewhat based on the format of the Mountain Academic Competition Conference and the Southwest Virginia Academic Conference, where ten "directed questions" per team are followed by ten tossups. At the end of the first round, the team that is behind may choose either set A or set B of the "directed questions." Question 1 from set A is read to the team who has set A, and if the team misses it, the other team can answer the question. The remaining questions are read in alternate order (1B, 2A, 2B, etc.) until question 10 in set B. Much like on the "Match Game" television show, there is no discernible or non-random difference between the contents of "Set A" and "Set B", so the privilege of choosing first has no apparent value. Tossups are scored with the normal 10 and -5 system, and "directed" questions are worth 10 points each. Computation math questions are read twice to provide more solving time.
Problems
As the VHSL is an organization of public schools, such longstanding Virginia programs as St. Christopher's, Collegiate, and St. Anne's have been unable to participate in VHSL tournaments or compete for the state title. Such schools are eligible for the NAQT Virginia Championship.
While the distribution is no longer entirely bound by the Standards of Learning for high school curricula in Virginia (the first years required a 'citation' showing which part of SOL was being applied), there are more grammar, vocabulary, math calculation, and foreign language questions as compared to non-VHSL high school tournaments.
B teams are not eligible for VHSL participation, despite B teams from various schools often being among the 5-10 best teams in the state.
Some districts run a lengthy "regular season" on VHSL matches, conducted in brief after-school meets, which discourages teams from attending normal tournaments on Saturdays. However, many districts have never had a history of attending Saturday tournaments. The VHSL has never placed any limit on attendance at non-VHSL events, although individual districts may choose to place such restrictions.
District and regional scheduling is generally haphazard, unadvertised (even to teams attending!), and difficult to predict, which makes it virtually impossible to avoid a conflict with some Virginia teams when scheduling an independent high school tournament.
The format used at VHSL events is not used at any other tournament in Virginia, and does not reflect the normal conception of quizbowl in the state. This disconnect is also reflected in the tournament name, as "Scholastic Bowl" is a term rarely used to refer to quizbowl in Virginia. More often, "It's Academic," "ACE" (for Academic Competition for Excellence), "Academic Challenge," and "Battle of the Brains" are used.
Before the 2009-2010 season, the state tournament was run in double-elimination format, despite the fact that it could have been run in a round-robin with only 1 or 2 additional packets/rounds. Seeding is solely dependent on what region one comes out of and may prevent teams below the second-place team from being ranked accurately. Fortunately, one side effect of VHSL's overall transition to good Quiz Bowl in the 2009-2010 season was the changing of the format of the state tournament will switch to round-robin with the 2009-2010 season.
Questions in the Claude Sandy era were notorious for being among the worst ever produced for high school quizbowl, with leadins such as "This Beethoven opera" and "This Gaston Leroux novel" existing side by side with questions on the works of Zane Grey and attempts to uniquely define specious concepts such as "the separation of powers." Teams often had to play "Zen quizbowl" in which all emotions about the quality of the tournament were suppressed in order to avoid tournament-losing levels of distracting anger.
State Championship Results
Links
The VHSL Scholastic Bowl manual contains all the rules of Scholastic Bowl as well as an archive of state champions and regional winners: http://www.vhsl.org/ScholasticBowl/ScholasticBowlManual.pdf