TRASH

TRASH or Testing Recall About Strange Happenings was an organization that produces the Trash (i.e. pop culture) tournaments TRASH Regionals and TRASHionals. They also produced at least two editions of the TRASH Junior Bird set and one summer open, Viva TRASH Vegas.

TRASH held its first events in the 1997-1998 academic year and went on hiatus following the holding of TRASHIONALS 13 in spring 2010.

Members as of 2010

Members who left before 2010

Advisors

Trash v. TRASH

Despite the capitalization, many people seem unaware that TRASH is an acronym, and are prone to announcing their own "TRASH tournaments" that have nothing to do with the TRASH organization.

Format

TRASH tournaments generally used an ACF-style game format, sometimes with slight variations such as an extra tossup per game, not breaking ties, or scoring the standings in a way besides win-loss.

Rules

All TRASH Regionals and TRASHionals tournaments were open. While some teams self-awarded themselves titles such as "highest-finishing all undergraduate team at TRASHionals," this was not an officially sanctioned division.

Championship belt

At some point following the demise of Extreme Championship Wrestling, the ECW heavyweight title belt fell into the possession of TRASH, and was subsequently awarded to each TRASHionals champion.

Winners

Of the 13 TRASHionals held, 4 of them were won by a team of Michigan alums organized by Craig Barker and another 4 by a greater Oklahoma coalition including Brian Hight. 2 more were won by a team of Tennessee-area people led by Michael Kearney. The remaining titles were won by a team of mostly Case Western affiliates, a team representing Berkeley (the only entirely school-affiliated team to win), and a Mid-Atlantic team led by Tim Young.

Controversy

TRASH tournaments were criticized by some for their excessive difficulty and focus on material from subjects or time periods unlikely to appeal to current college students. Some rule deviations such as the lame were poorly thought out from the perspective of fairly constructed packets. The shortcomings in TRASH inspired the writing of Chicago Open Trash, CULT, and other tournaments that married an all-trash distribution to the principles of good quizbowl.

TRASH was much more relaxed about announcing its tournament sites, announcing its national qualification, and briskly running TRASHionals itself than other organizations were at comparable tasks. The controversial 2010 TRASHionals at Penn, in which contending team Illinois missed the finals due in part to a forfeit loss caused by receiving contradictory information from different tournament officials as to when Sunday rounds began, marked the beginning of a dialogue about resolving these issues which was mooted by the organization's suspension of operations.