How to Coach Quizbowl
This page is intended as a quick-start guide for anyone who is new to coaching, sponsoring, or advising a quizbowl team. While there may be differences between different specific types of quizbowl, Knowledge Bowl, Scholars Bowl, Academic Challenge, or whatever other name it may be called in your area, there are a number of common features of quizbowl and general strategies for guiding a team.
Basic Quizbowl Sponsor Guidelines
- Organize and Recruit a Team
If you are starting a quizbowl team at a school without an existing team, you'll need to advertise to get the word out about quizbowl. Making use of morning announcements, newsletters, school Facebook groups, personalized invitations to intellectually curious students, flyers and posters in hallways and rooms, etc. may all be helpful techniques. See also PACE's excellent guide to quizbowl recruitment for more ideas and advice. If you already have an existing team at your school, use the returning students on the team to help you recruit as well.
Check to see if your school or district has any specific paperwork that you need to make quizbowl an official activity (this may also have implications for stipends). You may also want to register for a local city or county or regional league of some kind if your area has it, though do note that leagues and regional competitions may vary widely in the extent to which they follow good quizbowl practices that provide a fair and fun competition for all students.
- Learn the basic rules of quizbowl
The specific rules used at local events in your area may vary, but most pyramidal quizbowl tournaments around the country use similar sets of rules from NAQT or PACE that you can find online. It may help to watch some matches of quizbowl on YouTube or a video introduction to quizbowl. Other local coaches or college teams may also be happy to help you.
- Help students attend tournaments
This means encouraging students to identify and sign-up for tournaments and to complete any requirements that your school or district might have to allow students to compete such as permission slips or other forms. Tournaments are usually posted on the Hsquizbowl.org forums tournament announcements sections, on NAQT's tournament schedule, or on websites for a local league or state competition. In-person tournaments usually require a sponsor or a chaperone on campus with students, but online events usually only need contact information for a sponsor. Check to see what your school or district requires as well.
- Provide practice space or practice times once or twice a week
This is usually done in-person, but practices can also be held online. While coaches may need to provide some structure to practices at first by greeting students, introducing the rules of quizbowl to them, and then reading questions, students can usually take over practice-running duties after some initial assistance from the coach.
- Direct students to quizbowl resources
There are many troves of free quizbowl resources, including practice questions, online at sites like the quizbowl packet archive. See this page for a comprehensive set of resources. Simply providing links to these to students and reminding them to look into them or finding ways to use them yourself will be a huge help.
- Provide advice and support for students
Students may have questions or issues with teammates or other teams, so providing adult supervision is of course a key part of being a sponsor.