Jeremy Gibbs
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| Current team: Fort Zumwalt West | ||||||
| Career record: | ||||||
| Former school(s): none | ||||||
| Other leadership: MACA president (2006-Present) | ||||||
Jeremy Gibbs is currently the Coach of Fort Zumwalt West's Scholar Quiz team and president of the Missouri Academic Coaches Association. Under his tenure, the Zumwalt West team has grown to a size previously unheard of in Missouri, with about twenty Varsity players returning for the 2008-2009 season. Gibbs holds a number of views, such as promoting math computation and speed sets over pyramidal sets, which make him the target of ire on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board and Quizbowl Resource Center forum.
Tournament Hosting
Jeremy Gibbs is currently the coordinator for the St. Louis area Two Saints Conference. Fort Zumwalt West also hosted the first annual Fort Zumwalt West Invitational on January 16th, 2010 on questions from Questions Galore. [1]
Opinions and Tendencies
On Other Formats
Upon joining the Missouri message board, Gibbs originally criticized tournaments not using the official MSHSAA format and rules, asking why Quiz Bowl couldn't become an official sport in Missouri through universal use of MSHSAA rules [2]. He has somewhat loosened on this opinion, recently saying that he has "come to respect the benefit of competing in the varying styles" [3], though subsequent comments indicate that he still believes MSHSAA format to be superior.
Responsiveness to Criticism
As the President of MACA and the only MSHSAA Academic Competition Advisory Committee member who currently posts to the Missouri boards, Gibbs has also been criticized for his tendency to not respond to arguments against his opinions or to criticism of MSHSAA or its official question provider; he has justified his lack of response as being because he "hate[s] reading lines and lines of complaining" and says he ignores threads with posts he views as limited to complaining [4].
The most notable example of this lack of responsiveness to criticism can be found in his tendency to avoid actively criticizing 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 MSHSAA provider Questions Galore. Because of this, Gibbs has gained a reputation for accepting and even supporting those questions, which he justifies by referencing similar off-board acceptance of such questions, disregarding the fact that such acceptance generally comes from teams unfamiliar with good quizbowl and that several coaches expressed concern for re-contracting the company for the 2009-2010 season. His choice to run a tournament on Questions Galore questions (even calling them "great" [5]) after repeatedly seeing good quizbowl in action at Missouri S&T, Truman State, and Washington University suggests that he is continuing to be unconcerned with bad questions as long as they are used by Missouri's state provider--or merely in favor of bad questions.
Math Computation
Gibbs is a math teacher and supports computational math because he has "a masters in mathematics and understand[s] some of the beauty involved with it". He seems to misunderstand the arguments against computational math in quizbowl, believing those arguing against math computation are attacking people proficient in math [6], despite the fact that math majors such as Matt Chadbourne are among those against math computation in quizbowl. Notably, math has been used to dispute several of Gibbs' opinions on quizbowl. [7]