MSHSAA
MSHSAA (The Missouri State High School Activities Association) is the organization responsible for running Missouri's district and state quizbowl championships, taking over the role from MACA in the 1995-96 season.
Format and Distribution
The Missouri format consists of four quarters:
- 1st quarter: 15 tossups
- 2nd quarter: 10 tossups with bonuses
- 3rd quarter: 15 tossups
- 4th quarter: 10 tossups with bonuses
All tossups are worth 10 points; all bonuses are worth 20 points. Previously, they contained four parts worth five points each, but for the 2009-2010 season, the four part bonuses were changed to two part bonuses worth ten points each. There are no powers or negs. The maximum score in a MSHSAA game is thus 900.
The Missouri distribution consists of:
- Science: 10/4
- Math: 10/4
- Social Studies: 10/4
- Literature: 10/4
- Fine Arts: 6/2
- Miscellaneous/Vocational Education: 4/2
It was previously inaccurate to refer to either the format or the distribution as MSHSAA's, since both of them predate the organization's involvement in Missouri quizbowl. However, MSHSAA recently implemented a change by removing 3/1 Language Arts and adding those questions to the Fine Arts distribution. This change, combined with the change in bonus format, have made the current Missouri format uniquely MSHSAA's.
MSHSAA State Series Question Providers
- 1996, 1997, 1998: ?
- 1999-2002: The Question Bank (Bob Brown)
- Following the 2002 season, Bob Brown began teaching at Richland
- 2003: Champions
- 2004: Straight A
- 2005-2007: Bryce Avery
- 2008: Shawn Pickrell
- 2009-2010: Questions Galore
MSHSAA and Quizbowl
While more Missouri schools have formed quizbowl teams since MSHSAA became involved, some people feel that MSHSAA is out of touch with the desires of quizbowl players. Notably, MSHSAA's liaison to academic competition, Stacy Schroeder, had no previous experience with quizbowl. Many players have complained that MSHSAA's insistence on applying the same regulations to quizbowl as they do to sports hold back the state's best teams. Examples of these rules include: limiting teams to 14 competitions per season, banning teams from traveling further than 250 miles out of state for regular-season tournaments, and restricting how teams can attend national competitions.
Benefits of MSHSAA's involvement with Quizbowl
The only real benefit of MSHSAA's involvement in Quiz Bowl has been to put in on the same footing as other more traditional activities such as athletics. Quiz Bowl's status as "a MSHSAA activity" helps grant it status lacking to other academic activities such as Science Olympiad, Chemistry Bowl, and Destination Imagination.
Criticism of MSHSAA's involvement with Quizbowl
Format and Question Provider Selection
The questions used at MSHSAA's events have traditionally been extremely short, and provided by companies that continue to promote bad quizbowl.
Questions were provided by Bryce Avery from 2005-2007. Previous providers include Champions and Straight A.
The 2008 questions, written by Shawn Pickrell, were more pyramidal and largely heralded as an improvement over Avery's questions. In April 2008, Pickrell, citing overextension, announced he would no longer provide questions in Missouri.
MSHSAA's decision to allow the national tournament question to come to a vote and to procure higher-quality questions for its tournaments were widely praised by the Missouri community. Unfortunately, these improvements did not continue. In yet another characteristic move to stifle the growth of good quizbowl, MSHSAA has awarded Questions Galore the bid to write the 2008-2009 state championship series. This led to many independent tournaments being run on sets by Questions Galore, which is a company plagued by awful writing, a severe lack of literature, use of math computation that is simply impossible to answer in the given time limits, a general disregard for any reasonable distribution, and overall ignorance of standard writing procedures in quizbowl.
Stacked districts
One problem with the MSHSAA championship series is the existence of districts or sectionals with multiple top teams (Richland and Fordland in Class 2 Districts 9/10; North Kansas City and Liberty in Class 4 District 15). Because only the winner of each sectional advances to the state finals, on multiple occasions this has resulted in the second best team in a class not advancing to state because the best team was in their district or sectional.
In the worst case of stacked districts possible in Missouri, for the 2008-2009 season, Savannah moved up to Class 4 and was placed in District 16. Liberty and North Kansas City were placed in District 15, placing three of the top teams in the state in a pair of districts feeding into the same sectional, meaning it was only possible for one of the three to advance to the state tournament.
Sectionals
Until 2008, each class had been divided into 8 geographically-determined districts, with the winner of each district advancing to the state championship. For the 2009 championship series, districts were divided in two, with the winners of two adjacent districts meeting the following Thursday at a sectional meet, hosted by the odd-numbered district winner, playing a best 2-of-3 matchup to determine which team advances to state.
The proposal was received negatively on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board.[1] While adding an additional level of competition with a best 2-of-3 format may marginally improve the fairness of competition, it adds additional transportation costs, room reservations, personnel overhead, and participant time that make the extra competition unreasonable. In one extreme case, if Kirksville had won its district at Marshall High School 120 miles away, the team would have had to travel another 200 miles each way to St. Charles County to play the District 7 champion the following Thursday. The longest travel distance to sectionals that actually occurred was Bradleyville's 230 mile drive each way, mostly on two-lane highways, to Bell City.
At least one coach has stated this change was made because many schools (especially smaller ones) have trouble staffing a tournament for the larger district size. This was not indicated during the discussion on the Missouri message board, but that doesn't change the fact that it does not improve the fairness of the MSHSAA championship series. In practice, it resulted in several districts with only two or three participating teams, and in the case of Class 2 District 9, perennial state champion Richland won by default as the other five teams decided not to participate.[2]
Restrictions on Participation
MSHSAA's definition of the Academic Competition season, as defined in the Academic Competition Manual, section 4.C, is:
No senior high school or junior high school shall participate in an interscholastic academic competition before the second Friday in October nor later than the date of the MSHSAA District Competition, exclusive of the MSHSAA state competition, except to participate in a summertime interstate, interscholastic academic competition event only if the school has advanced from a qualifying event that takes place during the aforementioned season.
Restrictions on National Competitions
To attend a national quizbowl competition, MSHSAA member schools must:
- Qualify at an event during the regular season. This means that Missouri teams cannot attend as a wildcard. Qualifying events have become more common as more higher-quality tournaments are run on NAQT IS sets and affiliated with PACE.
- Be out of school before the competition. This rule will prohibit most schools from attending the 2009 PACE NSC. (This is disputed; the actual rule might only prohibit teams from attending national tournaments held before Memorial Day weekend)
In the past, this rule was ambiguous, but in 2007 member schools voted between three options to make the definition more precise. These options were:
- The academic competition season should end with the state tournament and participation beyond this date should not be interscholastic (participants could not represent their school). (91 votes)
- Interscholastic academic competition should be allowed to continue into and throughout the summer. (55 votes)
- A school academic competition team should be allowed to participate in a summertime national interscholastic competition only if the school has advanced from a qualifying event that takes place during the academic year. (130 votes)
The winning option, which allows attendance at national tournaments but only by qualifying, was later approved in another vote by MSHSAA member schools.
250-mile rule
Matching the rules for MSHSAA's sport activities, teams may not attend any tournament further than 250 miles from the borders of Missouri. This rule may be barely relaxed, as in 2008 the Academic Competition Advisory Committee recommended an amendment allowing teams to travel to one tournament outside of the 250-mile radius. [3]
The Charlie Dees Rule
In May 2008 the Academic Competition Advisory Committee approved a resolution that the 2009 Area Meetings discuss adopting By-Law 292.0, informally known as the "Charlie Dees Rule", which states:
New By-Law 292.0 NON-SCHOOL COMPETITION
During the season a student represents his or her school by competing in an interscholastic contest:
a. He or she shall neither practice nor compete as a member of a non-school team or as an individual participant in organized non-school competition that meets the MSHSAA academic competition definition. A competition shall be considered "organized" if any of the following conditions exist: competition is scheduled and publicized in advance, official score is kept, individual or team standings are maintained, official timer or game officials are used, admission is charged, teams are regularly formed or team rosters are predetermined, squad members are dressed in team uniforms or a team is privately or commercially sponsored. Further, competition which is either directly or indirectly sponsored, promoted or administered by an individual, organization, or any other agency shall be considered organized.
b. A student shall not have competed at any time as a member of a junior college or a senior college team if he or she desires to compete in academic competition in high school.
c. A student who joins a school team for the first time must have abided by these restrictions beginning with the first day of the current season."
Specifically, this rule is intended to prevent students from competing "with and against collegiate students", and it is thought that the motivation behind this rule is that several coaches viewed Charlie Dees' desire to get better at quizbowl, especially through playing with and against better players, was somehow inherently unfair.
This rule, as with all rules unreasonably banning quizbowl-playing students from participating in quizbowl, was met with severe backlash on the hsquizbowl forums.
Fortunately, at the 2008-2009 MSHSAA Area Meetings, the proposal was overwhelmingly defeated by the assembled superintendents, principals, athletic directors, and other administrative personnel from 510 MSHSAA member schools who attended. Seven of the eight sites were 100% opposed, while no percentage of opposition was listed for the eighth, while that site's comment ("Athletics is safety") didn't make much sense. Reasons cited were the ambiguity of the rule and its possible encroachment on Trivia Night-like activities and the fact that such a restriction limits students' opportunities to learn. [4]
Treated like a sport
The only response MSHSAA ever gives to criticism of its handling of quiz bowl is that the same rules apply to sports; thus, it should apply to Academic Competition as well. Notably, in the discussion of the Sectionals proposal, Jeremy Gibbs, president of MACA and the Missouri forum's primary source of MSHSAA information, repeatedly implied that the justification for a sectionals system as opposed to one with the top two teams in a district advancing to the next stage of competition is that the latter "is not how any other sport works." [5] However, the system used for Cross Country, in which multiple teams from Districts advance to sectionals, is similar to improved systems proposed on the Missouri board. [6]
State Championship Results
A list of tournament records, which is printed in the state tournament program, is also available on the Missouri Academic Competition Message Board