Practice

It's easy to sum it up if you're just talking about practice. We're sitting here, and I'm supposed to be the franchise player, and we're talking about practice. I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but we're talking about practice. ... We're talking about practice man. ...We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We're not talking about the game. We're talking about practice. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you've seen me play right, you've seen me give everything I've got, but we're talking about practice right now. --Allen Iverson

Most quizbowl programs host regularly-scheduled practices. Most teams host practice on some weekday afternoons or evenings, after classes are over, though some schools with an "activity period" during the school day (such as Dorman) are able to run quizbowl practices during a period that would otherwise be class time.

Practices are usually run by the coach (or, if there is no coach, by the team captain). The most common quizbowl practice activity is reading packets from previous tournaments to all the attending members of the team. Some teams use some of their practice time to look up or learn about important quizbowl topics. Key goals of practice include increasing players' familiarity with quizbowl, improvement of playing instincts, and straightforward knowledge acquisition.

Regular attendance at practice is a critical sign of dedication and a vital ingredient to quizbowl improvement. A player who attends multiple practices a week throughout the year, and hears good, difficulty-appropriate academic questions at all of them, will have a much better sense of what comes up in quizbowl matches than a player who does not, and is likely to learn much more by osmosis due to their exposure to a higher number of questions.