Trash capture

Trash capture was a term used in the 2000s to refer to college clubs which became entirely or almost entirely devoted to playing trash tournaments, leaving no opportunity for students at those schools to participate in mainstream academic quizbowl.

After the demise of the competitive trash circuit following 2012 or so, some academic years included as few as 0 or 1 full-length trash tournaments; certain clubs somehow remained trash-captured, reading only trash at practice and declining to attend academic tournaments, which effectively resulted in them attending no tournaments at all.

No examples of trash capture later than 2015 are known to exist. Some teams, however, have seen a related form of this phenomenon in the form of bar trivia capture in which ostensible quizbowl teams spend more time and emphasis (or exclusively spend time) attending bar trivia than actual quizbowl practice or events.

Clubs which were in trash capture at some point between 2005 and 2012 included NYU, Villanova, Boston College, and UM-Morris.