The following piece can also be found and commented on in my weblog (http://answerguy.blogspot.com) Dwight Kidder in his weblog (http://dek.blogspot.com) challenged other quiz bowl players and miscellaneous circuit personalities to express their current state of the academic competition circuit, where they think it is going, and their vision of academic competition's future. Things are going this way. I strongly detect a difficulty arms race afoot as players, editors and especially question writers search and search ever more intently for new topics for questions, going ever further from common knowledge inexorably towards esoterica and minutia. I walk into practices at GW now and see freshmen and sophomores scratching their heads at an ever- increasing proportion of questions we come across. At first I wondered if it's just a matter of us not having talented younger players, but then I ask myself how I would have done as a freshman or sophomore on some of this stuff. I don't know how to enforce this at a practical level, but I've been thinking the last couple of years that it's time to push the dinosaur players more to the margins. I imagine it's going to have to come about with some sort of mandatory restrictions. But even if we don't resort to that… those of you who've been playing quiz bowl for seven, eight, nine, ten or more years have to ask start asking yourself something, particularly if you've already got numerous tournament titles, All- Star awards, and national championships and such, as most people who've been around the block a few times do. What does yet another a 400-point thrashing of a team of first years who've never played before prove? At some point, isn't it time to stop getting your jollies by beating up on 18 year olds on questions you've probably heard before? I imagine that for today's would-be circuit entrants, it's pretty discouraging to get stomped on by people who've been playing for six or eight or ten years. Now the supporters of the status quo counter with "Well, newcomers to golf can't be expected to be competitive with Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson or Ernie Els or Sergio Garcia, at least at first. Why should quiz bowl be any different?" Well, for one thing, we're still trying to establish ourselves as a popular activity. This is really hard to do when even average circuit tournaments now have a difficulty comparable to that of the old Tennessee Masters, which back in the day was legendary for not being for the faint of heart. We've essentially up to now failed to take advantage of the foibles and weaknesses of the former 800-pound gorilla of academic competition, College Bowl, and the unity that their threats to shut us down brought; we've largely failed at our efforts to add new life to our circuit by including more once-a-year schools in on the action. For another thing, the skill and experience level of the playing field profoundly influence, well, our closest analog to a playing field. You don't ask novice freshmen who've never golfed before to make par at Pebble Beach, or people taking the wheel of car for the first time to negotiate Washington's Dupont Circle without functioning turn signals*. Yet this is exactly what we are asking of our freshmen and sophomores when we send them into battle against a team that consists of - to be somewhat non- hypothetical about it - Dave Hamilton, Mike Starsinic, and Adam Fine. This is particularly true if most of the questions have been pitched at a level as to be appealing to that type of player. Tournaments pitched at people like myself or Dwight Kidder have their place, but most invitationals are now like that and have been for a number of years. Speaking collectively, we're question connoisseurs who've heard many ways to write many questions and are biased by our own experience to write questions we haven't heard before, which as a matter of necessity are going to generate blank stares by a great majority of circuit players. When we do this, we're not generally <I>trying< /I> to stump players the way some writers new to high-level quiz bowl and eager to fit in do because they are under the impression high difficulty is what we're looking for. But the end result is the same. Our presence as players (and sometimes as writers and editors as well) is making quiz bowl progressively less accessible. Yes, novice tournaments are part of the solution. However, their scope is a bit narrow, and they generally do not serve the vital function of teaching younger players the fundamentals of question writing, which is essential to our survival as a circuit for two reasons. One, it helps develop future question writers when the current crop of mostly retired players now supporting the circuit moves on, and two, it is one of the best ways for young players to improve their games so that they might one day compete amidst the giants. It is my opinion that most tournaments should restrict to at least some degree graduate student play and that NAQT and ACF should have player eligibility rules that more closely resemble those of College Bowl (six year limit on participating in "official" tournaments). It's the only way to start clearing out the players who are in large part driving the arms race. I know there are tradeoffs. A circuit with higher turnover leads to some loss of institutional memory, in addition to less experienced writing and editing that penetrates all levels of the game, and possible less capable officiating. But if the circuit ever wants to grow, it has position itself for growth by making it more attractive to outsiders. And I remain unconvinced there aren't enough people willing to stick around in a non-playing capacity to help stave off the problems I listed above. There's still plenty of room for players who have exhausted their eligibility in this fashion. There are masters' tournaments to play in and there's no reason there can't be more of them than there are now, particularly if there are more people out there only eligible for masters' competition. There are trash tournaments also, although it might be time for TRASH itself to consider some limits on eligibility of its own, and for there to be a trash circuit primarily aimed at college students. Standard invitationals should be much more newbie-friendly. Teams should write their own questions, and if they're not up to the sort of standards we would hold, say, ACF Nationals, so what? Question quality at the margins may diminish in the short run. But people learn how to write questions better as they get feedback on how well received their questions were, both immediate feedback by other teams and by staff and via something like the Yahoo! group. They'll learn what players, both rookies and veterans liked or didn't like about their set. That's how we'll get our future Dwight Kidders and Adam Fines that we need to keep our circuit running, to write questions for national tournaments and to serve as guardians for the circuit's future. Now, I'm not suggesting that we pitch everything at newcomers. Surely at tournaments designed for masters' level play, or tournaments played with national titles at stake, novice players should be on sufficient notice that questions they submit (if any) will be judged against the highest standards of playability, they will be facing the heavy hitters, that their skills will be tested accordingly and that the results might not be pretty. But such events should be the exception rather than the rule. As it stands right now, packets by newer teams tend to not get used at all in submission tournaments or are radically rewritten to more resemble what a top level squad who's already heard the standard clues to everything would find challenging. The end result is discouraged entry-level programs, disheartened not only by low finishes (which, to be sure, are a part of any competitive activity) but by seemingly not fitting in to an established quiz bowl culture as inaccessible as the deepest ocean trenches. And as a tournament editor many times over, I admit I've been as guilty as anyone in the past of these sorts of practices. I catered to established customers running GWU's tournaments, academic and trash, doing my best to make my fellow grizzled vets happy while probably turning off and scaring away possible new converts. I don't know if after all this time I'm capable of writing or editing in any other fashion, escaping the mental block that years on the quiz circuit, playing and otherwise, has placed on me. But I should find myself with the spare time to increase my involvement in the quiz bowl circuit back to what it was when I was less busy with my life, I'll do my best to keep that in mind. * Yes, I did this once on my first trip to Washington, though I had already been driving six years at that time.
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