Re: Whither ACF?

etchuck · Thu, 12 Apr 2001 07:53:36 -0700

Charlie,

I assure you that CWRU would have
attended ACF Nationals, especially since it was so close
to us compared to a trip to DC or Chicago... had it
not been scheduled in conflict with our own high
school tournament. I also anticipate that the shift by a
month upward in the calendar threw a lot of people into
conflicts with their spring breaks or other committments
being held at that time. I know the shift upwards in
the calendar for Regionals was deleterious in that we
could not organize while still in our winter break;
Josh and Brandon were still able to go to ACF
Regionals but only as a two-man team.

I recognize
that part of the changes in the schedule were due to
personal committments by those running the tournament, so
I would only assume that next year's competitions
will return to the old scheduled weekends, or at least
fairly close, depending on the personal committments of
those assigned to run ACF Regionals and Nationals next
year.

I know that over the last 12 (smaller !) years I
have been involved with college comps in some fashion
that ACF has always had a PR problem. It's tough to
shake that history of "very tough questions", though I
do recognize that Subash's Regional set was very
good in quality.

I am not sure what ACF could
itself do for righting its own ship, but I know for my
own part in running organizations (Trivia Club, PACE,
Graduate Student Senate, now Postdoc Researchers
Association) that a closed circle of organizers spawns a
perception of a clique or an elite group that no one can
penetrate. One of the things that in my opinion doomed the
first version of ACF (and seems to remain problematic
for this version) was that they didn't seem to
welcome (or want to welcome) anyone who even displayed an
interest in being in that inner circle unless they happen
to be "the best players." While I understand there
may be an issue of ensuring the highest quality of
questions, it also predisposed the ACF question sets to be
more difficult than the usual "average" program would
be accustomed to. Alienate the masses, and you will
find it difficult to draw teams to compete and to
recruit new people to your organization.

I have
had a number of people who have come through the CWRU
program (and those who were at Duke with me back in the
days) who would if allowed be very interested in being
part of the organization of ACF. We ourselves have
always been interested in hosting a sanctioned ACF
Regional but cannot due to the unfortunate geography of
being between a rock (Chicago) and a hard place
(Maryland) which hosts ACF Regionals (and until this year
Nationals) all the time. Despite these difficulties, our
organization remains interested in competing in ACF-sanctioned
tournaments in the near future, and we (and others around the
country) want to help keep the ship afloat. If they would
only let us.