"As always, my opinion does not necessarily reflect those of the rest of my team or its alumni, although I'd be interested to hear what Tim Young has to say on this topic..." Very well, Mike. I have run QB organizations at two very different campuses, Dartmouth and GWU. Naturally, the challenges I faced at each institution differed markedly. Both are fine schools that have long traditions of having AC programs. In my four years at Dartmouth, we produced a fair number of good players, and I had large numbers of quality teammates ready to go to tournaments, which is something I frequently struggled to find at GW. However, Dartmouth is significantly smaller than any other Ivy school in total enrollment, and has few grad students (the Dartmouth team, AFAIK, has never had any.) I would guess that, as a rule, the Ivies have a higher percentage of students who wouldn't embarass themselves at QB than other colleges (same goes for the Ivy peer schools like Chicago and Stanford). The toughest part of keeping Dartmouth College Bowl afloat was money. Dartmouth was largely unable to raise its own money by running tournaments, mostly due to geographic isolation (2 hrs to the closest tournament, the closest major airport, and the closest regular AC program) There is also very little HS quizbowl in northern New England compared with the DC metro area or parts of the South, an avenue used by most DC-area circuit teams. Further, every event was a substantial commitment, everything not in Boston was an overnight stay, and air travel was out of the question. And yet the isolation was helpful in a way to us. As one can imagine, there was very little, the administration's best efforts notwithstanding, to do at Dartmouth that doesn't involve fraternity basements, bad beer, or both. Since not everyone there wanted to be part of that culture (at least not every weekend), seldom did we struggle to find four people willing to take a road trip. This has got to be part of the reason Dartmouth is able to send three squads to a tournament over 7 hours away (Penn Bowl) every year. OTOH, at GW, there are lots of other things to do in the area, on and off campus. This availability of social options makes travelling to somewhere like Penn State or Princeton or to a tournament with a perceived low "fun level" (e.g. Terrapin) a tough sell for students. A lot of this doesn't apply to other Ivies (except Cornell to some degree). Each has their own idiosyncratic set of factors plus and minus. If I had to list the general advantages, I would submit 1. A higher percentage of people who would make good QB players if so inclined. 2. A bigger student activities endowment than most schools, which means that an AC program is more likely to be better funded. (Every tution hike and at GW causes controversy, and budget cuts happen ; budget cuts at Dartmouth are laregly unheard of and few on campus pay attention to tutition hikes.) 3. A general focus on liberal arts majors, a set of disciplines more likely to produce QB players. (Dartmouth doesn't generally have career-centered majors like marketing or journalism and has comparatively few engineers/hard science types) 4. A set of students less likely to need to work their way through part of school, either due to coming from means or from big scholarship money. (Nothing kills a QB career faster than a job that requires you to spend your weekends working.) -Tim Young President Emeritus, Dartmouth College Bowl
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