Rice University College Bowl

r2aslet · Mon, 03 Sep 2001 19:30:54 -0700

Hello all,

My name's Stephen Aslett, I'm a
junior at Rice U. in Houston, and this is my first post
to the quizbowl group.

I'm posting this
because it looks as if, after years of neglect, Rice is
finally getting its act together and is going to have a
relatively active quiz bowl organization. In the past, Rice
has only attended CBI regionals and one or two other
local invitational tournaments. However, this year, I
and a few other QB diehards are working to ensure
that the administration provides us with enough funds
to allow us to make it to at least one big out of
state tournament this year (possibly PennBowl). In
addition to travel money, we're also attempting to raise
funds for some new equipment (right now, we have a
grand total of one buzzer system and one
clock).

I'm posting this message because I was wondering if
any of the people on this list had any
recommendations for places to buy assorted QB equipment (buzzers,
timers, question packets, etc) at a decent price.
Unfortunately, despite its large endowment, Rice has been
notoriously stingy with its funds, so the cheaper, the better
(as long as the stuff isn't so cheap that it's
crap).

Also, if anyone has any advice on how to help get a new
group off of the ground (I've already read NAQT's FAQ
on the subject), it would be much appreciated. At
this point early in the semester, what we're trying to
do is gauge the level student interest, come up with
an operating budget, and decide which tournaments to
potentially attend. So far, we've come up with a preliminary
list of:

Texas A&M Juniorbird
CBI Regionals
(Region 12)
NAQT South Sectionals
PennBowl
XI

Of course, we'll also try to attend any local
invitationals that we can. If anyone on this board is in CB in
our area and knows of potential local invitational
tournaments (read local as Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and
Arkansas) that are coming up and could let us know about
them, we'd appreciate that as well.

Hopefully,
if all goes well, you'll be seeing a much larger and
much better organized Rice College Bowl team this
year.

Thanks for any and all help,

Stephen Aslett