Re: Div 1/Div 2

ZAMM_Phaedrus · Thu, 18 Oct 2001 19:47:15 -0700

On certain levels, your analysis is flawed, in
that individual PPG is only a very rough guide to
judging who the top players are, ignoring such things as
teammate shadow effects and bonus performance. Also, this
is, for the most part, a team game. There are lots of
l=players out there who could be top scorers if they played
solo or with trained chimps. They'd also lose a lot of
games. And if they played with trained chimps, they
might smell like chimp after the
tournament.

That being said, I think that the main reasons that
people thought up such things as Division Two, junior
birds, and even trash is to increase overall levels of
participations. 

People complain in NCAA basketball that
people are concerned too much about the tournament at
the end of the year. I think that, on some level,
there is that sort of problem in quizbowl. There is a
place for teams analogous to mid-major and minor
conference teams. An overreaching conception of quizbowl--at
both the college and high school levels--should
address the needs and desires of these teams.

I
don't think I'm overreaching in using a sports analogy
here. Yes, it's a game, but it's a game that a lot of
us take seriously. Not everyone has the same
abilities. Some people will never be a great player, no
matter how hard they work at it. For some, the best that
they can hope for in this game is to be a role player
who may not make the A team (or, on some squads, the
B team.) There are multiple paths. Some will get
there by reading, some by writing questions, some need
to hear questions. 

It's incorrect to
complain about age differences. Some people will have a
life course won't start college right after high
school and do so continuously. Some undergrads are
dominant. Some grad students suck despite years of
quizbowl.

People, if they take this game seriously, should strive
to do the best they can, within whatever constraints
the rest of their lives give them. Various
stratifications of the game allow some people to better see how
well they are achieving their goal. It is one thing to
play D2 because your talent level is approximately the
same as other teams there. It is another thing to
coast on what you know with no self-improvement and
hide out in D2, staying away from better teams, as I
have heard some schools being accused. 

When I
play in a tournament, my goals have always been to win
at least one game that most people would think my
team wouldn't and to try not to lose any games that my
team should win. Based on past experience, it seems
like the former is easier than the
latter.

Bottom line: Not everyone's a winner. Not everyone's
going to be. Different levels of quizbowl good. All
quizbowl at one level targeted primarily towards a
specific strata of teams bad. Special Olympics quizbowl
where everyone's a winner bad.