Thought I'd give my two cents from the perspective of a team that's been on the circuit for a long period of time and still gets beaten quite frequently (there are a number of reasons for this which I won't go into in this post). Dartmouth hasn't been to an ACF tournament in the past three years and had generally shunned ACF as too difficult for our tastes. After the discussion here this summer, we decided to try it and I must say we had a good time. However, I agree with many of the areas of improvement that Mark Coen mentioned earlier (more bonus intro, pronunciation keys, and typo problems), we found the tournament to be accessible and ended up in the middle of the pack (3-1 and 3-1). I also cleared 30 ppg for the first time ever, something I have no business doing in a tournament devoid of Trash. Though ACF did a good job in making its format more accessible, I think it has some more work to do. The fact that I had 30 was mostly the result of me having participated in college bowl for more than three years. The other players on my team were younger and their numbers were significantly lower (with one exception). Teams that are just getting started on the circuit and newer players had a much harder time with the questions that seemed to me to be the result of inexperience. There should be a differential between older players and younger players based on experience, but the gap was too large in my opinion. Also, we managed to record a -33 to 0 win in the first section as a Yale team forfeited to us, but showed up later forcing us to take the average point differential to equalize tiebreaks. Because we got walloped by a Harvard team, this strange situation occurred. Still, I think that for the most part my opinion of ACF improved considerably over the weekend. I applaud their efforts so far at making things more accessible and hope to see them go further to remain focused on academic questions, but to even out the experience factor. No one likes to be beaten by teams and players who are so overwhelming through their myriad years of experience that start-up or less-experienced teams are at a severe disadvantage. Michael Philpy President, Dartmouth College Bowl P.S. As a Lafayette, IN native, I am thankful for teams like DePauw that attempt to bring quiz bowl to the Hoosier state. I certainly hope it spreads to the high schools, as I would have loved to play.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:45 AM EST EST