As someone else said, run an in-school tournament, or if you have a small group interested, invite parents and businesses from your community. We have the same funding problems, especially since we only started last year. We just ran an intramural tournament for the kids and teachers in our school and the final will be this Monday. It's not that hard; promoting the event is actually the most difficult part because a lot of people are like "wha? quizbowl? what the heck?!" You can find some sample scoresheets online if you even want to keep track. Make sure you have all the games scheduled ahead of time and have scrap paper and pens ready since most people won't know enough. Throw in a few extra trash questions to make it more fun for the outsiders (so you don't completely embarrass them). The most work-intensive part of organizing the tournament is getting all the questions ready. You don't realize it, but 20 questions a round * at least 4 rounds if you have 10 or so teams participating = a whole HECK of a lot of questions. Personally, it made it a lot easier on us to not worry about photocopying question packets and giving each moderator a round 1 packet, round 2 packet, etc... Instead we just gave each moderator a stack of question packets, no matter if they were different in each room. Also, sell food at the event. You'd be surprised at the number of kids who'll stay after school for another 2 hours just to watch their friends crush (or be crushed by) their teachers. Go to your local discount supermarket - Costco is good - and buy some chips, soda, Snapple, candy, etc. Sell for 50 cents, 1 dollar max. Pizza is really good if you can manage that. Anyway, hope this helps. Jessica Chong
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