Monroe City held an invitational tournament on Saturday, February 20th. The field consisted of 12 teams:

Canton
Centralia
Hannibal
Louisiana A
Louisiana B
Macon A
Macon B
Monroe City A
Monroe City B
Monroe City C
Paris
South Shelby

Centralia, Hannibal, Canton, South Shelby, Monroe City A, Macon A, Monroe City B and Macon B made the afternoon bracket.

Centralia took first, 200 to 160, over Hannibal.
Monroe City A beat Macon A for third place.
South Shelby defeated Canton in the consolation bracket.

Aaron Seider of Centralia was the top scorer with 14.33 toss-ups a game. Monroe City A's David Shively was second. Not sure about the rest of the all-tourney team.

Questions were provided by Questions Galore. If you want my opinion on the day's writing, just ask.

Why would Hannibal send part of their team to Warrenton and part of their team to Monroe City?

It must have been the jv team at Warrenton. Their scores were:

Hannibal 80, Pacific 290
Hannibal 90, Washington 120
Hannibal 50, Clopton B 110

Helias' varsity team was at Duchesne yesterday and their JV team was at Knob Noster.

I've considered splitting my teams up to get more question packets, and to get the JV more experience, but I no longer have a paid assistant coach willing to do that.

My guess would be that Hannibal was more confident that they would win the MC tournament, rather than against the field in Warrenton. If that's the case, we spoiled that notion, but they did pick up a few medals on the all-tournament squad.

Fortunately there are many free resources out there for you as a coach, so you do not need to worry about splitting up teams to get a hold of enough practice material. There are hundreds of free games you can download off of quizbowlpackets.com which are extremely effective if you want to get your team to dominate.

Sure, but nothing beats real tournament packets written by the same guy writing the district and state packets, especially since he repeats himself constantly.

Not to be disrespectful in any way, but how do you define "real" in your description of tournament packets, Mr. Ryan? I feel like studying packets from the sources Charlie alluded to in his post (www.quizbowlpackets.com, for example) has allowed me to grow as a quiz bowler. From my admittedly short experience with MSHSAA-style packets (I am guessing that you are talking about Questions Galore-style questions), I have found that those are often not good study materials. They, with a proliferation of one-line questions, do not provide me with the depth of knowledge needed to power/answer early more often. In addition, not all tournaments adhere to the MSHSAA distribution/question style. An example of this is any NAQT tournament, i.e. Spirit of St. Louis, the Villa tournament, etc. Studying questions from MSHSAA-style tournaments do not, on the whole, aid in preparing for a tournament of this type.

I think the point he's trying to make is that if he can get his hands on enough QG material, he'll have so many repeats from those packets at state.

I'd rather see Centralia grow as a powerhouse on the more NAQT/quizbowlpackets.com kind of questions, as they really emphasize a great depth of knowledge, over the one-liners that QG is notorious for.

I'm not going to defend QG. They're bad, and we all know that. When I said 'real' I meant authentic, not high quality.

I also want to clarify: we don't sit around and read QG all day for practice. We have volumes of pyramidal questions, including those from the links Charlie suggested.

I'm glad to hear you read pyramidal questions to your team. In my experience they definitely are some of the best preparatory material out there for teams, even if you are getting ready for bad sets, since much of the baseline answers will stay the same. I'm curious, have you taken your team to any pyramidal tournaments? I definitely will plug Mizzou's tournaments to you, since we always want to provide easy to access opportunities for local teams to play more tournaments without having to drive all over. Not to brag too much, but we have managed to attract some of the state's top teams from the big cities to our past tournaments, while also having many small and local schools like yourself to ensure that teams get to play a wide range of teams with differing skill levels and backgrounds (also, we offer way more than 3 games to every team in order to ensure you get your money's worth). Our three club-run tournaments this year are already done, but we are going to be the site of the 2010 NAQT Qualifier on March 20th, which should be a good chance to prepare your students against other high powered teams. Next year we are planning on running more events, so we would love to have you show up to some of them.

Also, I don't know if you are aware of this, but your school is eligible for NAQT's Small School national title (along with the Small School title at the NAQT Qualifier). It sounds like you are a very motivated coach, and your team has the talent to be competitive at local events, so I think something like that might be an interesting goal for you to explore with your team over the next couple of years. I would be more than willing to help you out with advice or other resources you might need.

I would love to talk more with you about our local circuit or just quizbowl in general, feel free to send me an email at cjd8b9@mail.missouri.edu. Good luck with your team, and welcome to the boards.

We're currently committed to going to the Lexington Tournament on the 20th, but I think I'll ask my team which one they would rather go to (it's their medals/summer). I would hate for Monroe City to get a Nationals bid and not us!

Mr. Kennedy, could you please email me your contact info.? I'd love to make sure you all get a paper copy of our registration form/invitation to next year's WUHSAC. My email is seanphilli@hotmail.com .

Sean Phillips