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14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 8:48 am
by CentraliaCoach
Moderator note: split from nationals bids thread

This may not be news to anybody else, but it was to me so I thought I'd share it in case others, like me, are lacking this information.

According to Stacy Schroeder at MSHSAA, the HSNCT (and I assume all other national tournaments) counts towards the season limit of 14 events (excluding Districts, Sectionals, and State). I asked for clarification because the manual does not state that events after Memorial Day Friday count, whereas for events after districts and prior to that Friday it is explicitly stated that they count. My rules interpreter had initially told me that HSNCT would not count, but after double-checking, he informed me that it would.

In a quest for a loophole, I also asked whether the 14 events limit was for individuals or for the team and was told basically that a team's varsity, regardless of the players who make up the roster, cannot compete in more than 14 matches.

Sorry if none of this is new, but having never 1) qualified for HSNCT or 2) had 14 events scheduled prior to doing so, I never really thought about these rules.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:42 am
by Charlie Dees
I am almost 100% positive your AD is wrong about the rule not applying to individuals but rather to teams.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:47 am
by CentraliaCoach
The individuals/teams answer came from Don Arni, my region's rules interpreter. It's possible he is wrong (he was initially wrong about the HSNCT not counting). I'll try and dig deeper.

The rule is vague in the manual. In the post-districts competition section it says that the event can't exceed the school's 14 allowable events, but in the actual statement of the 14 events rule, it says students can't exceed 14 events.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 9:49 am
by Charlie Dees
Yeah, the rulebook says "Students enrolled in grades nine through twelve shall participate in no more than fourteen interscholastic competitions the school year." There's no way to construe that as a teamwide limitation, it's clearly saying that there is a limitation per student. For one thing, it would be impossible to determine how to limit a team's participation using the standard you were told, since there are lots of teams that send B teams and JV teams to tournaments of all kinds.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 10:15 am
by CentraliaCoach
I added this in before your most recent response:
CentraliaCoach wrote: The rule is vague in the manual. In the post-districts competition section it says that the event can't exceed the school's 14 allowable events, but in the actual statement of the 14 events rule, it says students can't exceed 14 events.
I should have said "contradictory" instead of "vague." I brought this apparent contradiction up in my initial e-mail.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 10:25 am
by Charlie Dees
Aha, but here's the confusion. The rule doesn't explicitly say what you read into it. It says "A school may participate in one interscholastic event following districts and prior to the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Such an event shall count as one of the school’s allowable regular season events as per By-Law 293.0." That wording does not explicitly rule out a school sending teams to more than 14 events, all it does is say that it must be treated the same as any other event, which still means that a school can participate in more than 14 events, granted that the students playing on the teams don't play more than 14 events.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2011 1:50 pm
by CentraliaCoach
I have suggested to Coach Arni that MSHSAA needs to make some kind official statement to clarify this issue. I'm not saying Charles is right or wrong (in fact I hope he's right), I just want to be sure I abide by the rules as decided by the activity's governing agency.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 7:32 am
by CentraliaCoach
Coach Arni, after speaking with Stacy, has confirmed his original statement that a school can't exceed 14 matches. He wants to speak to me on the phone to clarify scenarios concerning B-teams and JV teams attending Varsity tournaments. I have to travel to Shelbina this evening for a match, but after I speak with him I'll further update you all.

He also said that they will publish a q-and-a to clarify things for next year, so I don't know what they are planning to do for this year.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Sun Feb 13, 2011 6:08 pm
by CentraliaCoach
CentraliaCoach wrote:Coach Arni, after speaking with Stacy, has confirmed his original statement that a school can't exceed 14 matches. He wants to speak to me on the phone to clarify scenarios concerning B-teams and JV teams attending Varsity tournaments. I have to travel to Shelbina this evening for a match, but after I speak with him I'll further update you all.

He also said that they will publish a q-and-a to clarify things for next year, so I don't know what they are planning to do for this year.
Each level of any school's sports teams are limited to a certain number of matches as a team. Individuals, as well, are limited. The intention of the rule, though it wasn't clearly stated, was to limit the Varsity Scholar Bowl team to 14 events, regardless of who makes up the team. A JV has the same limits, but can attend varsity tournaments without adding to the varsity total as long as the rosters are exclusive of each other. In the future, consistent naming of B-teams may be a requirement.

Mr. Arni admitted that policing this sort of thing is next to impossible, and it is really left up to coaches to be sure they follow the intention of the rule to preserve the "spirit of sportsmanship." There have been discussions of increasing the cap to as many as 20 events a year, but the most recent proposal was defeated this past spring.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:36 pm
by PenforPrez
CentraliaCoach wrote:
CentraliaCoach wrote:Mr. Arni admitted that policing this sort of thing is next to impossible, and it is really left up to coaches to be sure they follow the intention of the rule to preserve the "spirit of sportsmanship." There have been discussions of increasing the cap to as many as 20 events a year, but the most recent proposal was defeated this past spring.
Who defeated it and why? Illinois allows 19, I think.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 7:42 am
by CentraliaCoach
I don't remember which committee he said, but he said they were made up of non-Scholar Bowl coaches and administrators. They made the decision based on the current financial climate, that increasing the number of competitions would put more financial distress on school districts. The obvious solution to that, though, would be to increase the max and let districts themselves decide how many events they can afford.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 9:58 am
by PenforPrez
CentraliaCoach wrote:I don't remember which committee he said, but he said they were made up of non-Scholar Bowl coaches and administrators. They made the decision based on the current financial climate, that increasing the number of competitions would put more financial distress on school districts. The obvious solution to that, though, would be to increase the max and let districts themselves decide how many events they can afford.
Besides that, quizbowl teams generally spend less on travel than athletics because fewer people and less stuff get transported.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2011 1:26 pm
by Charlie Dees
Yeah, even with 14 competitions, most active teams don't really go beyond 10 or so. However, the large group of teams that fill up their schedule with dual meets would be helped immensely by increasing the number of dates available to them so that they can actually get out to a few tournaments without having to change their conference schedule.

Just to make sure we are holding this conversation in the proper context, which is one of analyzing how thoroughly regressive the MSHSAA is, and not a context of looking at how they're the status quo and I am advocating something radical, as best as I can tell this MSHSAA policy of only allowing 14 dates, including nationals, is the 2nd most repressive rule regarding how many dates teams can play anywhere in America. Kansas restricts it to 8, and they also effectively ban participation at nationals, so they are hands down the absolute worst. I couldn't find Arkansas or Oklahoma's rules, so there's still an outside chance they could be worse, Illinois is 18 with an explicit loophole that the 18 dates do not count toward 4-on-4 competitions or college tournaments, because official Illinois rules have 5 person teams, which essentially gives good teams free reign to go to any pyramidal tournament their heart desires, and Virginia has essentially no rules interfering at all with quizbowl teams choosing to govern themselves as they wish. There is not a single other state that has a government apparatus imposed upon quizbowl. To repeat, FORTY FOUR STATES DO NOT HAVE THEIR MSHSAA EQUIVALENT RUNNING QUIZBOWL. The only state that has become a true success with having the government be involved in quizbowl is Virginia, because the VHSL has consistently chosen not to impose rules which they know nothing about the implications of on active teams, and because they were willing to find a question writer of the highest quality to write for their state series while doing away with all speed-based tossups (including computation). Even in other states like Illinois, IHSA has been loose enough about the rules that the best Illinois teams can play whatever tournaments they want whenever they want, and their state format at least resembles a standard pyramidal tournament in a way that the lesser activities associations like ours don't. Illinois has a vibrant circuit, as evinced by the fact that a team who is around the 5th best in their state came to Wash U. and had absolutely no trouble beating two of the best teams our state has ever had to offer, along with abjectly dismantling everybody else.

The only team that has ever made the top 20 at nationals from Missouri was the only team for years that actively despised everything about MSHSAA and refused to prioritize anything but high quality pyramidal questions, and we still won 6 state titles. Now other teams have begun to catch on to pyramidal questions and are going to start doing really well at nationals. We are being confronted with mounting evidence that this current system under MSHSAA has been a complete disaster that has held down our circuit for ages. Teams that prioritize preparing for MSHSAA are losing, by incredible margins, to teams like Ladue, Clayton, and Rock Bridge, teams who are also proving that this rhetoric about pyramidal questions being "too long" and "too hard" and "a waste of people's time that should just get to the point" is thoroughly unfounded, and is simply a result of years of having MSHSAA's rotating stable of awful question providers being shoved down their throat. We have always had a comically bloated format that has made our circuit completely unused to basic aspects of most of the country's competitive circuits, like offering teams more than 3 games (if anyone were to go to hsquizbowl and seriously discuss the benefits of only offering teams 3 games before lunch, you would be laughed off the boards). Things are finally changing, and we're proving that the rest of the country got it right and MSHSAA got it dead wrong. We need coaches to start getting up in arms about how truly awful rules restricting us to 14 tournaments a year are compared to the rest of America, or rules where they might now be poking around with our ability to freely use B teams with whatever rosters we wish, or rules restricting us to being able to play within a "season." Dorman high school collectively plays hundreds and hundreds of matches a year, something nobody in Missouri has ever done, because they have none of these impositions, and Dorman has been one of the most consistently competitive teams in the history of the game. Surely if we want to be able to produce our own Dorman, we need to find voices with clout who can convince MSHSAA to scrap many of their horrible rules outright, and not sit down and shut up when a bunch of football coaches who could not care less about quizbowl tell them no.

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 7:18 pm
by L-Town Expatriate
Can we get a split topic of MSHSAA's potentially capricious interpretation of their rules?

Re: 2011 Nationals bids thread

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:04 pm
by Jeffrey Hill
L-Town Expatriate wrote:Can we get a split topic of MSHSAA's potentially capricious interpretation of their rules?
Yeah, I've been meaning to do this for a couple of days now.

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:23 pm
by dividebyzero
Just out of curiosity, what exactly happens if you break the rule? Are you just banned from state or is there more to it?

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:07 am
by CentraliaCoach
dividebyzero wrote:Just out of curiosity, what exactly happens if you break the rule? Are you just banned from state or is there more to it?
I got the impression that there would be little to no penalty, especially given the confusion about the way the rule was written and the near impossibility of knowing a team's event count.

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:53 pm
by L-Town Expatriate
dividebyzero wrote:Just out of curiosity, what exactly happens if you break the rule? Are you just banned from state or is there more to it?
Jane Cunningham takes time away from her efforts to eliminate child labor laws to rail against MSHSAA yet again. Aside from that, nothing else.

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 8:03 am
by PenforPrez
L-Town Expatriate wrote:
dividebyzero wrote:Just out of curiosity, what exactly happens if you break the rule? Are you just banned from state or is there more to it?
Jane Cunningham takes time away from her efforts to eliminate child labor laws to rail against MSHSAA yet again. Aside from that, nothing else.
I wonder if Cynthia Davis would have supported this or if she still would've been too busy trying to take away school lunches from poor kids. :wink:

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Wed Feb 23, 2011 6:02 pm
by L-Town Expatriate
PenforPrez wrote:
L-Town Expatriate wrote:
dividebyzero wrote:Just out of curiosity, what exactly happens if you break the rule? Are you just banned from state or is there more to it?
Jane Cunningham takes time away from her efforts to eliminate child labor laws to rail against MSHSAA yet again. Aside from that, nothing else.
I wonder if Cynthia Davis would have supported this or if she still would've been too busy trying to take away school lunches from poor kids. :wink:
There were several Republicans who expressed interest in pursuing this. Davis, probably (when she wasn't pushing for Missouri to finally legalise midwifery, and that's a whole 'nother can of worms there.) The closest it got was a committee hearing years ago, but the committee's chairman (a Springfield Republican) killed the bill by not allowing a vote.

And now they want to do something similar in Arkansas.

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 6:53 pm
by bolshevik
As an ambitious current player it infuriates me that a lazy, regressive organisation currently controls all quizbowl endeavours in the state I live in and they'd go to such lengths to hold down teams with hopes of becoming nationally competitive. It's also rather disappointing that they haven't resolved this confusion after SIX years.

Anyways, I thought I'd bump the thread because I'm curious to see how people in the Missouri community feel about this. I could just be naive due to my youth and inexperience with MSHSAA, and maybe I should just deal with MSHSAA as everyone in Missouri has up to this point, and if anything were going to change it probably already would have. But if anyone thinks voicing my concerns to any higher authority will possibly make a difference, then I'd be glad to.

(Don't get me wrong, though; Louisiana going to take all possible strides to improve outside of our limited schedule.)

Re: 14 tournament limit and Nationals

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2017 5:29 pm
by ilikebooks
Well, I suppose I will reply since this has always had an influence on my playing in HS. Basically, it is really demoralizing to have spent the last 2 and a half years putting as much work as I have into quiz bowl, from studying questions, to reading textbooks, and practicing outside of school with my teammates, and then be met with all these limitations from people who seem to not really understand quiz bowl and how it works nationally. I am most upset with only being allowed to attend one national when my teammates and I have worked so hard and could go and be competitive at both (especially when Missouri teams in the past have attended both). I also think if we didn't have all these limitations then competition of teams within the Missouri circuit would increase because they could see what nationals are like and could hear more pyramidal questions.

I also know there is a lot of people working to make changes that would help the circuit, but I really don't know enough about MSHSAA and its inner workings to know anything about that. Hopefully, some major changes happen in the coming years but who knows. Thats just my two cents and personal experience.