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New College team

Discussion of quizbowl topics not related to specific tournaments
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DIoanis
Posts: 165
Joined: Mon Mar 24, 2008 12:00 am
Location: Independence

New College team

Post by DIoanis »

I would like to announce the formation of a new quizbowl team at Missouri Western State University.

Right now there are only 3 of us on the team(all freshman who played quizbowl in Missouri and Kansas in high school) and quite frankly have <big>no idea</big> what to do next. I am not expecting any support from the university, is that normal? Is it too late in the school year to start a team?

WillHack
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Joined: Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:00 am

New College team

Post by WillHack »

If this were a Facebook post, I would *like* it.

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Charlie Dees
Posts: 4134
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Location: Columbia, MO

New College team

Post by Charlie Dees »

I'm excited to hear this. How far along is the team? Have you been approved as a club by the relevant people at the University? If not, it looks like http://www.missouriwestern.edu/cse/stuorgs.asp is the right place to start, as the handbook there covers the instructions to start a team.

At Mizzou, all approved organizations get some form of University budget every year, so if you get approved, that is definitely something you should explore. If you don't have a budget, then that is not a dead end. Probably the majority of teams do not have any kind of outside budgeting. Unfortunately this may mean for your first semester or so, you may have to pay out of pocket, or come up with creative travel plans (sleeping on the floors of hotel rooms other teams at tournaments you attend are buying).

However, you are in a lucky location. You are in a position to very handily attract a tournament field were you to run a high school tournament. The majority of college teams out there raise all of their money through hosting high school tournaments, and you have the entirety of Kansas City plus parts of NW Missouri to draw from, so you should have a very easy time getting 16 or more teams to sign up for an event you run on a well chosen date. You are also in a state with a lot of college teams who are in driving distance of you, so while it probably would not make as much money and would be smaller, you could run a college tournament that could also make you some money. More importantly though, we need some more college tournaments to go to in Missouri, so I personally would love that. In general though, be prepared to be hosting multiple tournaments per year, and that will be all you need to do for income. I recommend contacting MOQBA about suggestions and assistance.

For practices, once you are able to reserve rooms, you should meet at least once a week for a couple hours - most teams do it twice or more a week - and read questions, spend time with your teammates, etc. The ultimate source for good college questions to prepare on is collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com. For a new team with a lot of players who spent a lot of time doing Kansas and MSHSAA quizbowl, it probably makes the most sense to start out with novice college sets then branch out as the team starts to solidify. Check out Delta Burkes (ignore the math computation in them, though), ACF Falls, MUT, Illinois Novice. As long as you are reading college questions though, you will make progress. The fact is that in college, every tournament is filled with paragraph long tossups and uses the same 20/20 format, so be aware that your days of one liners and 4 quarter formats are gone for good, and because of that you need to be reading the kinds of questions you will be hearing. If you don't read college questions then you go to college tournaments, your teammates will have the wrong expectations and will probably not stay in the game long.

A huge piece of advice I have is GO TO TOURNAMENTS! You can't say you are a team until you are regularly playing things. Don't worry about whether or not you will be competitive, or if the questions are too hard for you, or if the other teams have too many good players. Nobody in college who matters will be judging you if you are not successful at first. We all understand that it can take time for a team to start making its mark, so if you do poorly don't get discouraged. A lot of teams have some silly notions about how they are going to practice on their own for a semester and then start going to tournaments or whatnot, and I can tell you that this approach of avoiding tournaments empirically does not work, as pretty much all of the teams that started out with that approach have since fallen apart or never even got off the ground. If you and your teammates get used to the idea of going to every tournament in driving distance from the get go, that will be infinitely more productive for you. Also, be aware, there will be quite a bit of driving involved. It's not high school anymore, so there aren't tons of teams collected in one area. Truman State and Missouri are both locations that are drivable in a day from St. Joseph, but I am pretty sure everyone else that hosts tournaments in our region - Wash U, Rolla, Missouri State - is going to require you to drive down the night before and get a hotel room. I would encourage you to be even more adventurous and try going to a tournament at the University of Illinois, in Oklahoma, or in Iowa or Minnesota somewhere. This is why it would be a good idea for you to try and get a high school event organized soon, because this can get pricey out of pocket.

As for tournaments to go to - Truman State is running a mirror of Penn Bowl on January 31st, ACF Winter is being run on January 16th at Missouri State University, and February 7th is the weekend of NAQT Sectionals. Hopefully a few more tournaments will pop up in the region, I know we at MU are discussing running something in the Spring. There are also a bunch of out of state tournaments at places like the University of Illinois to look out for that are very much worth the drive. The way college works is that there are 2 main groups that produce tournaments - NAQT and ACF. NAQT you played some in high school, and they essentially use the same format in college. The college tournaments NAQT runs are called Sectionals, and the teams that do well at Sectionals qualify for the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, or ICT, which is the national tournament in early April. ACF, unlike NAQT, is not a company. They are instead a loose group of editors, and they create a low level tournament in the fall, a slightly harder "regular" tournament in the Winter, a Regional championship tournament set that is somewhat harder than Winter, and then a National championship set that is run in late April. In addition to overall titles, which any students are eligible for, NAQT and ACF both offer awards for the top placing Undergraduate and "Division 2" teams. Division 2 is a sort of novice category based on things like how many years someone has been playing (ACF and NAQT have different eligibility rules). For ACF, D2 teams play within the main field and are given an award for placing the highest. In NAQT, D2 teams play in a completely separate tournament on easier questions than the regular division. Assuming you are all undergrads, everyone playing for Missouri Western should be Division 2 eligible at every tournament. For NAQT nationals, you have to get a bid by doing well at Sectionals, but for ACF Nationals you do not have to get a bid to be allowed to play. If you are able to pay for the trip, I would personally recommend setting sights on playing at nationals for your team, but that's just me. The rest of the tournaments you can play are independently produced, usually by other schools. A lot of tournaments, including those by ACF, will require teams attending to submit a game's worth of questions to the editor. Because you are new, you should mostly be exempt from this, but you should make sure before signing up somewhere what their policies are. Be prepared to start writing packets to play in most events over the next couple of years though, and if you start now you can get lots of discounts, which are great for new teams.

Also, if you are a serious college team, you should start following the collegiate sections of hsquizbowl.org. Those are where all the announcements of upcoming tournaments will be made. Moquizbowl is a good site for Missouri high school quizbowl, but I think anyone could agree that the collegiate discussion is very subpar, and if you are running a team it is much better to be active in the national discussion because you can get a lot more news there. For instance, NAQT has just announced that they signed a contract with a group called ACUI, which may affect you if Mo West is an ACUI school because it might make it easier to get some resources from your school, so you should keep up on that.

Good luck with this. Having founded a team last year, it is a very rewarding experience once it all comes together, and we need more teams in Missouri, especially in the west, so this is very welcome news. Hope it all works out, and keep us updated!

DIoanis
Posts: 165
Joined: Mon Mar 24, 2008 12:00 am
Location: Independence

New College team

Post by DIoanis »

I have thought about hosting a high school tournament to raise money for the team. I'm not sure if that would be a smart thing to do this year. Like I said we are all freshmen this year so we really don't have experience in any aspect about college just yet. But...I did run into (of all people) Bill Luce on campus last Wednesday. I just thought that was interesting.

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Charlie Dees
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New College team

Post by Charlie Dees »

What I am saying though is that you are in a region with lots of institutional support for high school quizbowl. If you contact MOQBA members, I'm sure any number of us could tell you what you need to do to successfully run a tournament, and depending on availability, some of us might even be able to come and staff it for you. There are also lots of coaches, former players, and whatnot floating around the Kansas City area who I am sure could volunteer for you if you asked. That is what every other college team does - at MU we ran our first high school tournament within a month of being approved as an organization. As long as it won't interfere with schoolwork and stuff like that, it is almost a necessity for you to plan to run high school tournaments as soon as feasibly possible if you want to be properly funded. Having your school run a tournament can have all kinds of other potential benefits as well - if you have something for your club members to get together to work towards, that can strengthen their bond to the club, which is a really useful thing if you have a bunch of new members. You don't need to run anything big, and you don't have to write the questions yourself - there are lots of tournaments you can mirror from across the country, or you can buy from NAQT or HSAPQ. This can make it much simpler to run, since you don't have to worry about writing anything. There are a bunch of outsiders who I am sure you could get to come staff a tournament for you and make Mo West a viable host, even if your current team is small.

joshua.bonnett
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Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2009 12:00 am

Re: New College team

Post by joshua.bonnett »

Does any one know if they ever got a team together. I start there in the fall.

Charbroil
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Re: New College team

Post by Charbroil »

joshua.bonnett wrote:Does any one know if they ever got a team together. I start there in the fall.
I heard from Dakota that they were having practices; try messaging him to see if anything's happening.

Edit: Given that he's apparently transferred to a school in Nevada, I wouldn't be terribly confident. Still, there might still be people interested, so I'd recommend at least checking.

DIoanis
Posts: 165
Joined: Mon Mar 24, 2008 12:00 am
Location: Independence

Re: New College team

Post by DIoanis »

Charbroil wrote:
joshua.bonnett wrote:Does any one know if they ever got a team together. I start there in the fall.
I heard from Dakota that they were having practices; try messaging him to see if anything's happening.

Edit: Given that he's apparently transferred to a school in Nevada, I wouldn't be terribly confident. Still, there might still be people interested, so I'd recommend at least checking.

Did not get a team together at mo west. It's not a great school, just fyi. Hope you have better luck then I did there. I'm now attending UCM in Warrensburg (UNR did not go through as planned, lucky I am able to enroll in classes here lol). Do know some ex players from Park Hill South who might be interested in starting a team here, time will tell. This could be more promising then mo west last year. I will keep everyone posted if this does develop into something more :D

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PenforPrez
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Re: New College team

Post by PenforPrez »

DIoanis wrote:I have thought about hosting a high school tournament to raise money for the team. I'm not sure if that would be a smart thing to do this year. Like I said we are all freshmen this year so we really don't have experience in any aspect about college just yet. But...I did run into (of all people) Bill Luce on campus last Wednesday. I just thought that was interesting.
What was Bill doing there? Did he say? I've known Bill long enough to know he'll show up literally anywhere anytime. :P

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ChippytheSavage
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Re: New College team

Post by ChippytheSavage »

PenforPrez wrote:
DIoanis wrote:I have thought about hosting a high school tournament to raise money for the team. I'm not sure if that would be a smart thing to do this year. Like I said we are all freshmen this year so we really don't have experience in any aspect about college just yet. But...I did run into (of all people) Bill Luce on campus last Wednesday. I just thought that was interesting.
What was Bill doing there? Did he say? I've known Bill long enough to know he'll show up literally anywhere anytime. :P
Probably getting books or IDs or something for his college classes he teaches at the high school. I'm glad to see him back this year. Hopefully he retires after I have him for college classes.

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