Thank you very much to everyone who attended this event. Stats can be found here.

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The St. Charles Community College Quiz Bowl Team will be hosting a fall novice tournament using questions from the Scholastic Community Outreach Program on November 20th, 2010.

I, Charles Hang, will be serving as the Tournament Director. To register for the tournament, or if you have any questions, please email me at charleshang228@yahoo.com.

Eligibility

Players are ineligible for this tournament if they have:

1) Scored more than 50 points per game at a tournament certified by the Missouri Quizbowl Alliance (MOQBA) (or any other tournament using pyramidal questions) or

2) Scored more than 20 points per game at NAQT's High School National Championship Tournament or at PACE's National Scholastic Championship.

A list of tournaments certified by MOQBA can be found at http://www.moqba.org/calendar/

Registration

To register, please e-mail me at charleshang228@yahoo.com with the following information:

1/ The Number of teams you will be bringing
2/ The Number of buzzers you will be bringing
3/ The number of players you will have, as well as their names.
4/ The number of staff (moderators and scorekeepers) you will be bringing

All registrations must be received prior to the date of the tournament. Once you register, I will send out additional information by email. Please feel free to share this announcement with any schools that you think would be interested in attending.

The field is currently capped at 12 teams, so please register soon in order to guarantee your team a spot at this event. Teams are limited to six players each (including substitutes); if you anticipate having more than six players, please register additional teams. Let me know if that might be a budgetary concern.

Fee Structure

Base fee
$50 for the first team, $40 for subsequent teams

Discounts
$10 off the base fee per working buzzer system provided
$10 off the base fee per moderator*
$5 off the base fee per scorekeeper**
$5 off the base fee for schools for each 100 miles traveled

Minimum fee: $10/team

Showing up late without getting in touch with me: +$20 penalty.

*To be defined as an individual capable of either reading a 20 tossup, 20 bonus match in under 30 minutes
** To be defined as someone capable of scorekeeping a match with the aforementioned description.

Checks should be made out to "St. Charles Community College;" we can also take cash payments, but greatly prefer payment by check.

Questions

The tournament will be using the Scholastic Community Outreach Program set, a set of accessible and short questions geared towards beginner players. For more information, please check here: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewto ... OP#p186670

Games will consist of 20 Tossups and 20 Bonuses. The team that answers a tossup correctly gets to collaborate on a bonus. Players have 5 seconds to answer after buzzing in and 5 seconds after a tossup or bonus is finished being read to answer.

Time

Tournament check-in will begin at 8:30 AM, morning announcements will be at 9:00, and play will begin at 9:15. The entire tournament (including awards and playoffs) should be over before 4:00. Each team will be guaranteed at least eight rounds, and there will be finals as necessary to determine the champions.

Location

This tournament will be held at St. Charles Community College, in the Social Sciences Building (Building 10 at http://www.stchas.edu/dotAsset/136483.pdf)

The address of the college is:
4601 Mid Rivers Mall Drive
Cottleville, MO 63376

Parking is plentiful.

Format

Because we have ten teams, we will have a round robin, followed by an advantaged final if the top team fails to clear the field by two games; thus, all teams will be guaranteed nine rounds.

Field (To be updated as registrations and expressions of interest appear)

Attending

Parkway North
Ladue
Lutheran High School St. Charles (1)
DeSmet (3)
Jefferson City High School
Parkway West (2)
SLUH

Interested

I look forward to seeing you at St. Charles Community College on November 20th!

So who's going to check that every player playing hasn't scored enough to negate their participation? Will MOQBA be publishing a black list?

Well, MOQBA isn't the director of the tournament, so I think it's safe to say there will be no MOQBA blacklist.

I mean, there aren't that many people in Missouri who've done either of the things listed, and if I suspect someone has, I'll go glance at their stats; it's really not that hard.

Yeah, the handful who don't qualify a) should pretty much know who they are and b) aren't dumb enough to try sliding past the rules once they realize they're ineligible. Not to mention the fact that you could probably [for the most part] rattle off the entire list off the top of your head (helped by the fact that a ton of people graduated) if you tried, so a gentle reminder shouldn't be an issue, if necessary.

The players may be wise enough to exclude themselves, but is there a risk their coach will insist they play? Truth be told I doubt there will be a coach dubious enough to try it here, but it helps to make sure checks are in place before an issue comes up that compromises the integrity of a host and/or the reputation of a team.

It might be wise to requiring rosters beforehand. It's not going to look good if, halfway through the first game, someone who has exceeded the threshold specified in the announcement is in the midst of playing.

On a sidebar, what Charles set for the threshold here sounds like a decent standard that should go statewide instead of continuing definitions of Varsity and Junior Varsity that may vary from school to school.

Point taken. It definitely wouldn't hurt to require rosters. Or, even a list of all potential players that day (with the actual people playing indicated on the day of) would work, since you could pretty easily just look up the ones you're not already sure about. Either way, I agree that it's definitely preferable to having issues crop up once the tournament has begun (or even ended).

[That all refers to your first two paragraphs. No comment on the last bit]

I don't necessarily think the rest of the circuit will look at it that way. For this single event, sure, I have no qualms about these rules, I think they will attract an appropriate field. However, I think that a definition of JV that includes the possibility of having seniors play will not catch on for much of the state, and given that MOQBA events aren't at all widespread, and most other tournaments don't take any kinds of meaningful statistics that we could measure to set the bar, it would be very difficult to come up with a criteria that works for what I think most coaches want out of JV. The other thing to keep in mind is that I think Missouri is poised to have a rapid increase in team skill in the near future, and we would probably need to come up with new rules to account for the shift in strength of teams, along with the fact that there will probably be a lot of good players who have no business at a JV event being eligible by these rules (for example, if Parkway Central were to have never gone to the HSNCT, I'm pretty sure each of Chris, Ammar, Nick, and Liron from Parkway Central would meet these eligibility rules). Again, I have no qualms about how these rules are being used at this particular event, I just don't foresee this being able to work on a larger scale, and I instead think that the only way to make it really work statewide is to set grade requirements, because gentlemen's agreements don't work.

Interesting point. Which brings up the question: why only 20 PPG for nationals? Like Charlie said, none of us would've become ineligible (probably. The only time I think we may have broken 50 PPG individually was on the modified MSHSAA set, so that doesn't really count.) had it not been for exceeding 20 PPG at HSNCT. This being said, do you think the two limitations are equal enough? Or is this intentional/inconsequential?

In retrospect, maybe 40 PPG would make more sense, but on the other hand, I'm hoping to attract people who may not be novices to Quiz Bowl, but are novices to good questions (since there are a few high scorers on second and third tier teams that I wouldn't object to having at this tournament).

That seems about as plausible as a coach insisting that seniors play at a tournament explicitly announced for underclassmen, or a coach intentionally violating any other explicitly stated eligibility rule--fairly unlikely, in other words.




This is in the announcement.

This year's dominant teams should come to this. Clayton, Villa Duchesne, Oakville, Eureka, where are you?*

*Not implying that other teams aren't dominant--they just don't have people on this forum that I'm aware of.

*Also, I just listed St. Louis area teams, though non-St. Louis teams are obviously welcome.

Is the date for this still Nov 20? If so, we're interested.

Yes. Presumably with one team?

I know that I'm ineligible because of PPG, but I'll see if any of my teammates can go.

Yeah, that was essentially what I was thinking. Also, we'd certainly enjoy it if you'd like to come staff (especially if your team comes).

So, with a big influx of interest, we're actually getting pretty close to our field cap, so interested teams should let me know soon whether they're defining able to attend.

Also, if you're interested in staffing, please let me know since we could definitely use experienced staffers.

We're switching to the SCOP set because several teams at our mirror already played the Fall Novice Set at Rock Bridge. Let me know if you have any questions.

I wish I would have known about the set change sooner as Tuscumbia has not played the SCOP set; at such late notice, though, it looks unlikely that we'll be able to come.

I only found out about the team conflicts a couple of days ago (especially since Rock Bridge neglected to post their field), and only thought of switching to the SCOP set today. I'm sorry you won't be able to make it, though.

Parkway West B won our tournament yesterday, going 10-0 to clear the field. Parkway West A took second. Our top scorers were:

1/ Seth Coffin, Lutheran High School St. Charles (whose mythology knowledge, I would like to note, was highly impressive)
2/ Kim Lister, Parkway West A
3/ Jaron Ma, Parkway West B
4/ Calvin Irwin, Parkway North
5/ Ben Zhang, Ladue
6/ Elizabeth Carroll, Parkway West B

Detailed statistics can be found here.