"That's the way it ought to be"

Since blog posting has been low in the last few months - a fact several people reminded me of in St. Paul - I haven't been checking for comments as often as I should have. And since there hasn't been a lot of action, recently, and it's been 18 months since the very first post of the blog, please forgive the reminder:

The very first post of this blog set down the basic rules, and one of them can be summarized as "no anonymous comments." I've only had to turn down a handful of comments to the blog for violating these pretty generic public forum rules so far, and the majority of those turned down were spam. Anonymous comments are an increasing number, though, and every one of the few that I've rejected on that basis so far has been one that would have met the guidelines and been posted and responded to, if it had not been anonymous.

Since I can't, by definition, tell anonymous commenters privately that their anonymity is an obstacle, I'm reminding them of that here.

"We are the champions"

Congratulations to the University of Rochester! Yesterday morning at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, the University of Rochester defeated the University of New Mexico in a thrilling two-game final to capture the 2008 ACUI College Bowl National Championship!

Full results and statistics are available at http://www.collegebowl.com/nct08/results.asp . Please email me with any corrections.

Thanks again to Macalester College, especially Chris Baxter, for being such wonderful hosts; and to all staff and volunteers whose dedication and efforts made this possible. And specially thanks to Gail Ferlazzo, the rest of the ACUI Program Team, the Regional Coordinators, the Campus Coordinators, and all the Regional and Campus volunteers whose hard work made this year enjoyable for so many universities and so many students.

"Yes, we'll gather at the river / The beautiful, the beautiful river"

At approximately 10:35 a.m. Central Time today, March 5, 2008, in the office of Richard Reynolds, Director of the Memorial Union at Iowa State University, Administrative Specialist Rod Simpson reached into a container filled with 15 numbered ping pong balls, and drew out number 13. An unlucky number for runners-up from 14 regions, but a lucky number for the University of New Mexico.

The University of New Mexico has been formally offered the Wild Card bid to the 2008 College Bowl National Championship tournament, and has in turn formally accepted it. As all Regional Champions have accepted their bids, the field is set at:

R1:        Providence College
R2:        University of Rochester
R3:        Seton Hall University
R4:        University of Maryland - Baltimore County
R5:        Georgetown College
R6:        Florida State University
R7:        The Ohio State University
R8:        University of Wisconsin
R9:        Ball State University
R10:        University of Minnesota
R11:        Washington University St. Louis
R12:        Rice University
R13:        Arizona State University
R14:        Western Oregon University
R15:        Pomona College
WC:        University of New Mexico

Congratulations again to our Regional Champions and the Wild Card! I look forward to seeing you in St. Paul. My condolences to the runners-up who were not selected, and my best wishes for success in your other academic competition endeavors.

Tom

"You go back Jack do it again"

The 2009 College Bowl Regional Championship Tournaments will be held February 19-22, 2009.

"New friends are golden"

Welcome to all of College Bowl’s brand new programs! It’s very exciting to have so many new teams this year.

Since there are a lot of schools running their Campus Program Tournament for the first time, here’s a repeat of my top recommendations for running that tournament:

Allow students to register either as individuals or as a whole team. Some will want to sign up on a team with their friends, but others may be the only person in their milieu who is interested in this activity. Assign the individuals to new teams.

Donated prizes can help increase turnout. While it’s hard for most schools to equal Arizona State University’s top prize – winning team members receive up to $4,500 each in scholarships – gift certificates from the cafeteria or bookstore, t-shirts, or names on a permanent plaque are all good rewards.

Demonstration games can generate a lot of interest. A student leaders versus faculty demonstration game not only generates student interest in playing, but may also be a good forum for recruiting faculty and staff to help with the tournament.

Encourage dorms, suites, greek organizations, student political groups, debating societies, and any groups with traditional rivalries to enter teams. Adjust your tournament schedule so that the rivals are sure to meet at some point. Can a team of football players defeat a team of baseball players, or the team from the band? Will the Young Republicans or the Young Democrats prove better? Such matches generate interest for both players and spectators.

Even if student activity funds are paying for your entire Campus Program tournament, a small fee can reduce or eliminate the problem of some teams not showing up for their match. Forfeits aren’t fun for anyone. You can either collect the fee as a fund for future program activities, or treat it as a deposit to be returned to teams after their final match.

If your Intramural Sports or Recreational Tournaments are set up so that organizations get points for how well they do in each sport or activity, coordinate your tournament so that it’s eligible and counts toward the grand prize.

A reminder for schools that played last year: if you’re planning to send an all-star team to the Regional Championship, you’re campus program will work best if you require returning players to play on separate teams. Your varsity squad from last year can be your best recruiters for this year.

Finally, remember that College Bowl provides a toll-free Help Desk to answer questions you have about promoting and running your tournament. I’m available to answer questions from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, and check my email regularly at other times. Call me at 1-800-234-2695 ext. 106 (818-610-8225 ext. 106 for local schools), or email tfm@collegebowl.com if I can ever be of any assistance to your program.

“It took me a long time to get back on the train”

Another season begins! The Campus Program questions are being printed and shipped out as I type this. Many schools are already promoting their upcoming campus tournaments.

It’s been too long since I’ve blogged. There is much to cover; some of it left over from last year. This season, I especially want to focus several entries on College Bowl game questions. While some earlier entries touched a bit on answering strategies, there is a lot more that can be said on the subject. Plus, I want to share an approach I’ve developed towards writing College Bowl style questions that will help you prepare practice material for tournaments, and even questions for your own invitationals. In the process, we’ll examine some myths and urban legends about College Bowl questions in general and how we create them in particular.

Other entries will look at new ways to promote your tournament, how teams develop over the course of the year, and how to fix broken ends on your buzzer system. Mark Dawson, a Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions winner, will be contributing a blog entry on how to use your College Bowl experience to help you appear on, and hopefully perform well on, game shows.

But I also want to talk about whatever topics you’re concerned with. Let me know, either in email or in the comments below, what you’re interested in talking about, and I’ll address them as best I can.

First though, I need to talk about MONEY. For team budgets, there is an important deadline coming up: the Early Order Discount for Campus program game packets expires at midnight Pacific time on Saturday, September 15th. Since I’ve been getting many calls and emails this week, I’m using this blog to post a FAQ about the discount. With a little planning, nearly everyone can save money!

We’ll be ordering packets, but our Purchasing Department is slow, and I don’t know when I’ll get my Purchase Order number. Can I still take advantage of the discount?

Yes! Go ahead an place your order before the 15th. In the Purchase Order field, type “to be sent.” Call, email, or fax me the number whenever your Purchasing Department gets around to issuing it.

Can I use my procurement card or personal credit card?

Credit card orders are even easier to do on our web site, and may be a better option for you. It’s secure and encrypted. We take MasterCard, Visa, and American Express.

Our tournament is next week. Can you ship the questions to me overnight?

We can, but that’s expensive. If you’re ordering the questions on CD-ROM instead of printed copies, I can email you the packets if your tournament is happening very soon. If we’re printing the questions for you, though, they’ll have to be shipped.

We know we’ll be ordering at least ten packets, but we might have more teams sign up for our tournament, and may need to order more games later. Can we still get the discount?

You’ll save the most money (a $50 or $75 savings ultimately, depending on the final size of the order) by ordering the first 10 games before the Early Order Discount expires. If you need to increase your order to 15 or 20 games later, you’ll still get quantity discounts on those later games. Note: increasing the order later can’t be done on our web page, but you just need to email or call me.

We won’t know about our funding until later in the year. Can we get an extension on the discount?

Sorry, but that’s not possible with this discount. It expires at midnight Saturday, September 15th. Please call or email me to discuss your specific situation, and we’ll brainstorm to see if there are other solutions.

We’re a new school. Does the Early Order Discount affect us?

Nope! The New School Discount is in effect all year, and is a better deal for teams that did not play in the 2006-2007 season.

Feel free to call or email me with any questions about ordering. Depending on the situation, we may be able to work with you to solve many issues. You can email me at tfm@collegebowl.com or call me between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific at 1-800-234-2695 ext. 106 or 818-610-8225 ext. 106 for local callers.

“Did I say that out loud?”

Prohibited during toss-ups, conferral can be defined as “anything that seeks to convey or receive information about the answering of a toss-up.” Conferral can range from telling a teammate what the answer is to subtly signaling to teammates that one player is certain of the answer and the other players can hold back.

Conferral encompasses many things, and there seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding and inconsistency when applying the rules against conferring on toss-ups. This post will try to clear up some of those issues.

For conferral to occur, their must be an attempt to transmit or receive information on how or what to answer from one player to another. This attempt may be intentional or unintentional; successful or unsuccessful; blatant or subtle.

Common actions called as conferral include talking during toss-ups, and gesturing with the buzzer after the other team has had an incorrect interruption. It’s best not to say anything at all during a toss-up until you’ve been recognized. Stay focused on the moderator. Don’t glance at another player to see if they’re going to signal, as that is seeking information and can lead to a conferral call.

Once a player on another team has incorrectly interrupted, don’t stick your hand out, or do anything that can be interpreted as signaling to your teammates that you know the answer. Just focus on the question and signal how and when you normally would.

Equally, laying down the buzzer and leaning back in the chair conveys to your teammates that you don’t know the answer and won’t signal, and is also conferral. It’s a bad habit, too; when the giveaway clue comes up you may realize you do know the answer.

Taking notes during a toss-up is not conferral. Looking at another player’s notes, however, is conferral. At the College Bowl NCT, a score will be visible to the teams at all times. If a player is keeping his own score as a check, other players shouldn’t glance at that score while a toss-up is up for grabs, or they strongly risk a conferral call.

Once a player has signaled and is waiting to be recognized, inadvertently turning to look at the player is not conferral, so long as nothing is communicated. That’s just being a spectator.

If a team is called for conferral before the toss-up is read completely, and before either team has signaled, no five point penalty is assessed. The only penalty in that case is being locked out of the toss-up. If, however, a player is the first to signal and interrupts a toss-up, and conferral is called after the signal, that does count as an incorrect interrupt, and a five-point penalty is assessed.

“It’s been a long long long time”

Sorry that this blog has been dormant for so long. I knew when I signed on to College Bowl Company that the period from February to May would be extremely busy, but it has surpassed even what would have been my most extreme estimate.

The March, 2007 “College Bowl Q&A” newsletter is now out, and is online at  http://www.collegebowl.com/pub/0307news.pdf . It has a recap of the RCT, and some information on NCT events.

To me, the most unique thing about the 2007 NCT is that it will be the first one where all of the matches will be held at the hotel. There will be a visit to the USC Campus for the opening dinner on Friday, but then we’ll return to the hotel for the beginning of the Round Robin. We’ve got buses for all the off-site transportation, so unless a team is planning to come early or stay late for sightseeing, there’s no need to rent a car.

Before the NCT, I’m going to try to post the entry I drafted on game reviews. It needs some rewriting based on some of the things that happened at the RCT’s. It will probably be the only long post I’ll be able to do, but I’m going to try to get some shorter posts out.

One topic I hope to address before the NCT is the feedback we’ve gotten from the RCT. Participants and volunteers who haven’t completed the evaluation are urged to do so. Email me if you need the link.

All for now – much to do, with short deadlines.

"The stage is set. The perfect show / is put before the mass"

In Ames, Iowa, at approximately noon today in the Central time zone, in ACUI College Bowl Program Team Chair Gail Ferlazzo's office in Memorial Union, a student, whose name I forgot to write down but whom I understand will be President of the Iowa State University Student Government next year, reached into a box and drew out a ping pong ball with the number "1" on it. Accordingly, the 2007 College Bowl NCT Wild Card Bid has been offered to, and excitedly accepted by, Providence College!

All Regional Champions except Region 9's accepted their bids. Illinois declined their bid, and the Region 9 NCT spot was offered to, and accepted by, runner-up Purdue. Thus, the NCT field is composed of:

Region 1: Williams College
Region 2: St. Bonaventure University
Region 3: Seton Hall University
Region 4: University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Region 5: Southern Virginia University
Region 6: University of Florida
Region 7: The Ohio State University
Region 8: Northwestern University
Region 9: Purdue University
Region 10: University of Minnesota
Region 11: University of Missouri - Columbia
Region 12: Baylor University
Region 13: University of New Mexico
Region 14: University of Washington
Region 15: University of Southern California
Wild Card: Providence College

RCT thoughts/reactions/experiences, and more on the NCT, will be blogged next week.

“You can choose a ready guide / In some celestial voice / If you choose not to decide / You still have made a choice”

Another Question from the Inbox: Eligibility Rules

Last Fall I received this query:

“…when I read the eligibility guidelines online, I got confused.  It says the following:

The members of the team which wins the Campus Tournament are automatically members of the Varsity Squad. … Which of these players represent your school is your decision. However, we strongly recommend that schools select a Varsity Squad.

This seems a bit contradictory to me.  Do we HAVE to make the winning team members part of our “Varsity Squad” or not?  The last sentence implies that we don’t even need to have any concept of a Varsity Squad – how can we mandate a Varsity Squad (in first sentence) and then say we merely recommend that there is one (in last sentence)?  At [school deleted], we’ve always selected from the top individual players at a tournament, not necessarily entire teams, because we (the organizers) randomly put students on teams, since most of them don’t know each other.”

In the last sentence, it’s the word “select” that should be stressed. The meaning, which I agree isn’t as clear as it should be, is that we recommend selecting all-stars instead of automatically taking the winning team, both for the long-term benefit of the Campus program tournament each year, and because, more often then not, even a slight tweaking of the winning team roster to cover a weak area with a stronger player in that area can make a difference.

A problem with the language is that the definition of "Varsity Squad" had to be left deliberately vague to accommodate the vast individual differences in programs. The language also dates from the way a compromise was reached on the very early versions of eligibility rules. Most of this happened before I got involved with College Bowl, but I think it happened as follows:

Initially, the team that won the Campus Program would be the team that represented the school at the RCT. After just a few years of the modern tournament (c. 1980-81), it became very obvious that schools wanting to be most competitive at RCT responded to this rule by stacking all their best players on one intramural team, and that this had the effect of discouraging new teams from competing in the Campus Program. The solution was to recommend all-stars, but a significant number of schools wanted to keep the trip to the RCT as a prize for the winning team.

By the mid-1980's, the eligibility language evolved as a compromise to allow both approaches, and has had minor adjustments since to recognize the decline in coached teams and the rise in club teams.

In practice, what this means is: Any school may make an unlimited number of students eligible in a year for RCT and NCT play. Only one student on the team at either tournament may be a grad student. Only those students registered for the tournament spend a year of their eligibility. All students must have played in at least one game of the Campus Program tournament to be eligible for the RCT and NCT. How large a group a team practices with, and how large a pool that team is selected from, is up to the school. That practice team, of whatever size, is the "Varsity Squad."

We ask that schools invite all members of the team that wins the Campus program to be in the pool, or try out for it. We do not require that any member of the team that won the Campus Program tournament be a member of the RCT or NCT teams.

Each individual program has its own priorities and goals for its Campus Program. For an outstanding example of this, see the lead story in the January, 2007 College Bowl Newsletter, available on-line at http://www.collegebowl.com/pub/0107news.pdf .

As a general case, we recommend that schools select and train all-stars to represent them at the RCT, and we note the very strong likelihood that the team that won the Campus Program tournament will contain at least one all-star, and probably more than one.

Certainly, schools have won their RCT, and perhaps the National Championship, sending the winning Campus Program team intact to the NCT. But many schools find that over time concentrating experienced, returning players on one team reduce the turnout to the Campus Program, and that the Campus Program works best when players who have RCT experience are split over several teams, and not concentrated on one “killer squad.”

Each school is organized differently, and the selection rules have to work for club teams, coach-run teams, and even the few teams that are run as actual classes.

Whom to Bring?

Pages 46-48 in the Program Guide Chapter “Coaching Your Team,” available on-line at http://www.collegebowl.com/pub/coachingyourteam.pdf , has excellent advice. My own observations and coaching philosophies follow as an addendum, rather than a replacement, for that advice.

The most important is that you should select your lineup to cover the widest range of subject areas. Our web site tells you what subject categories are covered in each game packet, and how they are weighted. See http://www.collegebowl.com/games/qdistribution.asp .

Over enough time, players will increase their depth of knowledge in current areas of expertise, and develop strengths in new subject areas. In the time remaining between now and the RCT, however, it is easier to teach speed, and strengthen existing areas of expertise, than it is to develop new areas.

Back on October 13th, I blogged abut what to look for in a Captain in a post titled “Captain on Deck!” That post, and page 48 of the Program Guide, look at the factors in selecting a Captain pretty thoroughly. The bottom line is that it is better to select a Captain based on maturity, leadership skills, and game play ability, than it is to automatically reward whoever scored the most toss-up points in your Campus Program tournament with the position.

A variety of other factors that depend on how your team is run will also influence selection. If players are required to write and submit questions for practice, the quantity and quality of the work can be useful to consider. A player who has written more will be better prepared for the RCT.

Attendance at practice is another factor worth considering. There is much to be said for rewarding the players who work and prepare the hardest. Those tend to be the players that turn-in the best performances at the RCT.

It’s also critical that the players selected to play at the RCT get along with each other. Personality conflicts, and even outright feuds, have been known to distract teams, and greatly impede performance.

Finally, decision-tree backups and contingency plans for replacing players if necessary. As a coach, I had players occasionally back out at the last minute for reasons ranging from serious illness to Resident Staff interviews. Think about potential replacements ahead of time. Once you’ve made the selection, don’t replace without a very clear reason, or it can be very damaging to team morale; but be prepared for the unexpected contingency.

Questions About Eligibility

For questions about eligibility, or in the event a last-minute substitution is necessary, either email me at tfm@collegebowl.com, or call me at 1-800-234-2695 extension 106. It’s my job to work with you to see what can be done.

If you have any players with special needs, especially those requiring some accommodation, PLEASE let me AND your Regional Coordinator know as soon as possible. The sooner we know, the better we’ll be able to accommodate them.

The next blog entry will be for players, Coaches, Game Officials, and Tournament Directors: in short, everyone involved in a match. It’s the long-promised post on resolving game discrepancies (or, as we used to call them during the olden days, “protests”). We’ll look at both how to advocate your position most effectively, and the resolution procedure to follow.