“Better, better, better / It’s getting better all the time”

Practice is one of the ways, and the most popular way, of getting better at College Bowl.

Writing questions and studying new material can also be highly effective. But practice sessions uniquely provide the opportunity for coming together as a team, drilling recall skills, rehearsing game strategy and preparing for the match environment; all while having the fun of playing matches.

While people with experience in College Bowl, high school quiz bowl formats, sports psychology, and even televised quiz shows generally know the benefits of practice, it’s my observation that a lot of people without experience in these activities assume that practice is of little benefit. “How can you prepare for this stuff?,” they ask. “You either know it or you don’t, and you don’t know what you’ll be asked.”

With new teams, coaches and coordinators joining College Bowl each year, it’s natural that some newbies don’t yet appreciate how quickly teams can improve and how effectively they can prepare for the RCT under the right circumstances. This post is focused at them, though I hope it will include some ideas that even the most experienced teams can adopt to refine and improve their game.

Many ideas for drills and practicing can be found in Chapter 6 of the Program Guide, “Coaching Your Team,” pages 46-56, available on our web site at:
http://www.collegebowl.com/pub/coachingyourteam.pdf .

Other resources for coaches are available under the “Coaching Your Team” tab in the “Campus Program” portion of our web site.

The Group Experience

How well will your individual team members function as a team, and what can be done to get the team to the point where they function most effectively?

Bottom line: if you’re just putting your team together now, your team has a better chance of performing well as a team if you can hold a total of at least 10-12 practice sessions during January and February. Fewer then eight and most of the benefit you get will be procedural; i.e. the team will gain some comfort with the rules and the playing situations. More than about 15 and you risk team burnout.

Even if you can only hold a few practices, the team will benefit, particularly in the areas of player recognition, acceptability of answers, and the rules changes for this season.

That said, more practices can create an advantage over teams that have fewer practices.

Try to practice for at least an hour, and no more than an hour-and-a-half, each time. In addition to any drills, play at least two matches each practice.

The “group process” is one of the most heavily researched and best understood areas of psychology. It is a powerful force that can effect great changes in individuals, promote personal growth and allow those individuals to develop ways to work more effectively as a whole than as the sum of their parts.

A College Bowl team fits the definition of a “task group.” Practices are the sessions that can allow the group process to work its magic. Effective groups go through predictable stages of development.

We’ll talk more about the specifics of those stages in a blog post or series of posts, sometime after the RCT. In the mean time, any text book on group psychology or the group process will describe them in detail. In a three-stage or four-stage model, the idea is to hold enough practices to have a chance get your team to the third stage, where they operate with improved effectiveness.

Especially if:
1. you have a new team
2. the majority of the team you’re sending to the RCT is rookies, or
3. the majority of your program is new,
spend one of those practices in a social event. The “service project” idea I wrote about last month would be good such event. The importance is to allow the group to bond socially and interact before you put them in a car and send them to the RCT.  

Practice Drills

Several ideas for drills are listed on pages 51-52 of the Program Guide. The “Password” drill on page 52 is highly recommended and can be fun to do in the car on the way to the tournament as well. It encourages free association and linkages, which are important in quick recall. (I think this drill is actually based on an old Avalon Hill game called “Facts in Five.”)

The “wait to be recognized” rule (Rule 11, and many other citations) can be taught in simple drills and during the practice matches. Moderators can use pauses, looks and other nonverbal means to try to get players to answer during all-toss-up drills. If the recognition rule is specifically practiced, it’s easy to learn; if it isn’t practiced, it will bite you during an RCT match.

Drills can also be specifically tailored to help teams develop in knowledge categories where they are weak. Anything that exposes team members to common answers and their clues may pay off down the line.

Teams can improve their bonus conferral by specifically looking at that aspect while playing a series of bonus questions. Conferral works best when everyone participates and when the captain has the clearest understanding of how certain a teammate is when offering a response. It’s been my observation that most captains don’t designate as often as they should, and bonus-only drills are also a good place to work on that.

Another drill, actually a test, which can have some benefit, is to have a player take a lockout signaling device in each hand. Give the player three to five tries to signal so simultaneously that both lights on the lockout go on. Lighting both can be done on nearly any system when the two signals occur closer together than the tolerance of the lockout system, which is usually on the order of one millisecond. What can be learned from this drill is that some players habitually hold the signaling device in one hand, when they actually would have a slightly faster response holding the signaling device in the other hand. Learning to hold the signaling device in the hand with the quicker response can give an advantage of a few milliseconds in a buzzer race, where several players try to signal at the same instant.

Rehearsing Game Strategy

Clock strategies, which are strategies designed to use the time given to a team to respond to a question in order to gain an advantage over an opponent, can be rehearsed as they come up in practice match play, and in specific short games. For instance, play a four-minute game where one team begins with a 200 point lead. The short game can be used for teams to get a feel for situations where the strategies do or don’t work, and to better gauge the point where the strategies should start being employed. The various strategies have been discussed earlier in posts entitled “Standard Strategy,” “Fast Break Strategy,” “Four Corners Strategy,” and “Control Strategy.”

Practice matches also offer the opportunity to discuss the more general strategies and tactics involving the various question types. These tactics are discussed pretty thoroughly in pages 53-56 of the Program Guide, the “Rules of Engagement” and “How and What to Answer” posts of this past September, and last months “Questions from the Inbox” posts on list answers.

Preparing for the RCT Environment

One of the principal axioms of sports psychology is that rehearsal improves performance, and that the closer rehearsal can be to the conditions of the actual competition, the more effective it will be. This applies to both actual practices and to envisioning and mentally rehearsing potential game situations.

Depending on how well-staffed the RCT is, you can usually expect it to have the full complement of game officials. Your practices may have the most benefit if you practice with a full set of officials as well.

Rotate players through the Game Official positions. This helps get teams used to that they will face many different officials, with different levels of experience, at the RCT. You’ll also find some players who enjoy being officials more then playing, which helps prepare your program for the point when you may want to host your own high school or intercollegiate tournaments.

If you haven’t selected your RCT team yet, try different combinations of players and captains. Even once you’ve selected your team, it may be wise to mix it up a little, as last-minute player changes do occur occasionally.

Run your practice games with eight-minute halves, and follow game procedures as strictly as you can. This includes procedures for resolving discrepancies. Don’t let players interrupt a match to point out an error or question a ruling; teach them to note it to bring up for discussion at the end of the half. A blog entry specifically focusing on discrepancies and resolving them effectively will be coming up before the RCT.

O play practice matches strictly under the rules, it helps to know the rules. At some point before the RCT, every player (and every Moderator and Judge) should take the on-line rules quiz. It’s available at:
http://www.collegebowl.com/pub/rulesquiz/welcome.html .

Keeping Focus in Practices

Some players lose their intensity in practice because there are no stakes. Intensity can be picked up by adding some real competition to the matches. One way to accomplish this is to invite a nearby College Bowl team or High School team to scrimmage with you.

Mark Dawson, who has recently joined us at College Bowl HQ, tells me of a “Keep the Table” drill he participated in during the 1990’s, when he was practicing with the Emory team. You need 9 to 12 players, plus the Game Officials, to do this. Divide the players up into three teams so that the teams are about evenly matched. Play two teams against each other for an all-toss-up mini-game. The team to answer five questions correctly, the team that loses sits down and is replaced by the third team, and the next mini-game starts. Though the stakes are just the pride of being able to keep playing, it’s enough to make the drill more competitive.

Resources for Practices

Having players write questions and use them at practice, is an excellent source of practice material. Over time, this allows teams to build up a large store of original practice questions.

Unused Campus program questions can also be read for practice. And especially for new teams, there are 57 practice games from previous years available at:
http://www.collegebowl.com/games/samples.asp .

And 14 more recent games, including 5 from RCT and NCT playoff rounds, are available at the same site, but password protected. Your Campus Coordinator has the password; it’s the same one that was used to register for the RCT.

High school questions and questions from other formats are better than nothing, but have a limited value because they follow their own unique conventions. The best practice material is the material closest in form to the tournament you are competing in.

Next post will be on selecting your RCT team.