h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Lemon Blossom

As an aspiring captain of my school's quiz bowl team, I must get terribly excited. What's your area of speciality? What's your team like? Where (vaguely, US region-wise) are you from? How do you guys do?

I'm from a large San Diego high school, and after being the youngest person on junior varsity this year, I hope to become captain of varsity someday. Is there anything I need to know? I live and breathe Academic League 24/7.

You should definitely go out for college bowl. I've heard it's really fun.

(BTW, my capacity for hero-worshipping is very great, so if it starts to bother you, do let me know.)

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Where am I? Suburban Maryland, in the DC area. Which is apparently a pretty good region in terms of competition. My area of specialty is generally science and technology. I do pretty well on history, also, although I wouldn't describe myself as a specialist in that field. My team is horrible this year although it used to be better. Last year we won the Maryland NAQT regional and did pretty well--but that was mostly because we had two very good seniors, one of whom was a brilliant captain. This year the team sort of fell apart. This may be partly because I'm not a great captain, but I blame it to a large degree on the coach and on two of my teammate's inability to behave at practices/unwillingness to practice. We did manage to come in second at the Maryland NAQT regional (it's actually one of the easier local tournaments to win because one doesn't have to play against Thomas Jefferson). We didn't win any tournaments this year, but we managed to get into the playoffs of all the ones we played in.


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Hmm... I managed to make captain mostly because of the incompetance and unwillingness to study of the rest of my team--my coach refuses to recruit new players because he believe that "when we need someone, someone will find us". I have been ranked pretty highly on the individual scores at some of the tournaments we've played at this year, but I don't think I'm the best choice to answer your questions. However, since you asked, I'll try.

I personally think reading over the summer is more useful than studying lists--at least I feel I learn more that way. I suppose picking some subject the varsity team is weak on (or will be when the oldest current members graduate) makes some sence--but on the other hand, focusing on your specialty helps a lot. Personally, I find that it's worth the effort to learn things that are relatively unusual and don't come up that often--knowing "Higgs Boson" on the first five words may not come in handy that often, but when it does it is useful psychologically as it scares the other team pretty badly (I know; I managed that particular stunt on the first question of a game once and it made the other team start ringing in early without knowing the answer for a few questions just because they expected me to power on everything if they didn't. Generally I think that obscure stuff is more useful anyway because things that everyone should know, the rest of your team and any team you're playing will know, so it's just a buzzer race. It's more useful to know the unusual facts--and if conferring is allowed (I'm not familiar with the Academic League format, no conferring on toss-ups is my main gripe with NAQT) then you don't need to know all the obvious stuff because someone else on the team will know it--what comes in handy is knowing how Tschikovski committed suicide, not that he wrote 1812 Overture. As long as your team is relatively good, it's probably more worthwhile to get to know your specialty to an obscure degree and to learn some general facts that are on the edge of obscurity.



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I will. It's quizbowl, how could it not be fun?



<<(BTW, my capacity for hero-worshipping is very great, so if it starts to bother you, do let me know.)>>

I will. I have no objection to hero-worshipping on principle--I started a religion worshiping the person who was the captain of my school's varsity team when I was a junior--but I'm not a valid hero. Worship Sam Lederer or Noah Rahmen or someone if you need a quizbowl hero.

Wow, cool...

Yeah, I haven't had much experience with NAQT. We played one scrimmage with a school that does NAQT, which turned out a disaster, as apparently according to NAQT rules you can't, for example, use players in the varsity match that have already played in the JV match. Therefore, my coach's plans were more or less scuppered, and we won our JV but lost our varsity match.

We don't have a California state tournament or anything - the farthest we go is county. But my school tends to go to National Academic League tournaments in New Orleans and Chicago.


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Which is completely unlike our system. We have a *huge* team, a total of about 40 novice, JV and varsity players. We'll be upgrading to 60 in the fall, with the introduction of the Academic League class - an exciting and innovative first that allows us to practice outside of our 20-minute lunch period.

Academic League is pretty much exactly like NAQT. You can't confer during tossups (which are worth 3 points, and -1 if you get one wrong). You can confer during bonuses, and you get 20 seconds to do them, and up to 5 points for correct answers. Bonus answers have to be given through the captain, but they can defer to a teammate if they wish.

Yeah, I got landed with art history to study over the summer. It was deemed that my esoteric brand of pre-17th century literature, Baroque music and English history wasn't really sufficient in the whole general mishmash. So maybe I'll read the textbook I was given... or maybe not.

I do tend to go on about this, and I'm sorry if I'm boring you, but as I said, I live, eat, breathe and think academic league more or less 24/7. I'm going to try out for the Jeopardy teen tournament too; if only because it gives me a new pool of questions to answer. That's pretty much the state of my existence.

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Yeah--NAQT tournaments tend to have five preliminary matches followed by a single elimination playoff with the top 16 or so teams seeded based on the preliminaries. Rather than have a distinction between Varsity and JV you can have as many teams as you want (identified with letters, A being the best and going down the alphabet by decreasing skill); teams play random teams of all skill levels in the preliminaries and can end up having teams from the same school playing each other in the playoffs--at one tournament we went to this year the finals were between two teams from Thomas Jefferson. Because there aren't seperate levels of competition for varsity and jv, it wouldn't really make sence to be able to move people around. Not that I'm trying to defend NAQT--I'm mad at them right now because their question quality seems to have gone down this season.


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The DC area has, I suspect, the highest concentration of quizbowl teams of any area in the nation. So the state tournament is really just teams from the three counties that are DC suburbs--PG, Montgomery, and Howard and from DC itself. (I don't know why DC teams are allowed in the Maryland tournament--I think it may be because there isn't a DC one.) I'm sort of surprised there isn't an NAQT state tournament in California--if your team doesn't play NAQT normally it might be that there is one you aren't aware of, maybe? (When I say state tournament, I don't mean that it is run or sponsored by the state or anything, it's just the tournament that NAQT identifies as the state tournament, with any team that places above some level getting to go to the NAQT nationals.)


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Wow. You guys sound like Thomas Jefferson--they tend to bring 7 or so teams to tournaments, which adds up to 30 people, and I don't think that's their whole club. Since my school has five lunch periods, we just practice after school. Being able to have a class for it would help. A lot of the teams in my area are organized like that, but mine is sort of an exception. Our coach is ancient--he's been doing it for something like thirty years now and because it's a magnet school in a bad public school system he can usually find a few good people--at least enough for a varsity team. So he concluded that he's a genius and a great coach (he's neither) and so he doesn't need to recruit or do anything--just read questions at practice and people will show up and we'll have a great team like we always have had before. Too bad it's not working anymore. I suspect that in two years my high school won't have a team anymore.


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Only difference is points--bonuses are more important in NAQT since the TU is worth 10 points (15 if you power) and the bonus is worth thirty.


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Baroque music--cool. I like Baroque music, but the other orchestra people on my team hate it for some snobbish reason--only romantic period is good enough for them. Art history is important--fortunately someone else on my team was happy to take that--this kid who really wants to be Italian (long story involving loud arguments between him and the people on the team who take Latin, but if you want to hear it I'll be glad to elaborate).



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It's certainly not boring me; I enjoy talking about quizbowl. BTW, are you aware of Michael Braun--the guy who won the last Teen Tournament? He's on a local quizbowl team; I know him although I don't think he knows me. Good luck with Jeapordy; let me know if you're on TV (unless for understandable privacy reasons you don't want to).

I think there might be an NAQT state tournament, but I've never really looked into it since we don't do NAQT. Academic League doesn't go any farther than county. At some of our tournaments we do the A team B team thing, but those are private tournaments that individual schools put on and aren't part of our regular season. In the regular season we have the three levels of play (varsity, JV, novice) and we play other schools, one school per week.

My coach is really into subbing in and letting everyone play - so unless you're captain you really only get about five minutes of playing time per match. But it's not a bad system really, because as long as we're far ahead of the other teams (which we often are) he'll let the kids who would ordinarily never even make it on the team answer a question or two. It's kind of sweet, really.

I love Baroque music and all that sort of thing with a passion, partially due to my odd obsession with England pre-1800. I play violin and have ambitions of forming a recorder consort... which I highly doubt will ever happen.

Do elaborate on the kid who wants to be Italian! Now I'm deadly curious.

While in Chicago at the National Academic tournament I got to meet Brad, the guy who won the Jeopardy Ultimate Tournament of Champions, and who beat Ken Jennings. He was moderating some of our matches. He's really nice. (I'm also a Jeopardy freak, though since we don't have tv I don't get to watch it much.)

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All of the tournaments we go to (with the exception of nationals when we can afford to go to them) are run by individual schools. I think even the NAQT states are run by the quizbowl team of the college that hosts them. NAQT just sells the questions, they don't run the tournaments. About 1/3 of the tournaments we go to are on questions bought from NAQT, 1/3 are on questions written by the team running it in the NAQT style, and 1/3 are on questions written by the team running it in some other style (usually the style of the local TV show, called It's Academic, which has its own rules and a tradition of horrible questions). Also, it's three-person teams and only one team per school, no multiple levels of play. I suppose our regular season is technically just the TV show, which is single-elimination from the start and three-team matches. The format is five rounds--two non-competative, three toss-up, confering whenever you want. The questions are horrid, though--full of twists and generally so easy that they're buzzer races once they get past the twists. I hate the TV show because I don't like the questions, I don't like having to dress up formally, and I don't like that the whole thing is single elimination. I was on the TV team both senior and junior years; in both cases we lost in the second round to teams we ought to have been able to beat.



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On the TV show subbing is not allowed; at most tournaments it is allowed but pointless in general since if a school has extra players they usually send more than one team--one school actually sent seven teams to the tournament my school ran (it was 1/3 of the teams competing, we wouldn't have made a profit without them, not that we deserved to make a profit--another long story I'll tell you if you really want to hear it but I don't want to bore you with if you're not interested). This year once or twice my coach did feel it was humerous to make a big deal of substituting people for each other--telling two people to switch seats for no clear reason except to be funny. I suppose if your number of teams is limited, though, subbing does make a lot of sence.


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I have to admit I agree that that is an odd obsession. I play violin, but not very well. By the end of senior year I was a second-violin in my school's middle level orchestra. I've been playing for six years, but although I've been using the Dorflein series with my private teacher that whole time, I only today finished book three. Part of my problem is I am nearly pitch-deaf, so I have no buisness playing violin, really. The other part is I don't work at it enough--I don't practice violin nearly as much as I suppose I should.



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Cool. I'm a Jeopardy freak--it seems to run in my family, my grandfather was and my mother is. I haven't had time to watch it much due to homework, though.


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As it's time for me to go to bed--after 11 and I need to get up at six tomorrow--I'll have to elaborate on it tomorrow. Sorry I couldn't finish this now.

Good night

My mom did It's Academic when she was a kid in New York - sounds pretty intense!

When we play it's more like inter-school sports matches. We buy our questions from pretty much anywhere (usually National Academic), or sometimes the coaches and teachers at school make them up. We go to a school, or they come to us, and we play. Five players at a time, a captain and four players, and coaches can call time-outs and sub in whenever they want. Matches are 25 minutes long.

The local television station has a program called, believe it or not, 'Academic League on the Road', which travels around to various schools and tapes their AL matches. They also tape the city finals at the end of the season, which we competed in (finished second). Since San Diego is such a huge city, there are something like 25 teams in the league, and so it's never a problem finding someone to play. A big school, like us or one of the other forerunners, will hold a tournament every few Saturdays, and maybe 16 or 18 teams will show up to one of those. That's about it, really.

Enjoy getting up at six tomorrow. I shall brag and say I get to sleep till 8:00 - but then I'm leaving on a jet plane, as duty and the relatives call.

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We have a lot of good local teams that go to tournaments--but there are a lot of teams that only play on the TV show (81 schools on the TV show). But they don't tape our matches at schools, we have to go to the local NBC affiliate and play on a set. It's sort of cool that it's the same studio as the Nixon-Kennedy debates and some national Sunday news roundtable, but it's annoying to have to drive out there just for one game.

No school except for one (Thomas Jefferson, which has a huge program) in my area ever has multiple tournaments. But a good number of them do have tournaments--this year I think we went to about 10 and there was one we missed because of a schedualing problem.

I will explain about the kid who wants to be Italian later--unfortunately I have to get off the computer again. Sorry.

I think very few leagues/districts/cities actually do like we do and have inter-school 'matches' like sports teams, where it's just two schools there at one time. I must confess I prefer the tournament setting - you get to play more different teams, there's more people there, and it's a bit of a festive affair.

81 - that's a lot of schools, really. The number surprises me, actually. Are they all from your area?

No apologies are necessary; I used to have to sneak computer time until my father got a new computer and I got his old machine.

I also prefer the tournament setting--hopefully College Bowl is something like that.

The 81 schools are, as far as I know, all from the cities of Washington and Alexandria and the three surrounding counties. This show has been going on for 43 years (they make a big deal of being listed as teh longest running game show ever in the Guiness Book of World Records), and I think it is partly responsible for the DC area having one of the higher concentrations of quizbowl teams, and of good quizbowl teams, in the country. There's another version of the show in Baltimore; I don't know how many teams they have though. And a third version in central Virginia (Richmond area, I think).


I just got a new computer for college this week, so now I don't have to use my parents' computer anymore. We only have one phoneline, though, so my internet time is limited.

Yay! New computers are always cool.

I think there must be another version of the show in New York - I know my mom did it when she was in high school there.

Cool.