North County Academic League

North County Academic League is a format of high school quizbowl played in northern San Diego County, California and run by the San Diego County Office of Education. The season runs from January to March, when the four regional champions meet for the championship tournament. Various matches are televised on San Diego County Office of Education Instructional Television (ITV Channel 16). The winner of the Academic League was sent to the NAC at some point, but that tradition has not continued recently.

Format

Academic League matches are played in tossup-bonus format and are timed (time varies depending on whether it is a Novice, Junior Varsity, or Varsity match). Tossups are worth three points and bonuses worth five points. A neg rule is also in play; teams are deducted one point for an incorrect answer at any point during or after the tossup, but not if the opponent has already been penalized for an incorrect answer. Bonuses are either three, four, or five parts, and 20 seconds is given for conferral on all parts, after which points are awarded based on how many parts the team got correct. The team with more points when time expires wins. If time expires in the middle of a tossup-bonus cycle, the tossup and/or bonus will be completed.

Questions

According to the 2006 rules, each coach is required to submit 6 tossup and 6 bonus questions each year. "Coaches may write questions themselves, solicit an expert, or purchase the questions." Nine current events questions per week, all tossups, are to be written by the moderators directly out of the Time magazine dated Monday of that week. Questions are added to and taken out of a question bank, which means that verbatim repeats do occur.

Officials

Academic League uses six officials: a moderator, a buzzer judge, a timing judge, an official scorekeeper, and two student scorekeepers. The moderator performs normal moderator functions like reading questions and awarding or deducting points. The buzzer judge is responsible for recognizing players after they have buzzed in, and the timing judge is responsible for timing the thirty-minute match, three-second interval to answer after recognition, five-second interval before the tossup is ruled dead, twenty-second interval for bonus conferral, and any 60-second timeouts. It is unknown why three scorekeepers are needed, but coaches are forbidden to keep score.

Controversy

In a 2007 match between La Jolla and Scripps Ranch for one of the regional championships, a closely fought match went to overtime. The tiebreak tossup asked which nation was the first to be established with the help of the United Nations. Scripps Ranch answered with Israel, was ruled incorrect, and lost one point (thereby losing the match). The answer on the page turned out to be Libya. As the county championships were not for several weeks, and the game took place on a weekday night and would not be broadcast until that Sunday, Scripps Ranch was able to file an official protest the next day. The team cited both the CIA World Factbook and U.N. Resolutions as evidence that Israel was established with the help of the United Nations three years before Libya was. The protest was denied and the regional commissioner cited two sources in their denial, printouts of which were mailed to the Scripps Ranch coach. The commissioner claimed the first source was Encyclopedia Britannica. The second source was Debbie's Super Trivia Encyclopedia. Emily from Scripps Ranch decided to e-mail Ken Jennings about this travesty. Ken's response, which can be found in this blog entry, notes that this kind of stuff happened all the time when he played CBI, which he describes as a "similarly monolithic and complacent organization". Results of an online search appear to indicate that the correct answer to the question depends entirely upon the exact wording of the question.

External Links

• Official webpage
• Rules as of 2006
• Code of Conduct for the 2006 and 2007 seasons
• Link to first part of an episode
• Scores for South County seasons 2000-Present
• Website featuring the TV Airing of Academic League Matches