Charlie Steinhice
Director of various tournaments and team coach at UTC. Associated with funn and losing stats.
Playing Career
Steinhice was involved in the WUSTL team that lost the first College Bowl NCT to Stanford in 1978. He later finished his education at Tennessee, where he played on the team that won the first ACF Nationals with Robert Trent and others, under the coaching of Carol Guthrie.
UTC
At some point in the 1990s, Steinhice moved to Chattanooga and became the advisor to the UTC quizbowl team (it is unknown whether Steinhice actually had a faculty position at UTC or was just an outside volunteer). Since 1998 UTC, under Steinhice's direction, has run a lengthy lineup of tournaments including the fall "Trevor's Trivia: Bob Selcer Memorial" and spring "Trevor's Trivia: Dennis Haskins Open" high school tournaments, the fall Center of the Known Universe Open, winter Sword Bowl, and spring Moon Pie collegiate academic tournaments, and the fall Big Lots Clearance Open and spring RC Cola trash tournaments. Other tournaments such as the "ACF Detox" trash, the Moc Masters and Muck Masters summer academic and trash tournaments, and mirrors of the HSNCT have been run irregularly. UTC was also the host for ACF Regionals in the Southeast from 2000 until 2006.
Many people enjoyed the new opportunities to play tournaments in the Southeast, and surely the tournaments founded in the late 1990s were as good or better than other independently run events of the time. Indeed, UTC's high school tournaments are still among the best available in the region. However, their collegiate tournaments have been criticized by many for a slew of reasons: they tend to last only about 10 rounds and use anachronistic formats unheard-of in the rest of the country such as single-elimination playoffs; questions are meandering and full of unhelpful clues and non-clues such as terrible jokes in bonus leadins; each round takes about 45 minutes to run because Steinhice encourages teams to chatter between questions; and general question quality is variable, frequently spending time in the "poor" range due to wild swings in difficulty and general question structure. UTC "academic" packets contain an alarming number of trash clues, and questions don't appear to be edited after they are submitted.
Steinhice does not appear to understand the way packet submission works, as his typical way of editing a tournament involves announcing the event without planning to either write it himself or require team packets, frantically demanding three weeks ahead of time that other people write his tournament for him after no packets magically appear, then shortening the tournament to 9 rounds and a tossup-only "shootout" when, shockingly, packets still do not manifest themselves from the ether. Matt Weiner's attempt at Steinhician packet-writing methods ended in disaster.
UTC tournaments are also marked by doses of funn which approach the LD-50. Throwing actual Moon Pies into the opening meeting at Moon Pie and forcing teams to chant Charlie Steinhice's not-that-insightful "three rules of quizbowl" are some of the recurrent ways in which funn manifests itself at UTC.
Steinhice himself is known to frequently accuse ACF of being impossible and make snide remarks towards it, such as equating ACF with poision by hosting a trash tournament called "ACF Detox." Of course, ACF Detox was only possible because Steinhice's UTC club served as the southeastern host of ACF Regionals for seven straight years, a long-standing support for the format that few programs can match.
For many years, criticism of the very low question quality at UTC tournaments was brushed aside by noting that it came from people who had not attended the tournaments. However, with the recent proliferation of Sword Bowl and Moon Pie mirrors everywhere, people who have paid money to play on Steinhice's questions, such as Jerry Vinokurov, have targeted the packets with inescapable rancor. (It should be noted that some of this is not Charlie's fault. For example, Penn Bowl 2006, a mirror outside the south that Jerry played on and later ranted about, ran on partially edited Sword Bowl questions that Charlie had sent out for repeat- and spell-checking, which shifts some culpability away from Charlie.)
In Feb. 2008 Steinhice led UTC to a 4th place showing at the Southeast SCT. Steinhice was the top scorer and the winner of the Tuscaloosa Ram neg prize. He remarked that it was his first attempt at playing an NAQT tournament, as well as his first tournament period in ten years. Steinhice later led UTC to a 19th-place showing at the 2008 NAQT ICT in St. Louis and finished 7th in the individual rankings.