Noah Prince
| ||||
| Past Teams Coached | IMSA (2008-2016) | |||
| College | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | |||
| Stats | HDWhite NAQT page | |||
Noah Prince is a quizbowl writer and technologist who formerly served as a coach, staffer, tournament director on the Illinois circuit. He was the coach of the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) quizbowl team from 2009 to 2014, where he was a mathematics teacher at the Academy. Under Dr. Prince, IMSA won four consecutive IHSA championships and became a nationally competitive school.
Playing Career
Noah played scholastic bowl for Normal Community High School in Illinois. He was a standout regional player in the Big 12 Conference, which included MacArthur. In his junior year, his team made the IHSA State Finals, but failed to advance out of a group that included IMSA and Stevenson.
Noah attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, but was not involved with quizbowl at all in college.
Coaching Career
Noah was recruited to be IMSA's coach in 2009 during his second year at IMSA after the notorious Coach Dennis Czerny left his post. At the time, IMSA was not even considered a regional power, and hadn't made the IHSA State Finals since they beat Prince himself in 2001. Under Prince, IMSA never failed to qualify for the state finals, and never finished lower than 4th place.
| Year | IHSA State | Masonic State | NAQT State | NHB State |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-10 | 3rd | 4th | -- | -- |
| 2010-11 | 1st | 3rd | -- | -- |
| 2011-12 | 1st | 1st | 2nd | -- |
| 2012-13 | 1st | 3rd | 1st | -- |
| 2013-14 | 1st | 1st | 1st | 1st |
One of Prince's students lovingly recalled "Whenever IMSA wins an IHSA state championship, Coach Prince loves to mention that he played in the IHSA series as a high school student, though he'd never have imagined he would be leading the winning team. His favorite pastime is first-lining non-computational math tossups and claiming that the lead-in was factually incorrect."
IMSA also enjoyed high finishes at nationals during this time, including 4th at 2012 NSC, T-5th at 2013 HSNCT, and 4th at 2015 HSNCT (which Prince coached during a transition period).
Prince and Brad Fischer coached Team Illinois at the 2015 NASAT tournament.
Prince left the IMSA faculty in the summer of 2016 to move to San Diego.
Writing and Editing
Noah began writing quizbowl questions during his IMSA coaching career, starting with the IMSANITY housewrite. Prince served as head editor of IMSANITY through the first four iterations, and described the goal of the set thusly: "IMSANITY aims to be a regular difficulty tournament in the sense of high conversion overall but not afraid to ask harder answer lines in reasonable moderation. Questions, especially bonuses, will feel unique, but more due to creative themes than to increased difficulty. IMSANITY seeks to be a leader with noncomputational math questions." Before IMSANITY, it was common for quizbowl tournaments to contain at most a handful of math questions, while it is now more common for sets to carve out dedicated space in the distribution for math.
Prince has also contributed to a number of other projects in a writing or subject editing capacity.
- SCOP (2014, 2016, 2017), writer
- IHSA State (2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022), writer and subject editor
- NHBB / IAC (2016, 2017), writer and side event editor
- MASSOLIT (2016), sole writer and head editor
- HSAPQ (2017), writer
- NASAT (2017), writer and subject editor
- PACE NSC (2021) writer
Prince has also produced a few novelty sets, such as IMSADNESS and a few packets of before-and-afters.
In a forums post, Dr. Prince detailed his bad experiences applying to write for NAQT.
TD Career
Prince has been a tournament director by necessity. He ran several IHSA regional and sectional competitions at IMSA, and was the co-director of the BMI mirrors of IMSANITY at Bloomington.
Prince also ran events for History Bowl: the 2019 San Diego Regional History Bee & Bowl Championships, the bowl playoffs at 2019 NHBB nationals, and the 2019 National Science Bee.
Quizbowl Technology
Prince developed a question management system for NHBB called Packetizor. He later made an improved version freely and publicly available.
During the 2018-19 quizbowl season, Prince founded a new online quizbowl company called Qblitz. The Qblitz website runs online tournaments, beginning in Spring 2019, and it also offers statistical analysis to help players improve their game.
Podcast
Since 2019, Prince has been the host and producer of the Tossup 21 podcast, which focuses on quizbowl stories.
Quizbowl Service
Prince briefly served in the steering committee for the Illinois coaches association. He later helped restore the organization's website after the departure of Jonah Greenthal.