The circuit is not obligated to make anyone the beneficiaries of geography. If anyone has benefited from geography, it has been the East Coast. California teams have had to come out to the East Coast and to the Midwest for national tournaments since the dawn of quizbowl. The Berkeley quizbowl team gets a whopping $1100 a year from our student government, plus the vague promise of the possibility of acquiring money from a contingency fund. On top of that, travel expenditures have to be approved specifically for each tournament, as we are not allowed to use our money for travel expenses without prior approval. Despite all this, we regularly field at least two teams in every California tournament and often we field as many as four teams, a feat which requires a large expenditure of money from our own pockets, usually without any hope of being reimbursed from the club budget. Moreover, we sent last year two teams to the NAQT Nationals, two teams to TRASHionals, and another team to ACF. Granted, we were eventually reimbursed partially by the money we got from the contingency fund but at the time, our teams were flying out basically with no guarantee that they wouldn't end up paying for all of this out of their own pocket. In other words, we turn ourselves inside out and do everything we can in order to send as many players as wish to go to every tournament of interest. It must be nice to be able to make the drive to a national tournament every year in one day, but I wouldn't know. The moral of this story? Once in a while, a couple of East Coast schools can put a little extra effort into getting out to a national tournament that isn't held in their backyard for once in ten years. Whichever region of the country you hold the tournament in, some large part of the teams will have to make that long flight. At least be grateful you might only have to do it once every ten years instead of every year like we do. > I don't think that the circuit is obligated to make > the California teams the beneficiaries of geography. > All the currently active CA teams are found in the > greater San Francisco or Los Angeles areas; they do > not have to deal with the struggle to get to a major > airport that a Penn State or Cornell does. Many east > coast teams will have a much more difficult time > attending this event than any west coast teams had > last year, and the number affected will be much > higher. > I await hearing the rationale for this decision as > well as that for disregarding the other bids. There > are lots of things that NAQT might have already done > to alleviate the problems that we may not know about, > and I'm hoping some of them have already been > arranged.
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