Re: Texas and QB/AD (was: Another propos

etchuck · Fri, 31 Dec 1999 08:01:10 -0800

Actually, speaking as an outsider who's a lot
closer to the action that the average outsider, there is
a movement to try to get TWO teams from each state
to compete at Nationals. It won't happen for San
Antonio Nationals this year, but it's likely they'll try
to get a separate "Small Schools" bid for each state
beginning in 2001 (Anchorage AK). In a way Nationals has
already split the competing teams into 3 divisions based
on size, although in reality everyone's really
competing for one title... which as you point out the
largest schools usually win... but that's another topic
of discussion.

<< Furthermore, the only
subject in AD that has ever substantively helped me in
quizbowl has been Fine Arts. >>

For me it
would have been economics... had they not decided in my
year to do "History of Communism and Socialism". I've
been trying very hard to pick up slightly more than
basic concepts of economics ever since... and the HS
teams that compete at CWRU have paid for that pursuit.
:) :)

The only other thing that I learned
from AD that was useful to me is the art of
presentation. I was pretty damn horrible at speech. It wasn't
until the night of nationals right before I had to give
my speech that people actually helped me get a good
idea of how to play that part of the competition. That
one day plus taking a drama class in my freshman year
in college really gave me an idea of how speeches
should be done. Now I torture the Ohio AD kids in
drafting impromptu speech topics and arranging the panels
of judges. Yeah, my old AD teammates who were at my
class reunion last September were more than shocked
that I was still stuck doing Decathlon, much less
being in charge of doing speech.

Of course,
knowing how much effort it takes to do Decathlon, it is
amazing how some AD teams here find a couple of questions
planted in the tournaments we run at CWRU that allude to
AD curricula of the last two years, so at least some
of those hours aren't for naught if they have to
change mindsets in playing qb vs. AD. Of course, some of
us actually pay attention that sort of thing...
:)

Collegiate teams hosting high school competitions is going
to help things with Texas and California (not to
mention the void that is the Mountain States area:
Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, etc.). That
problem is going to be getting schools that are well
funded in Decathlon to play a qb tournament that covers
areas much more broad than the AD curriculum. I've
attempted to fill part of that need with the Celebrity
Shoot here in Ohio. As long as those HS competitions
are perceived to be fun for the kids, they'll be
successful in recruiting teams... but it's going to take 2-3
years for a fledgling HS comp to mature, especially if
the people in an organization don't have the
experience running a competition before.

There are
other problems that AD teams: comraderie. At least in
QB tournaments, high school players (at CWRU anyway)
are rather sociable with other kids on other teams.
Sure there might be some psych wars that go on, though
in our case, that's offset by the psych wars the
hosts do to torture the kids. :) AD teams tend to group
among themselves and not be friendly at all. In fact,
teams have been known not to be courteous enough to
give other teams applause or ovations during award
ceremonies over here. You can imagine how much it burns me
to see that. In short, you have competitive coaches
in HS qb that have personalities and some
maliciousness, but if you can deal with the many cold shoulders
that the highly competitive teams and even
administrators in AD can do... wow. AD rumor-mongering I'll
leave as discussion in the Academic Decathlon clubs
room... which I think still has about 6 people as
members. :)