Clemson tournament proposal (something a little different)

clemsonquizbowl <*clemsonquizbowl_at_clemsonquizbowl.yahoo.invalid*> · Tue, 19 Nov 2002 02:57:19 -0000

>From what I've heard here this year, budgets seem to be rather tight 
in the Southeast.  Virtually all the tournaments I've seen announced 
in our travel range are ACF.  We have a different problem at Clemson: 
our budget is ample, but we have a young program with very little 
interest in ACF and a lack of volunteers.  So my proposal is this: an 
NAQT tournament at Clemson in the spring with no entry fee but a 
requirement for each team to provide a volunteer for the day.  (We 
would eat the financial cost of hosting.)

To make it more attractive, I'm seriously considering allowing 
volunteers to play with their teams when they are not volunteering, 
and allowing teams to change their volunteer during the day. (I 
envisioned it as something along the line of a team brings 5 players, 
throughout the day they rotate who sits out a round, and whoever sits 
out volunteers to help run a match in a different division.)  
Obviously, there are ways teams could manipulate this scheme, and the 
quality of volunteers would essentially be beyond a TD's control, so 
I have my reservations about this.

My questions to the board are:
1.  Has anything like this been tried before?
2.  Can the general quiz bowling population be trusted to submit a 
reasonable field of volunteers and be honest in not manipulating it?
3.  How much interest would you have in actually participating?

Dates under consideration are March and early April.

This is still in the early preliminary stages and doesn't have final 
approval here, but it will help to have some feedback from the quiz 
bowl population before proceeding with a rather unique tournament.

Roger Whitehead
Clemson Quiz Bowl co-chairman