I see my proposal for a Trash tournament designed with recent content and younger players in mind has met some controversy (with most of the complaints coming from people who are admittedly well outside my target audience, which is why I'm not going to waste any more time defending my decision after this post), so I thought I'd just say a few things. I see no reason why older players should be so offended that we are running our tournament targeting younger players. After all, TRASH, the main trash organization, is pretty obviously geared towards older grad and post-grad players, and a large number of teams that show up at regionals and nationals (and essentially all the top ranked teams) are masters teams. If anyone should take issue at being under-represented, it should be the younger players, and since we're being very upfront about our target audience, nobody should feel deceived by our tournament experiment. There's nothing wrong with segregating a tournament by age/experience level; junior birds do this all the time, and even someone's example of Jeopardy fails because Jeopardy holds separate tournaments for high school students, college students, and adults. The quiz bowl scene is probably the only place where people don't find the idea of college kids in their late teens competing against 30+ year old post-grads absolutely silly. Given the way trash is oriented, age does play a large role in determining the canon and question material. It differs from academia in that people actually spend significant amounts of time studying academic material like history, science, lit, etc for purposes other than answering questions at tournaments (i.e. education), and any high school graduate should have general knowledge of past events from his educational background alone, so it is not unfair to ask a college freshman about events and ideas that originated well before the time he was alive. Trash, however, is made up of "useless" knowledge absorbed through one's everyday pursuit of entertainment and other hobbies. Pop culture is generally a reflection of the times, as the cycle of fads and what's "in" and "out" will tell you, and people share the closest connection to pop culture events that occurred during their lifetime. A lot of people today don't watch Friends or the Simpsons, but since those shows are popular among the rest of their generation they are likely to know a lot more about them than shows like Welcome Back Kotter, Green Acres, or some such outdated television that can only be found on Nick at Nite. Similar to what Matt Weiner said, the only realistic way for people who did not grow up watching those shows to be able to answer questions on them is to memorize facts either by watching old reruns ad nauseam or scanning detailed archives of information on old television shows. That basically defeats the whole point of Trash, and frankly anyone who would actually go that far to improve his Trash PPG could be described as pathetic at best. We (an entirely undergraduate organization) read a lot of Trash packets in practice with questions like that, asking about Mork and Mindy characters, obscure Hitchcock films, or one hit wonders during the psychedelic era, and they frequently go dead in the room, and worse, leave an unpleasant taste in the mouths of our players who fail see to see why a bunch of outdated 60's-70's material is in a game played by college age kids. I'm sure some patronizing middle aged individual is going to write us off as a bad team, but clearly the early buzzer races that occur each time a question on Seinfeld or another topic relevant to them comes up indicates that there is talent in the room. I haven't been to a non-junior bird Trash tournament, but I can only imagine how irritating it must be to be expected to answer questions on material that went out of place before you were born against older people who grew up to it and quite frankly should find something better to do with their lives instead of spending weekends answering questions against kids half their age and then complaining when said kids find the experience a turn-off. I am not entirely against the presence of graduate students/post grads in quiz bowl, but as a player who plans to limit his career to his undergraduate years, I am growing annoyed with dinosaurs who think every tournament should cater to their interests. This is our first Trash tournament, and from the responses of undergrad players I've talked to (i.e. those whose opinion actually matters to me, as they are our target audience), our experimental format is a welcome change from the limited selection of Trash tournaments available. If you have such a fundamental problem with our idea, you can always go to one of the other myriad tournaments that caters to your interests, run your own, or choose not to go to ours. I just hope you don't use that problem as a reason to discourage undergrad players you know who would be interested in participating in our tournament. -Chris Frankel -Princeton _College_ Bowl P.S. For the record Jersey Trash WILL allow grad students to play, but no entirely grad student teams will be allowed, and it is preferred that any grad students playing will also have participated in our academic tournament, Buzzerfest, the day before. No post-grad players will be allowed.
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