Hello, I guess, being one of the dinosaurs in the So Cal circuit, I feel obliged to respond. My opinions are solely mine and do not reflect the stance of the UC Irvine club/team. ----------------------------------------- 1. Southern California teams not driving up to Northern California tournaments: I believe this problem boils down to how serious (or "hard-core") a school's program is. For years I have made it a point to attend as many tournaments as possible for the sake of the UCI QB program, even driving up to tournaments in Berkeley, Stanford, and two CBI tournaments at Fresno and Sacramento. But, alas, my teammates just aren't as serious about QB as I am--and that's why I've been on so many conglomerate teams. Truly dedicated QB players are hard to come by; just take a look at the Occidental program after Wesley graduated! One personal opinion--I've been to Berkeley so many times that I virtually memorized all the major streets in the area! I'd appreciate a change of venue once in a while. At least in So Cal we have tournaments held at UCLA, USC, Caltech, UCI, UCR, and Scripps. A little variety goes a long way. Perhaps the Berkeley/Stanford duo can do more to help initiate Northern California colleges into the QB circuit. --------------------------- 2. Poor tournament quality I was just a little taken aback by the comments made by Ross about the UCI tournaments, but I understand that he spoke with good intentions. The main problem is that UCI does not attract many graduate students who want to play quiz bowl. Thus, when our players graduate, we lose experienced moderators. You have no idea how many HOURS I have spent training new undergraduate students to moderate properly. To compensate for this problem, I have "hired" moderators from UCLA, USC, UCR, and Harvey Mudd on a per-head basis for our tournaments. It is always my goal to have a well-staffed tournament. And as to the comment that I changed/edited ACF Regional questions--I have seen it done at NAQT Sectionals (by another school whose name I shall not mention), so that was my rationale for doing so. If I have by chance broken some tacit rule of Tournament Directing, please let me know. Basically, I wanted the players to have a good time at the tournament. Our dedicated club members actually took the time to test-play all the packets to clear up the few ambiguous, awkwardly-worded, or just plain impossible questions. (No offense to the editor. Your packets were 99.99% outstanding.) And as to tournaments running late--I have seen UCI tournaments run more and more on-time in the last several years. Two things that we can all do are to arrive at the tournament on time and to come back from lunch on time. --------------------------- I'll continue my babble in the next post . . .
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