I've been playing quizbowl in SoCal in one form or another for 7 years now, going on 8. This is my fourth year of collegiate play and I too am concerned about the California circuit. It is unfortunate that more teams do not make the trip up to Berkeley and Stanford more often, but due to the relative sparsity of quizbowl schools up north, those are the only two programs currently able to put together a well-run collegiate tournament. We come down for a lot of SoCal games; just last week, seven people flew down from Berkeley to play at TWAIN, which by the way was extremely well run. In light of our good attendance, I don't think it's too much to ask teams to come up north once in a while. As for organizing more JB tournaments, last year I considered trying to put something like this together at Berkeley. After further thought, I realized that for the most part, this would not work for us due to our relatively remote geographical location and our busy tournament schedule. You just run into too much burnout if you have tournaments staggered every week. Last spring, the West Coast had ACF Regionals, FUCT mirror, Wildcat, Cardinal Classic, NAQT Sectionals, and NAQT Nationals. That's 7 tournaments, folks, and we sent a team to each one, not to mention a team sent to ACF Nats. With that kind of a playing schedule, where are we going to squeeze in more JB tournaments? The responsibility of creating a viable QB circuit in California lies with every participating school. I think Berkeley and Stanford do their fair share. CalTech and UCLA also contribute enormously. I am also very excited to see such a great turnout for TWAIN and a revival of some clubs I long thought dormant or dead. These are all positive signs and with WIT, Technophobia, and ACF Fall approaching, I look forward to an excellent season of QB on the West Coast. That said, I'd like to address Willie Chen's comment that UCI doesn't have the "gene pool" to be competitive in QB. I don't know for sure, but I'm afraid that this could be a popular misconception on the part of the QB community in California. It doesn't take any specific "genes" to do well in QB, just a desire to play and get better. Berkeley and Stanford have advantages because they are well- established programs, but they succeed not because we're all brilliant geniuses with 250 point IQs but because we work hard at it. If you work hard, you will have a good team. If you don't work hard, you won't. I wish there were a different way to become good other than working at it, but sadly there isn't. One of the best way to improve is to write questions, which is why I think too many centrally-written tournaments such as NAQT events are not the best thing to have. This is not meant to disparage NAQT but rather to emphasize the importance of writing questions in the improvement process and to encourage teams to attend packet-submission events. QB questions are a little like SAT questions in that once you divine the question structure, you have an advantage over your opponent, and what better way to do that than to write your own questions? In summary: play quizbowl, write questions, attend tournaments. Otherwise the circuit will die, leaving only Stanford and Berkeley to play each other in perpetuity, locked in a vicious struggle akin to that of the trench warfare that characterized World War I. Ok, maybe that analogy doesn't quite work, but I think everyone understands what I mean. Also, I write way too much. Jerry
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