I am a graduate student in an MBA program at the original poster's school. I was very active in college bowl at Boston University and Emory Uniersity in the early 90's, and then I left quiz bowl and college behind to do other things like travel, work, and get married i.e. have a life for 6 years. I was asked to help coach a high school team a few years ago which was a pleasant experience, and when I was presented an opportunity to get an MBA as a full-time grad student, I wanted to be a team member just to have fun, hopefully make a contribution, and rediscover the event as a casual participant. Now, I really can't believe I used to take all of this so seriously. Here are some of my observations. I orinally became disillusioned with academic team in my junior year like many do. There were better players among the upcoming Freshman and Sophomores across the board because the quiz bowl game at the high school level was growing with better coaching and a lot more seasoned players showing up in college. Also, some novice style tournaments became unavailable as has been mentioned. On the other side of the juniors and seniors were graduate students who I often felt were sucking the life out of these organizations through there often unintentional iron-handed organizational control of a school's quiz bowl team based on some presumed tenure of quiz bowl superiority. The I am a better player or the TA for your 300 level Lit class so I am better qualified to run this organization kind of mentality, which I still loathe today. I believe somewhere in the mid 90's this situation converged so that questions began to move toward ever increasing levels of obscurity and less and less relevance, and some players who were great high school stars and well-rounded people spent about a month or two in these organizations before abandoning the whole game at the college level. I have often felt it is the Wild West in terms of structure in the quiz bowl subculture as one poster wrote, and yes I have thought that maybe the NCAA should become involved or something like it. I have also thought that all of these posts and the quiz bowl world are begging for the type of documentary that made films like Hoop Dreams, Paris is Burning, and The Color of Money such textured observations on American subcultures. An NCAA affiliation would certainly mainstream and legitimize the quizbowl world, and make such a documentary the fodder for some lame show like HBO Real Sports etc. Never once have I ever been asked to show a Student Id or any proof that I am a registered student or who I claim to be on the form at any academic style competition since I was in the 8th Grade. With this type of situation, anyone can play anywhere anytime as long as they want to, and noone can really do anything about it. Yes, there are some players who dominate, and have been around forever, but in the real world no one cares that you are starting out at 23 in a sales position or trying to do some work. They just want to know whether you can get it done whether you are 19 or 39. The same is true in quiz bowl. No one checks eligibility or student status, or legitimacy of affiliation, (at many tournaments you are lucky if the facts in the questions are correct 85% of the time.) so without any governing body, there never will be anyway around the great disparity of player abilities, ages, and education levels. However, life is like that in everything else be it golfers that lie abut handicaps, that guy at your summer job that has spent his life becoming the senior most employee at Whataburger in a 5 state radius or Senior Traders on Wall Street that can't wait to kick your ass so hard on the ground that it makes 550-10 drumming in quiz bowl seem like a pleasant experience. I think the NCAA has a good idea about the 5 years of eligibility from the time you first matriculate at an accredited college or university, and that rule should be looked at in some form for quiz bowl. However, if the NCAA or some other group is not keeeping up with every program and all the players, then there will always be people out there playing for different schools bouncing around the country for 20 years. To quote D. Miller: "Of course that is just my opinion, I could be wrong." Brian Carberry --- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "nicolas_walters" <Sywolf_at_a...> wrote: > > While I agree that the need for grad students to be involved in the > circuit on some level is important, I think what the original poster > was trying to say is that juniors and seniors are often placed in a > crappy position, quiz bowl wise. There are a lot of junior bird > exclusive tournaments in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic for example, > so when you hit your junior year, not only are the number of > tournaments you can attend cut in half it seems...but the level of > competition goes up exponentially. I think perhaps a compromise would > be to have more CUT-style events. That is, if you're a junior or > senior, you can still compete in junior bird events or JV divisions, > but you have to be in a team of two or fewer. Does anyone have any > thoughts on this proposal, or any other suggestions to remedy this > obvious problem? I think something needs to be done, because if not, > many college clubs will continue to be mostly freshmen and sophomore > clubs. What's the incentive for a junior or senior to stay and run a > club when he can't even attend most of the tournaments for which he's > doing the logistical work? At least that's the way I see our own > club, and I know that many schools in our region are in a similar > position. > > --Nick Walters, Penn College Bowl
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