While looking at the stats from the West Coast SCT, I noticed that UCLA put up some dominating numbers in the D2 bracket. Further examination of individual stats showed that the tandem of Charles Meigs and Matthew Sherman put up some very strong stats against the D2 competition... just like they did when they played D2 last year at ICT 2003, where Mr. Meigs was also the leading scorer. In its official elligibility rules, NAQT affords D2 status to players who "Prior to the current competition year, [] have never played on a Sectionals team that qualified for the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament nor played at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament at either the Division II or Division I levels." Even in its most recent official exception, NAQT states "Players on teams... remain Division II ineligible, as do all teams that attended the ICT, regardless of the date of their invitation." Under the public and official rules on D2 elligbility, UCLA's team was inelligible to play in D2 and broke the rules by playing. When this issue came up on the hsquizbowl.org message board, several UCLA members claimed that NAQT had, in private, offered UCLA's 2003 D2 team an special exemption to elligbility rules whereas they could play in ICT 2003 and still retain their D2 elligbility. I follow the scene pretty regularly and correspond often with several NAQT members, yet I have never heard anything of the sort. If what UCLA is saying is true, however, then NAQT needs to do some serious explaining, namely why they would grant such an arbitrary and fundamentally contradictory exemption, and why they would keep it a secret that even the teams who would be paying money to compete against UCLA would not be aware of? If NAQT had gone to the trouble of announcing and publicizing other exceptions to their elligbility rules, why would they keep this case a secret? I just wanted to bring this issue to light, because D2 elligbility is always a spark of controversy and this issue seems especially serious.
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