> 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. Chris -- The essence of their account is true. At the 2003 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament in Los Angeles, one team dropped out only a few days before the event. Since all of the standyby teams were already in the field, NAQT asked local schools, including UCLA, if they would like to enter a team for free in order to complete the 32-team bracket and obviate the need for byes. When that garned no volunteers, NAQT allowed that the team's members wouldn't forfeit their DII eligibility. At that point, UCLA indicated that they had four interested players. To the best of my recollection, they were the only school to express an interest, though they may merely have been the first. NAQT did not expect that the replacement team would do as well as it did; we anticipated a team that lost more-or-less every game and did not belong at the ICT. Under no other circumstances would we have considered waiving our "one shot at a DII crown and you're out" policy. In retrospect, it was a very poor decision and one that I, as president, can say that NAQT will not make again, ever. I will add, however, that UCLA did not in any way misrepresent its team as poor players; that was an assumption made by NAQT based on the circumstances. > 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? NAQT did not believe that the exemption was being kept a secret; the e-mail inviting a team to participate under those circumstances was certainly circulated among all of the participating schools in southern California and I remember mentioning discussing the issue with several teams at the ICT itself, the most memorable of which was whether the decision was made simply to win Adam Fine's public bet about ICT attendance. We will certainly document it on our website as soon as our CVS repository is back online. I'll repeat again that, with hindsight, it was a bad decision and one that NAQT will not make again. -- R. Robert Hentzel President and Chief Technical Officer, National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC
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