What happened in this case of Cancel Bowl/BUTT just seems like an isolated incident of poor judgment; it seems harsh and overdramatic to call this an "attack on academic quiz bowl." I don't think that we're going to see a systemic scheduling of trash tournaments for the sole purpose of undercutting academic tournaments in the near future. So as not to beat a dead horse much further, yeah, the moral of the story is to make sure you get in touch with teams in your region before you plan to host a tournament just to make sure there are no conflicts. Fin. Somewhere in all of this, discussion of trash's relation to quiz bowl seemed to get lost, so I wanted to comment. In a theoretical sense, trash/TRASH tournaments can parallel ACF tournaments. They can be untimed, on buzzers, with a set distribution, 20 pyramidal questions, and enforcement of diversity across categories (and yes, that means that, whether you like it or not, you may have to be subjected to the occasional question about a `70s sitcom). Game play is essentially the same, for the most part. The differences are the scope of questions (duh) and a few additional whimsical and/or wacky rules. In practice, there are good tournaments and substandard tournaments of both kinds. In both cases, some entities write questions very well; others write poorly. If you look in the right places, trash influences academic competition, and academic competition influences trash (sometimes not always beneficially; that could be for another post). This being said, aside from the similarities of each game, academic and trash quiz bowl can and should continue to coexist as they do for a few reasons: - Most teams seem to come to a consensus about how much academic quiz bowl and how much trash they care to play, and the academic calendar can accomodate for that. Why change things, especially if all it does is force teams caught in the middle to make choices? - Separating trash and academic competitions allows for dueling tournaments to become much more common. Teams might consistently make one choice over the other, which could lead to at least one tournament having a thinner field than it could, possibly even causing it to be canceled. In an extreme case, an area that could barely support a single tournament, academic or trash, would certainly not be able to support two tournaments on the same date. This might cause neither of the tournaments to be held, in which case, nobody wins. - Many of the "bored 35-year olds" that play trash also help out at academic tournaments. Those that play academic tournaments may forgo playing trash tournaments to help out. Separation could adversely affect the staffing situation for both tournaments, which might restrict team entries. - University administrations may not allow two separate clubs to exist for what's basically the same activity. Instead of dividing the circuit, we should be focusing on strengthening (dare I say, uniting?) the circuit (including trash) for good of the game. J-Kel
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:48 AM EST EST