(sections of Ben Gross' post are quoted below) I think the issue of the High Holidays comes up every year--so I expected it would happen again. There is no doubt that it is a difficult issue and an emotional one for those affected. But there is no easy solution here. Because we aren't just talking about three days of the Jewish calendar here. (Though the Jewish holidays probably affect more people than any other conflict short of Easter or Christmas.) <<<In the future, however, people who are responsible for scheduling tournaments should be a little more aware of conflicts with events which occur in the vast and wondrous world which exists outside the quiz bowl circuit. >>> The underlying heart of the matter is that some holidays and conflicts are always going to conflict with weekends. Whether it is the High Holidays, Easter, Christmas, Pesach seders, or Tisha B'Av, or any of the other important religious occasions--not to mention all the important test dates (GRE, MCAT, LSAT), conflicts are going to happen with a whole bunch of tournaments each and every year. They just all can't be scheduled around. If teams did so, most weekends of the year, 75-90% of players would sit around wondering why there aren't any tournaments. TDs have to pick which outside events to schedule around. LSATs or Rosh Hashanah? Easter or GREs? We won't always agree with the decisions, but they usually are reasonable. Ultimately each team and tournament director needs to decide for themselves what the best plan of action is. In this case, the fact is that while a sizeable portion of the quiz bowl universe is Jewish, still we are a minority. And weighing the loss of many Jewish qb players vs. any number of reasons why other weekends were bad (like the fact that two nearby schools scheduling junior birds on the same weekend was a very bad idea), many teams and TDs will decide to run an event on Rosh Hashanah. It's not an ideal solution. In fact, it will probably tick a few folks off. But it may be the the only solution, short of not hosting the event. <<<The schedulers at Swarthmore have forced Jews to choose between their beliefs and their buzzer systems...and the choice is not an easy one for a Jewish quiz bowl player to make.>>> (I don't intend any offense here, to either Mr Gross or the Swarthmore team.) Besides, we're only talking about SNEWT. This isn't a national championship. This isn't Penn Bowl. Or a NAQT sectional qualifier. This isn't even the principal tournament hosted by Swarthmore this year (QOTC). Missing SNEWT, while not enjoyable, doesn't mean that much in the grand scheme of things. Missing a national championship would mean a whole lot more. (That's not to say that Swarthmore is off the hook for moving their tournament date twice and settling for Rosh Hashanah. But I think we need to pick our battles.) I think it becomes much more important to speak out about the conflicts with ACF Nationals and a Pesach seder or Easter than SNEWT and Rosh Hashanah. As much value as we all put on quiz bowl, we can't attend all the tournaments. I'm not writing this post as a defense of Swarthmore's planning. (Though I must confess that I would rather be faced with a choice between SNEWT and shul than Penn Bowl and shul. But that's just me.) But the truth is that if Swarthmore hadn't hosted a tourney on Rosh Hashanah, one of the other fall tournaments would probably have been scheduled then instead. Kenny Peskin (who still appreciates the effort CBI/ACUI showed to get kosher for pesach food from a kosher restaurant in Dallas for the 1998 CBI Nationals. Even though the food was pretty bad.)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:43 AM EST EST