I think the reason why many of us feel revulsion
at the idea of a quiz bowl "camp" is that it might
expose an embarrassing aspect of our game. We like to
believe that being good at quiz bowl means being well
read, but the unfortunate fact is that if you're a
beginning player, you actually will increase your PPG by
learning lists of Nobel Prize winners and other "things
that come up."
A couple of people have
suggested that the best way to prepare people for quiz bowl
in a camp would be to make them write questions, but
I disagree. Helping people to write good quiz bowl
questions is laudable, but if the goal is to improve
people's playing ability in a fixed amount of time, it is
much more efficient to make them play on lots of
questions and to quiz them on lists.