<< The correlation between school size or reputation and team strength is pretty tenuous. People not on the circuit usually assume that the Ivy League schools always dominate the field, for instance. Huge schools have a theoretically larger amount of people to draw from, but in reality, the number of people on any campus who are interested in playing quiz bowl is pretty constant, no matter where you go. The same thing can be seen on the high school circuit, if you are unfortunate enough to be involved with high school competition. >> Oh gosh, let me touch this topic for a second. I do think that in college quiz bowl, school size and reputation are not so significant indicators of success as team organization. I can't say that the number of people on any campus is constant; clearly the larger schools have potential for more people to be involved compared to a smaller school, but it's the ability for the organization to tap into that population and get them involved that counts. High school however is a slightly different issue because there is a weird thing known as school funding that causes discrepancies. Sure, there are some exceptions to the rules, but while tournament organization and tenured leadership are the most important indicators of success in HS qb, money/funding is just as important. Not all high schools can drive around like Detroit Catholic Central to comps out of their area in Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, hopefully North Carolina :) ; but clearly CC is one of the best HS teams in the country right now because of it. So yes, in the end experience matters. You get experience going to tournaments. Most of us in college don't have major problems with our budgets because our organizations can manage the money one way or the other. But most high school programs rely solely on what they get from their principal or allowed to get from their school board. Then there's Academic Decathlon where my peers in Ohio are still arguing that size does matter even more... but that's a completely different ball of wax.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:45 AM EST EST