A few stray thoughts, speaking for myself of course: 1) Don't take those community colleges lightly. At Moon Pie 2001, Division II was won by a 2-year school (Florida CC Jacksonville.) At COTKU 2001, another 2-year school (Snead State) took 3rd place in Division II after going undefeated in its divisional round robin. At Sword Bowl 2000, in a 15-team field, two other two-year schools (Valencia CC and Central Florida CC) took 4th and 5th. At Sword Bowl 2001, yet another 2-year school (Dalton State) took 6th in a field of 16. And trust me, those were not easy fields. It'll be interesting to see how the juco's fare in the NAQT ICT. 2) My players at UTC over the past five years have enjoyed all three of the major formats, each in their own way. None is perfect, of course. With CBCI, the biggest problem we've found is the officiating, which can be awfully picky and is sometimes done by people who just don't know the game. We do have some issues with the questions, but more on consistency than on degree of difficulty. Especially when you're not one of the heavyweights, sometimes it's nice to play on easier questions. Jaded veterans like us may snort at that thought sometimes, but CBCI provided an entry point for a lot of us, myself included. We wish UTC had been able to go this year but found out too late that the replacement for our supportive institutional contact from last year had no idea what College Bowl was. We hope to return next year. NAQT is a good level of difficulty and more consistent on the editing. But we're still not as comfortable with the timed game as with untimed rounds, and my players find it harder to understand questions when the moderators feel like they need to speed read. NAQT's strongest suit is their continued effort to fine-tune their product; we like the thought that "constructive" criticism can actually be constructive when it's received by NAQT. ACF is our preferred style, when the level of difficulty is accessible to newer players, as with last year's ACF Regionals and this past fall's ACF Fall set. But ACF Nationals, at least in the past, has frankly been over the heads of most smaller schools -- a lot of it, especially the bonus material, has been hardcore stuff that senior honors students never heard of, even when it was in their own major field. I for one have been encouraged by the trend in ACF toward questions that are still challenging but not too obscure for 90% of the people who take the time to play this game. Still, as long as we know what to expect, we genuinely enjoy playing on any of the three. Feel free to disagree, and feel free to criticize any or all of the above -- but be glad someone out there is taking the time to put on a tournament. Hey, where else would we get to use this kind of knowledge?
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