crbirdx1 wrote:Only news I have is that we have had 3 tournaments this fall. OAC Fall/Gahanna/Pickerington. 1/6 I will have my tournament. 1/20 @ Chillicothe is running an IS set. I am heading there unless something happens. 2/24 may be our league tournament. Till 3/3 Trash at New Albany there are plenty of dates to choose from. So in all there will be 7 tournaments in Cbus this year.
Not counting History bowl WC and Cbus have the same amount of tournaments. Two of the 7 in Cbus are OAC and NAQT states. 5 years ago when I started it was OFK St. Charles/Buckeye 10 Fisher Winter War and Naqt/OAC states.
So allow me to preface by saying that I do appreciate all of your efforts over the past four years toward making the Central OH circuit more active. For you to have sacrificed as much of yourself toward the planning, development and execution of all the events you put on, despite the fact the very first one was rocky, is beyond commendable. I appreciate your contribution to this thread and hope you engage further in this discussion.
With that said...
The events at Pickerington North and Gahanna-Lincoln weren’t announced publicly (also these aren’t events that were planned months ahead of time.) I can understand if you recruit via word of mouth or via email, those are effective recruitment strategies short-term for an event, but that’s it. And I think in some ways it is a novel, creative idea to get newer teams acclimated to competitive quiz bowl (Logan HS, who played at the event at PN, is a great example here.)
However... these events are not long-term solutions (in fact, they’re not even a solution to the problem of our area only having three mainstream, announced events on the calendar). And yes, we do need a mainstream in Central Ohio quiz bowl because of the necessity for both working cooperation and interdependence when it comes to the resources necessary for a tournament to be successful: the date, the building,
staffers, questions, and teams. I emphasize staffers because it is critical for new teams to be exposed to the best readers possible, not the ones that have little experience. The other imperatives for our mainstream to be strengthened with the addition (and not the subtraction of)
publicly announced events are a) so we don’t have a circuit that bottoms out when a coach (such as you) decides to hang it up, and b) so teams don’t have to do 2-3 hours of traveling for pyramidal quiz bowl because we thought closed-invite events were the same thing as 18-24+ team events that teams could look forward to. Also, if teams (read: advisors) start treating closed-invite events as substitutes for events such as Rowdy Raider, SHATEYRONHA and St. Charles Fall, then we’re going to see less money pumped into the OH quiz bowl economy. (In fact, this might be happening currently.)
I write the above not to disparage nor undermine those two events, nor you personally. I’m sure each event served as an enjoyable, pleasant and appropriate acclimation to quiz bowl for all participants (and that is important!) But it does need to be established that, no, they don’t count as “events for Central Ohio”. They may take place in Central Ohio, they may have Central Ohio teams participating; but if I can’t advocate and pitch an event like Gahanna-Lincoln’s to, say, the coaches for Centennial or Wellington (two schools who probably would’ve enjoyed GL’s event a ton) when they attend OAC Fall because either a) the tournament doesn’t exist yet or, perhaps more importantly, b) because I have no idea it was even going to happen... then does it really count as an “event for the Columbus area?” Do you think two inaugural, closed-invite events at Pickerington North and Gahanna makes up for the fact the two longest running tournaments in the Columbus area (St Charles Fall and OSU Winter) fell from the calendar?
For as successful as your two events were this fall, just think about the couple of more teams that might have came had these tournaments had any visibility before the tournament was played. And I’m not talking about Fisher or St. Charles, I’m talking about teams like Centennial and Bishop Hartley. In fact, I know from my e-mail correspondence with the coach that just took over at BH that he really wanted to get in on playing a fall event. They were signed up for OAC Fall but had to back out because of date conflicts; they were signed up to play at St. Charles, and him and I were planning on introducing ourselves and get acquainted while at SC, but then that got cancelled. I know in talking to Centennial’s coach toward the end of my tournament, their kids were getting discouraged in their first tournament experience ever and the only tournament I could - in good faith - recommend them to, in order to gain some confidence and dip their toes further into the water, was the JV division at St Charles (and I’m not here to flame Alex: I’m just pointing out what difference it makes when we put our events in the mainstream.)