Upon return home from her trip to Houston for the ACF Fall, Sun sees her arranging the receipts of expenses incurred during the trip, such as electricity recharging bills, meals and hotel for Friday night. I can always claim networking or client development and then the team would have its meals paid for by my employer rather than the university or from their own pockets! Imélie thinks while she fills out the expense report form for the ACF Fall, while not trying to have her boss pay for the tournament entry fee.
"What are you claiming expenses for?" Sun asks his wife.
"The cat is out of the bag now. I am coaching the Green Wave quiz bowl team, and I can confidently say that I will be coaching it until I earn the degree. At the beginning of the season, the university was on the verge of closing the program, and I am the last chance to show the program was worth saving" Imélie explains the Green Wave's situation to him.
"Really? I thought the administration would not do anything with quiz bowl until major disciplinary issues arise!"
"If you were basically anywhere else that might have been true. But Tulane never seemed to have any actual quiz bowl stability. All these years of post-pandemic failures as a team are finally avenged!"
That ought to keep the administration off our backs, Imélie thinks while also writing her plan for hosting the ACF Regionals. She also reviews the requirements for hosting them, how much they will need to shell out to host the competition, what are the room requirements and the staff requirements. Of course, if Tulane is to host the tournament, the field must be well-controlled, and Tulane would then use the buzzer discount for its team, and subsequently drop any Nationals bid down to Division 2. Especially if it wins the D2 title at Regionals.
On Monday, at lunch, after the design documents of their next projects have been distributed, Imélie's coworkers start talking about what they did during their weekends. One went shopping for their kids, but when Imélie's turn comes...
"Let's say that an executive of one of the potential clients had a child playing quiz bowl at the ACF Fall, and therefore in college" Imélie then tells her coworkers.
"Quiz bowl? What's quiz bowl?" Keshav asks, wondering what kind of game it is.
"It's like playing Jeopardy but with teams. And it's also about academic questions, but even ACF Fall is way harder than on a TV game show. Of course, since I'm attending Tulane for a part-time MBA/MGM, I am naturally going to root for Tulane in quiz bowl. I'll show you a clip of a quiz bowl game if you want, but it's not very popular in college"
I must avoid talking about how I am actually coaching Tulane's quiz bowl team at any cost at work! They might then think that I am not doing what I claim to be doing the degree for, but right now I'm on track for As in both courses and not just in business stats; I also sent them the mid-term progress report along with the expense report, Imélie thinks while her coworkers suddenly ask questions about Tulane's quiz bowl season and what expectations she has for the season.
"I'm surprised by how the new players have been performing. What surprised me was that, in previous years, Tulane was somehow unable to scrape together four decent players for quiz bowl! Look at how academically talented the students Tulane attracts for undergrad are, year in, year out!" she then answers her coworkers.
Meanwhile, Alyssa is writing a newspaper article about the ACF Fall and what it means for the rest of Tulane's quiz bowl season for the Hullabaloo, albeit with no mention of the ultimatum issued by the administration to the quiz bowl program because she feels the victory at ACF Fall would render it moot anyway. She does so prior to writing her share of the half-packet; just to be on the safe side, she feels like she needs to write a quarter-packet. Same went of the other team members, too, especially since Imélie was planning on not playing at Regionals, believing that playing at ACF Division 2 Nationals without her would have been a better bet than Division 1 with her.
That night, she reviews the quarter-packets the Regionals-bound players sent her so that she picks out the questions that, jointly, best represent what she feels are required of ACF Regionals, so that she can submit Tulane's half-packet in earnest. And then reply to her players to focus on studying past ACF Regionals sets.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
When the next meeting comes before the LQBA Fall Invitational South, she starts lecturing her players on what to do as moderators for the tournament.
"First, I trust you know the NAQT rules since you all took part at the HSNCT. I am saying this because the LQBA Fall Invitational South runs on NAQT rules. Second, parents and players will undoubtedly have questions about Tulane for you guys once I announce the Green Wave quiz bowl openings during lunch time. Please treat players and teams with respect, both during games and during lunch time. Out here as mods in this tournament, you're not only representing quiz bowl but Tulane as well"
"So many in the state's high school circuit are surprised Tulane even have a quiz bowl team and people feel forced to go out-of-state if they plan to keep playing in college" Xavier feels triggered by the Tulane bit, compelling him to comment on that.
Like Marcia and Sadie, who are the only two I know from my high school days to have kept playing in college. Marcia played for UPenn, by junior year she played on UPenn A, Sadie, on the other hand, played for Vanderbilt, also moving to the A-team as an undergraduate. Sadie had the better collegiate career of the two, Imélie reminisces about past Venomous Agendas who played collegiate quiz bowl.
"With all due respect, Xavier, while most quiz bowlers in this state will be able to get to the GPA requirements of auto-admission, and meet all the curricular standards of TOPS, the same cannot be said of the SAT or ACT. However, I feel like I need to avoid giving false hopes to other quiz bowlers that might be interested in attending. I accept, however, that Tulane may not be for everyone. Nevertheless, please pay attention to who plays well in our areas of need, well, anything but math and science, just don't comment on it until the moment deemed appropriate" the coach gives her instructions to the players.
"The way you plan on using the LQBA Fall Invitational South to attempt to recruit players for us feels far too much like 1970s Red Army talent scouting!" Derek comments, not realizing that Tulane's early decision deadline is fast approaching.
"You'll have everyone in the southern Louisiana high school quiz bowl circuit there all right, true, but comparing Imélie to a 1970s Red Army coach?" Xavier feels like Derek went a little overboard.
"Guys, the Red Army didn't do quiz bowl! There may have been a few questions on it in past packets I asked you to study from, but the training regimen of a Red Army team was just brutal, irrespective of the sport they fielded a team in!" Imélie retorts when she hears her players compare her to a Red Army coach. "I'm only doing what's best for Tulane quiz bowl; if it means being as restrictive or blunt as 1970s Red Army sports recruiters, so be it. We know quiz bowl doesn't have any clout with the admissions office so we need to ensure that any recruit we could be getting is going to attend via regular means! However, the admissions office probably doesn't even know what quiz bowl is, or how it's going to impact their academic success"
This is our last opportunity for the ED deadline of November 1, while giving appropriate lead time for them to write an application and get their materials in order, but it is as I said: we cannot take for granted that a quiz bowler is going to be able to get to 32 on the ACT or 1480 on the SAT, Imélie thinks, while sending them an email on both auto-admission under early decision for Louisiana residents, and on directions to Jesuit High from campus. She knows that other than Xavier, none of the players really explored New Orleans that much, so unless Xavier takes them to Jesuit, in which case they have that covered, they must go there on their own for 7:30 am.
But before they can return to other quiz bowl drills, with each of the players acting as moderators for each of the practice games, and with one packet of their choosing, they go over the fundamentals of moderating quiz bowl games, and what they should expect out of modding high school-level tournaments.
"Either way you will likely need to keep score as well. High school teams are usually more unruly than in college, so you need to watch out for this, too. I trust you know what's protestable and what's not, and that, if you can't resolve a protest, you may need to go to the tournament director"
"Of course, they're more unruly, they're less mature than we are! Especially lowerclassmen; hormones often kick in then" Nolan then comments about the unruliness of the players.
"Also stick to the sets provided! It goes without saying that you should read tossups in order, and the bonuses as well, but in high school tossups go dead more often"
"We know the difference between high school and college quiz bowl by now, and how it translates to modding games!" Derek then stands up for the other players.
"Personally I don't think drilling you on modding games played by pairs and in full-size teams is going to change the dynamics of modding that much. So for tonight we'll play five different practice packets with a different moderator each time, I'll mod the last practice game. We'll go in alphabetical order of first name"