In Moscow, a meeting regarding the Red Army's quiz bowl program is held in late April, and the people in it seem to disagree on how to grow the Russian quiz bowl circuit. The following is a loose translation of the meeting:
"We all agree that we should build the Red Army as a brand name in collegiate quiz bowl, not only domestically but internationally, but we have no idea of how we should go around doing that" the RUQB chairman asks his fellow board members.
"I believe we can use quiz bowl as a tool for propaganda; we can then have the Red Army play against the teams of the most prestigious universities in the world and have the games carried on state TV!" the outreach coordinator then suggests to the chairman.
"The public will view quiz bowl as a novelty at first, but, with strong Red Army performance, we will be able to inspire lower-level students and then they may want to play quiz bowl among themselves by that point" the third board member points out.
"The problem is, for that to work, we need to make sure that the Red Army team is strong enough to take on these teams, and locally we don't have the coaching expertise required to make it work. Not for now anyway" the chairman points an issue out with the third board member's point.
"Plus, state TV won't want to carry a Red Army quiz bowl game if we are not able to provide an exciting (i.e. winning) product" the outreach coordinator then lays bare the media considerations.
"We will need an incentive for those teams to play us; right now, if we were to use the Red Army brand we are riding on the historical reputations of other sports, none of what brand name recognition we could have right now comes from quiz bowl!" the third board member continues speaking.
"What other countries did was to develop from the bottom up, here you are suggesting starting from the top down! You know how that worked for our Soviet ancestors!" the outreach coordinator then mentions.
"We need to agree on whether to allow civilian players or stick to military personnel. Right now, using the Red Army brand name for quiz bowl will conjure an image of soldiers playing quiz bowl in uniform so maybe we should stick to active-duty military personnel" the third board member mentions the implications of Red Army branding.
Top-down building of quiz bowl might have helped launch the British university and DC-area high school circuits, via TV shows, called University Challenge and It's Academic respectively. But they just aren't sure about how to even build an infrastructure, and what impact it's going to have. No more than they can agree on more specific aspects of the plan.
"Here's the deal: how are we going to know whether the Red Army is strong enough to make this vision of having Red Army quiz bowl games carried on state TV work? We may need to start with mixed tournaments. We might need to expose ourselves a little bit early on but we must build our way up and if it turns out that even some high school, Chinese, Korean or American, can beat us, it's going to reflect poorly on Russian quiz bowl!" the chairman voices a concern about carrying quiz bowl games on VGTRK (a.k.a. Russian state TV).
"And then we'll come stronger in later tournaments. Civilian players might be better in good quiz bowl subjects, they will be harder to discipline. They won't take very well to being under constant scrutiny. That's why I feel it's better to stick to the military to build the Red Army quiz bowl team" the third member then points out.
"If we were to stick to active-duty military personnel, we need some way to ensure that we can have the team train together as well as study at the same institution at least for the purposes of tournament eligibility. Maybe, you know, a phantom independent study course, so they can get up to speed on good quiz bowl subjects? Or an English course if our players don't have the necessary English proficiency. But we know that, in "good quiz bowl" subjects, higher military schools (undergraduate) and service academies (graduate) aren't very good" the chairman starts to run down the concerns of using active duty military personnel to play quiz bowl.
The one thing that the board of the newly-formed Russian Union of Quiz Bowl (RUQB) agrees on is that their "national" team is a Division I college team and must be held to ACF Division I standards. But there are just so many things they don't agree upon.
"None of us could coach a college quiz bowl team if we wanted to. We might have connections, we might be able to do outreach but player development we can't do. Who do you think would be in the best position to coach the Red Army to victories we could exploit for propaganda and political gain?" the outreach coordinator asks the other twoé
"It pains me to admit it but Imélie Tremblay. She coached the Tulane Green Wave quiz bowl team to the ICT while (re-)building the team from scratch. She knows better than anyone else the realities the Red Army quiz bowl team will face"
"My main concern with Imélie is that she doesn't speak Russian; the other language concern I have is the English proficiency of the players we will potentially get"
"She's the only one I feel can lead the Red Army quiz bowl team to victory at either ACF Nationals or ICT in five years, and in Division I no less! These are, to the best of our knowledge, the closest things to a world championship in college quiz bowl"
The RUQB administration may very well wish to grow the game domestically, but they must also consider the need for moderators. Then the military member of the RUQB Board, who is also its chairman, proceeds to write a job offer, first in Russian for their own records, and then has an army linguist translate it in English for him to send it to Imélie via email. Upon receipt of the email, written with the letterhead of the CSKA Moscow club...
"The Red Army quiz bowl team has offered me to coach them next year!" Imélie announces to Sun.
"Are you crazy? You don't even speak Russian at all! Do you think they have enough patience to let you learn the language at a pace that's appropriate for your abilities?" Sun asks.
"Quiz bowl will be, to the Russian public, a novelty. Plus until the training packets can be translated into Russian, the drilling will have to be done in English. Even though they do know about how I led the Green Wave to an ICT Division II run with four rookies, they think that no one else they could have considered had experience of starting a team from scratch. I guess I can compete at ACF Winter and Regionals under the Red Army banner while taking Russian language courses... but if I accept this means a divorce. Our marriage isn't going badly enough for that, I just have a busy schedule from now until graduation"
"I always forget about how willing Russia is to use anything for political gain! I guess, China as well but unlike Russia I suppose the Chinese have their own circuit"
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"The Chinese make a way bigger deal of high school quiz bowl than of collegiate quiz bowl"
Who am I kidding? It's tough. I am not sure that this job offer is even real! If I try to ascertain the veracity of it, I might get an answer in Russian, even though they don't ask for any kind of personal information and address me by name. I am not sure I should leave behind the players I developed at Tulane, especially Alyssa, or my husband. Yet this represents an opportunity to turn the Red Army into a major international brand of quiz bowl, a dynasty even, knowing that the Russian government will want to see progress towards winning the ACF Nationals or the ICT, year after year. However, if I accept, I won't be able to move around even within Moscow without a FSB agent tracking my every move! But this means I can actually threaten the team into playing the Red Army quiz bowl team next year if the team lacks discipline during practices or games, if I choose to stay at Tulane instead, Imélie reflects in what would this five-year contract being offered means to her, and, the way the Russian general staff talks about the state of quiz bowl in Russia, there is clearly potential talent but no actual circuit. I hope the Red Army, or the RUQB, realizes they cannot sustain a dynasty without a feeder circuit! But the good news is they understand the intellectual requirements of playing quiz bowl at the level they want to develop the Red Army into so they trust I can learn Russian just fine. This is perhaps one of the biggest decisions Imélie must make.
At the same time, the Russians must have a list of alternate coaches at the ready in the collegiate circuit and they aren't going to give up on their quiz bowl dreams without trying. I can see it from here: some desperate high school might wish to play us and suddenly a victory against the Red Army would give them a certain amount of prestige in their local circuits, not to mention make us, and with it, the entire Russian quiz bowl circuit, look like doormats! If we are careless with playing exhibition games, this entire plan is going to backfire, the chairman of the RUQB muses, while formulating rules regarding exhibition games that a future Red Army team must follow. However, even if we start with some random institution prior to going into ACF Fall, if we go that route, we must start with a bottom-feeder and then we won't look like a doormat. Then move up the ladder and move on once we have sufficiently improved. That said state TV will probably only carry the ACF Nationals or ICT final or something. Yet, after review of the ACF eligibility rules, as much as I would have liked to stick to the military as a player source, we're forced to concede that the logistics are far too complex for the use of military players to be viable. To the ACF's eyes we would be whatever institution hosting the team, and my colleague started negotiating with Moscow State. To the rest of the circuit, we would be the Red Army.
Yet the problem with the Red Army team as originally envisioned was that it would only be able to compete in the Chicago Open, but to the eyes of the RUQB's chairman, a Red Army victory at the Chicago Open would not carry the same symbolic significance to the eyes of the Russian government or public as would a victory at ACF Nationals or the ICT, or at the very least a victory against one of Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford's A-teams, and without it, he feels state TV won't carry Red Army quiz bowl games. Which cannot be broadcast live to ensure the security of the competition. Plus, he believed that a team made only of active-duty personnel would be more likely to be dominated by the VVS (i.e., the air force) given that life in the VVS was more conducive to intensive quiz bowl training than in the other branches.
Moderators and scorekeepers, on the other hand, can be military personnel without any academic restrictions. The RUQB knows that, if they want their five-year plan to succeed, they need to train staffers as well as play honestly on the quiz bowl international stage; that's the only limit they shouldn't cross.
Imélie then asks the following to the HR department about what happens to the tuition already reimbursed if she drops out (and subsequently leaves the company) in an email. Because she is on track for a 4.0, she knows that she's in for a hefty price that's at stake – because she knows she will need to drop out of the MBA/MGM dual degree program if she accepts the Red Army's coaching job. She feels financially handcuffed... however unlike some employers she expects them to understand that even an unfinished degree can still be of use to them, depending on what she actually learned.
"General, we need to consider backup plans should Imélie say nyet to us" the RUQB chairman's staff linguist complains to him.
"To the eyes of the West, quiz bowl is a mostly male thing. So ideally we should get a female coach that has experience of developing players at the highest level of collegiate quiz bowl. Or at the very least, have played in at least one of ACF Nationals or ICT Division I. And also to be willing to train high school and college coaches in how to coach and run a team. And then we shall show to the West that we can develop female players better than they can! But the next best thing is Sadie" the chairman then runs down his wishlist.
"My big reservation with Sadie is that she played for and coached an established team. All I know about coaching a quiz bowl team is that the challenges faced aren't the same for a brand-new circuit and team vs an established team and circuit!"
"That might sound crazy but it's the future of Russian quiz bowl, as well as the future of quiz bowl as an international academic competition that we're wagering on by selecting the Red Army coach! In the event the coach is female and single, widower or separated I'm even ready to propose to her upon her arrival on Russian soil if it serves the best interests of Russian quiz bowl! What is clear is that, from now on, quiz bowl is a political tool!"
Obviously, everything the Russian general staff knows about the challenges faced by women in quiz bowl comes from For 10 points, fix this community, and it feels like this publication is their go-to for different topics related to the inner workings of the quiz bowl world, such as outreach.
Maybe we could host a TV quiz bowl show with some general education (the Russian equivalent of middle school, or grades 5-9) or secondary education (grades 10-11) institutions running on NAQT rules with NAQT questions, present it to the public as some quiz bowl championship but with the understanding that no ninth-grader can compete in the general education bracket, because of NAQT eligibility rules, and the teams in the top 15% of the pool will qualify for the MSNCT and HSNCT respectively, in which case the auditions, themselves a round-robin tournament in its own right, will determine who will be in the top 15%, who will then have their games taped and broadcast on TV. No need to have the tournament on state TV but then there would be three Red Armies. The same channel hosting the show would also be broadcasting select MSNCT and HSNCT games, another board member with connections in the TV world muses, realizing that ninth graders wishing to compete must find a secondary school to compete for. That, even though he does not harbor much of a hope for Russia at the MSNCT and HSNCT, at least not in the early years, despite the RUQB paying all the expenses of the winners' trip via some military slush fund. And the same slush fund would fund the collegiate Red Army quiz bowl expenses as well.
Meanwhile, Sadie also receives an invitation for an online interview with the RUQB chairman regarding this job, notwithstanding that Sadie doesn't speak Russian any more than Imélie did. Maybe, maybe I will have an excuse to just "master out" of here if I get the Red Army coaching job! To my knowledge it's the first time I ever heard about an attempt to grow the game internationally at the collegiate level; China and Korea both made, and still make, more of a fuss over the HSNCT than over the ACF Nationals or the ICT. I mean, I played against Seoul International at the HSNCT, with Imélie, and later in the same tournament, Beijing #2. Seoul International finished 1-1 in the playoffs that year, and Beijing #2 was in the top-30. But the Chinese and Koreans aren't anywhere in the ACF Regionals or the online SCT Division II, never mind the Russians. You would think that countries relying on rote learning would be able to perform well on the international quiz bowl stage, Sadie reminisces about her experience of playing against international quiz bowl teams, notwithstanding having played against Toronto, McGill, Oxford or Cambridge. Building the Russian collegiate quiz bowl circuit and, with it, the game internationally, beats staying in this dead-end graduate program, and I will have a better chance to present this game as a game for everyone irrespective of gender. Of course, I will take the Russians up on that offer, knowing that it will be held in the morning; it would be late afternoon in Moscow.