During all summer, Flo takes care of Ben more than she ever could have during the school year. She even reads guides on how to coach quiz bowl to get Ben to sleep, either in the original English text or in French. Might be a little too dense, but it certainly can be used to get the baby to sleep.
And yet, when the first practice of quiz bowl begins, with some parents of players, a collection of players ranging all grade levels at VA, from seventh graders all the way to seniors, the returning players are wondering how Flo is going to differ from Warren as a quiz bowl coach. After the new players are introduced...
"I'm Florence, and I will be the quiz bowl coach going forward. Please raise your hands if you haven't played quiz bowl before"
The players who raised their hands are either seventh or ninth graders. Players not in these grades are returning players and hence know the rules of quiz bowl, as well as what makes quiz bowl questions different from what people usually encountered in trivia games. Especially tossups. The returning players introduce themselves, then prepare the buzzer system.
"Did you actually play the game?" a parent of one of these new players asks her.
"Yes and I am the only teacher here with any actual experience of the game in any capacity. I was actually part of the first Venomous Agendas team to qualify for the HSNCT"
Better keep quiet about me being a rental player back then, and how getting me to play led to Marcia fighting with Warren, Flo then resumes talking about the basic structure of quiz bowl games, as well as the core rules of quiz bowl to new players.
"Don't be afraid to buzz in if you feel like you know the answer. Also, one of the most important things to know about the mental aspect of quiz bowl is that you shouldn't dwell on a wrong answer, much like I used to tell debaters not to dwell on a bad round" Flo gives another crucial piece of advice.
"What's our tournament calendar going to be like?" another parent asks her.
"All questions about our season calendar will be answered with all players present"
Speaking of other players, the players have finally set up the room for practice on buzzing skills. The parents are awaiting an answer because they may need to block off certain Saturdays for quiz bowl tournaments.
"First question: are you OK with attending online tournaments?" Flo asks the players and their parents.
"Your predecessor always had the team attend in-person tournaments!" a veteran player shouts.
"Why attend online tournaments?" Sonny, another veteran player, gasps upon hearing about online tournaments.
"Online tournaments are less expensive because we can attend one without having to leave town for it" Flo explains to the whole team. "Our current budget allows us to attend six in-person tournaments per squad, quiz bowl-State inclusive"
"Coach, at State, if we qualify, only one squad per level is allowed" a parent points out.
"State?" another player scoffs at the suggestion of just aiming for quiz bowl-State. "State is basically open-entry these days so long as we are in good standing with LQBA! The MSNCT or HSNCT is where it's at"
"Back to our sheep; does anyone have any objections to enter online tournaments?" Flo asks again.
"It depends on the schedule for other stuff" Sonny points out.
"Are any of you planning to play a sport with meets on Saturdays, or debate?" Flo then opens a calendar of Saturdays on a tablet where players can post when they are unable to play, and why. Not that she actually expected the debate team to use its reserved spot this year.
One student lists swimming meets; however, the Saturdays listed by that student are mostly in the first half of the year, and last year's quiz bowl season started in early October. And yet, the one date that's set in stone on the quiz bowl calendar, for the time being is, well, quiz bowl-State.
"One word of caution: please pay attention to the question sets when choosing which tournaments to enter" another parent of a veteran quiz bowler warns Flo. "I chaperoned last year's team at the HSNCT, and I suggest you prioritize NAQT question sets; also playing more than one tournament on the same question set is a big no-no"
Here I am, back into a world whose logistical inner workings I admittedly don't know much about. And yet, if I am to survive as a quiz bowl coach, let alone bring it to the HSNCT, just knowing what resources to use to develop players won't be enough, Flo is blindsided by this aspect of team logistics.
When looking at various tournaments the VAs could enter, starting with in-state ones such as the LQBA Fall and Winter Invitationals South, she peruses a sample quiz bowl tournament entry form: team rosters, school name, as well as a list of common discounts (staffer, buzzer, shorthanded and new to quiz bowl), and contact information.
"Ideally, starting from October, I would like the high school team to enter one tournament per month until February. Since there are fewer tournaments in middle school, we must enter every set available in-state, but we also need to consider if a middle school tournament takes place on the same week as a high school one, and at a different location..." Flo sighs, while the last students declare what scheduling conflicts their other Rule of Two teams would induce, if any, on Saturdays.
The other two students who declared conflicts of schedule plan on playing different sports: one plans on doing track, the other on playing soccer. But because the calendar also asks for any concurrent Rule of Two activities, the whole team knows what the most common concurrent Rule of Two team on this year's roster is. Which is, without surprise, mathletics.
Because it seems only one player per season would fall prey to scheduling conflicts, it's fairly easy for parents and players to agree on a schedule for the quiz bowl season.
And then comes the moment the three new players are waiting for: their first sample questions. With one eighth grader volunteering so the drill would have an even number of players.
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"The core concept of quiz bowl tossups is pyramidality, that is, tossup clues are read in descending order of difficulty" Sonny explains to the newcomers, while the veteran players are doing their own drills.
"Tossup number one: One of the earliest modern forms of this category of tests was the US Army Alpha test in World War I used to sort recruits. The keju system was a series of tests of this type used to recruit mandarins" Florence feels a little weird inside herself for reading the very question she negged at the HSNCT that caused the VAs to blow a five-point lead in a last-tossup showdown and be eliminated in the playoffs.
Yet, the new players fail to buzz in, and she keeps reading it. "Tests belonging to this category are classified as being either criterion-referenced or norm-referenced. For ten points, name this category of tests to which the SAT and ACT belong"
Cindy, the ninth grader, then presses the buzzer. "Standardized testing"
"Ten. For ten points each..." Flo reads the bonus attached to this question.
Do question topics change randomly from a question to another? A puzzled new player seems to be shaking upon hearing the first bonus part, which had no relation to the tossup that player just heard, but seems to bottle up emotions while the bonus is being read to the new players.
The next tossup being read as a sampling of quiz bowl questions was another question from a past HSNCT, but, unlike the previous one, she didn't actually play it in a tournament. It was a literature question about Maria Chapdelaine, which she remembers only for that question having traumatized a student out of doing an extra credit assignment on that book.
"Are all quiz bowl questions going to be that hard?" Cindy asks her, bewildered by the difficulty of these questions, after the second tossup was read and left unanswered.
"No. However, it will give you an idea of the hardest questions you will face in your lives as Venomous Agendas will be like" Flo's tone of voice doesn't seem too confident.
"Is it normal for quiz bowl questions to randomly change areas from a question to another?" another new player, whose face is showing signs of discomfort, asks her.
"Yes. While quiz bowl questions change areas randomly from a question to another, what is not as random is the number of questions by area in a game" Sonny answers from across the room.
Sonny gives a list of key resources to both the new players and to Flo that might be of use to them in some capacity. Protobowl as well as a database of quiz bowl question packets, which contains past packets of various sources, ranging from past HSNCTs to Red Army sets. For the time being, Flo decides to focus on middle school quiz bowl sets for further question reading, with some few question sets from indie sources. And a subject distribution along with it, shown on the screen.
"That's a lot of stuff to study for" Cindy sighs upon looking at the NAQT subject distribution.
"It goes of everyone here, but what is it that you like most to learn about? Also, don't forget: while quiz bowl is a game of knowledge, it isn't school. You're not graded, and you don't need to know everything, even in a single area, to play well. However, if you decided to join the quiz bowl team, it's because you know things, as well as learn more things. Naturally, you could be tempted to focus, as quiz bowlers, on what you're good at in school, but quiz bowl often goes in what courses in that area don't cover" Flo harangues the players, before moving on to another quiz bowl drill, but sounding a little too prepared.
This portion came pretty easily to me for the limited time I was playing, but even though it's been only one practice, I can already tell what makes it like day and night compared to coaching the debate team, much like my playing experience was equally bewildering, Flo starts ruminating before she gets started drilling the new players on looking up past quiz bowl sets. But here Flo is also learning how to navigate the Quiz Bowl Packet Archive, with the help of veteran players, who then put it on the screen...
They start with the tabs at the top of the screen, which is about the players' educational levels, and then a couple of drop-down menus. Difficulty, subjects, type being the most important ones.
"The Red... Army?" Florence hyperventilates upon reading set titles, and the Red Army apparently publishes several quiz bowl question sets a year each at the middle and high school levels. "Why is it that they seem to have their hands everywhere in writing quiz bowl questions these days?"
"Don't go around thinking the Red Army sets lean towards content from ex-USSR countries, or Cold War history. They have been of help to us in practicing these areas, however" another veteran quiz bowler warns the new players, as well as Flo, about the use of Red Army question sets for practicing.
"Just don't rely too much on one source of questions when reading past quiz bowl packets for practicing" Flo warns her players, and then decides to pick a packet from the newest available middle school set, which is a Red Army set, for the resumption of question sampling.
It seems that, as much as it is a learning experience for the players, it's also a learning experience to Flo as well, since she is made to feel like having a feel for what questions look like at various difficulty levels would benefit everyone actively involved in the game for the Venomous Agendas.
She then reads a couple of tossup-bonus cycles on that set and then proceeds to read a high school introductory housewrite. Which is supposedly on the level of what the early tournaments of the high school season will be like (such as Tal Atkins and LQBA Fall Invitational South).
"Let us finish this question sampling drill by reading some questions from packets of comparable difficulty to those at the high school division of quiz bowl-State, or so I'm told" Flo picks up the first packet fitting that description she manages to get.
"In fact, most high school tournaments in the second half of the year will be more or less that difficult" the eyes of another veteran player at last year's HSNCT perk up upon hearing that Flo is sampling questions from what is called, in the quiz bowl world, regular-plus.
And yet, to finish this sampling of questions with the new players, Flo decides that she would read the questions remaining to fit the subject distribution Sonny gave them earlier, after she read the HSNCT questions. Once the question sampling ends:
"If you're in middle school, don't be afraid to use high school introductory questions to study, but don't use sets that are more difficult than that in the beginning. Then, once you get more comfortable with high school novice questions, you can move to regular and then regular-plus sets for studying and practicing. However, don't neglect studying by means other than reading past question sets" Flo warns the new players, who all took notes on how to study for quiz bowl tournaments.
When Sonny returns home from the quiz bowl practice that day, during dinner, his mother asks him about what happened during the practice. And Marianne's questions turn to how Flo goes around drilling quiz bowl players.
"Now that we determined Hathaway doesn't have anyone willing to coach a debate team, and money would have been short enough to severely limit the size of the team Hathaway could field, because I would have wanted everyone on the team to play at every tournament Hathaway would enter, perhaps quiz bowl would be more financially feasible. Speaking of quiz bowl, do you have any idea of how I should go around coaching a team? I might not have a choice but to coach the team myself, if we can find enough players" Marianne discusses the realities of expanding extracurricular opportunities at Hathaway with her oldest son.
"I told Flo the core things she needed to be aware of as the new coach of VA quiz bowl" Sonny then summarizes what he told Flo during practice. "It seems like Flo is getting coached, too, but it's her first day with the actual team"
About the importance of sampling question difficulties right out of the gate, about tools to use for studying for it, and the importance of not dwelling on a wrong answer. But he trusted his mom to handle the logistical part of coaching the Hathaway Hornets' quiz bowl team... if that team comes to fruition.
If everything I was told about Hathaway is correct, given the limited resources we have, I would rather have a quiz bowl team, because it's all-subject and debate or mathletics aren't. And I know from my experience at VA that debate is much more expensive than quiz bowl; for the price of one debater, I can buy a buzzer and pay the entry fees for an entire season's worth of tournaments of the team, Marianne is left wondering about how to get players for the quiz bowl team.