How to Run a Quizbowl Tournament
Introduction: This document is designed to explain how to run a high school quizbowl tournament. The main tasks involved in this process include but are not limited to: reserving buildings, ordering questions, setting up a reasonable pricing plan for the tournament, making sure all tournament supplies are ready for the day of the tournament, and keeping in contact with all clubs attending your tournament. I include advice to help avoid any possible problems that you may have preparing your tournament.
Materials and Supplies:
Necessary Staff:
*Note that the amount of all the materials necessary to run the tournament is a function of how many teams attend your tournament.
How to run a high school Quizbowl tournament:
Inform all possible attendees that it will be taking place. There are two methods of doing this, each of which must be followed in order to encourage attendance: firstly, collecting a list of quizbowl club sponsors’ e-mail addresses and sending them preliminary information concerning your tournament, which allows for local recruitment, and secondly, announcing your tournament on quizbowl’s premier message board at hsquizbowl.org to make the existence of your tournament known to quizbowl organizations on a more global scale.
Create a pricing plan for your tournament. First and foremost, you must consider both your club and your customers in this matter. Don’t set the price too high because the schools may not be interested in attending; however, don’t set it so low as to not make much of a profit. The whole purpose of the tournament is to fund your own college quizbowl team’s trips.
Reserve a large classroom building on campus to host the tournament in. Contact your university’s administration months in advance regarding the buildings. Generally, there is a long process that you have to go through in order to reserve a building, so get started early so that the building doesn’t get reserved by any other organization.
Secure the questions for your tournament. The easiest way to do this is to reserve some questions online with a question-writing organization such as NAQT. It’s much easier to do this than to write your own questions because writing questions takes a bunch of time and effort and they are open to scrutiny.
Secure enough volunteers to staff the tournament. Volunteers’ duties usually consist of keeping score and reading during matches. It is imperative that the volunteers have enough knowledge to run matches smoothly. Generally, people that are active in the quizbowl community are more than welcome to help. If you are having trouble securing enough experienced volunteers, then you must train volunteers in the art of moderating matches. This takes time, so it is imperative that you do it months in advance. I say this because moderator troubles are a common issue in almost all quizbowl tournaments. You want to give the moderators proper training to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible.
Design the structure of the tournament. For small tournaments, a round robin usually works. For larger tournaments, separate teams into pools and then make them play a round robin for seeding purposes, then proceed to a playoff in which you can seed the teams according to their performance in the preliminary rounds. I strongly suggest that you find some sort of tournament generator online that can generate pools to your liking. This task can be extremely tedious otherwise.
Make a schedule that organizes all this information to avoid any confusion, otherwise there will be so much confusion and you just won’t be able to handle it all at the same time, not to mention people will be at your throat asking you the five W’s of the tournament instead of giving you the space you need to ensure that everything runs properly.
Secure all necessary equipment for the tournament. Usually, the only thing that a college quizbowl team is lacking in order to run a quizbowl tournament is a sufficient amount of buzzer systems. Most high school teams have buzzer systems, so just offer them a discount for allowing you to use them. Teams are happy to oblige and there are almost never any problems.
A few days before the competition, make sure you make copies of the questions.
Pick up the keys to the building that you are holding the tournament in. Normally, the university physical plant holds these, so make sure you stop on by to pick up the keys. If you don’t do this, then you won’t be able to enter the building.
The night before the tournament, set up all the equipment. Each room should have all necessary equipment available to the volunteers so that none of this has to be done the day of the tournament.
The morning of the tournament, purchase some kind of complimentary breakfast items, such as doughnuts and orange juice, so that everyone has something to eat before the competition.
Make sure the teams sign in before the tournament.
Collect buzzer systems from the teams that agreed to bring them and hand out schedules.
Figure 1. Buzzer systems
Source: http://www.quizsystems.com/images/front_system2.jpg
Once everything is collected, call a team meeting welcoming everyone to the tournament and answering any questions that anyone may have.
Dismiss the meeting and make sure all staff are in place. It is necessary to designate an official tournament director that will serve as an arbitrator when problems arise. The tournament director should be one of the most experienced members of the staff.
Play the rounds, making sure final results are turned in to the designated statistician. If you don’t get the results into the statistician, then why did you keep the statistics?
Figure 2. Quizbowl team ready for competition
Source: http://www.jesuitnola.org/upload/physsci/dufresne/quiz_bowl_picture_page.htm
Sometime around noon, dismiss for lunch. During this time, it is important that the statistician compile all statistics that will determine who advances to the playoff rounds.
Once the teams return from lunch, announce the results from the morning. If teams have been eliminated, return their buzzer systems to them as soon as possible so they can leave.
Play the playoff rounds until a champion is determined.
Figure 3. Tournament Bracket
Source: Jake Sundberg
Clean up any mess made. The custodians surely don’t want to clean up after you.