I believe it shipped, though the fact that they didn't call a traditional 4 o'clock kegger worries me. Hopefully they'll be a bouncing baby product on the PR Newswire tomorrow. Cross fingers. Note this is also why I'm running short today.

Open mike night: Craig's take today. If I don't get any more in my inbox tomorrow, I'll start mine, giving first what I think is possible, and then following up with my justifications on either Friday or Sunday (depending on how my schedule plays out), and now Craig's take:

As a matter of personal experience, I am entering my 11th year of association with quiz bowl in some form. I pride myself that I played on two teams that never required me to study, and in doing so, I have made myself into a quality player, being fortunate enough to be a member of several national championship winning teams and an occasional all-star at tournaments, both academic and trash. I was never hard-core to many people, because I discovered that I didn't like certain formats from my freshman year, but I never complained about them because I didn't play them. The freedom to decide like that is kind of an amazing principle that sometimes gets lost in the desire to play as many tournaments as possible. I never kept a notebook, I never wrote a flash list, and I never wrote a thousand questions to get better. By the same token, I am one of the hard-core dinosaurs that people hate, because I have been around forever, I have heard tens of thousands of questions, and I spent way too much time in any given week thinking about quiz bowl or working on quiz bowl related things. The amazing thing is, there is a place for me, in part because I have retired from all but the one format that still permits me to play (which also happens to be the one I am quite good at.) I moved on to other ways of partaking in the circuit, writing and working for NAQT, coaching at my high school, reading at Michigan tournaments. All of these things are the underrated and under-appreciated side of the game. We need people, whether they are undergrads, grad students, or alums, or even just interested people, to help us, because the key to everything we want to do is manpower.

Interestingly, I think that one of the key things that no one ever mentions is how the quiz bowl community in general could benefit seriously from reaching out to the business students in their campus community. There could very well be a number of people who could help them run the organization's ugly side: the finances, PR, marketing, outreach, and the things which we seem to lack. Everyone wants to join a quiz bowl club to play, but sometimes, having people who are more willing to run the show without touching a buzzer could be beneficial. How often are players put into positions in their club which they are ill-suited to fill, simply because they are the only ones willing to do the job, or the club is so small, that everyone has to do something? Finding people who would like to build their resumes by running what amounts to a small business while hanging out with some fun people certainly could help a number of us.

I lament the fact that my breed of player is going to die, the ones with the almost eerie ability to anticipate where a question is going and jump on it quickly. Over the past few years, many of our questions have become so obscure in so many of our lead-ins that players now sit through six seconds of inane one-upmanship before they get to the part of the question that anyone can answer. The pyramid point is now the size of a pin, and we have to start sliding down before anyone who hasn't spent the last two weeks in the grad library translating Tolstoy from the original Russian into French will be able to get it. (Not that there's anything wrong with that as your idea of fun, you're just not going to find a broad cross-section of people who are going to find that fun.)

The fundamental problem I see with quiz bowl is not the game, it's the players. Arrogance is required to be a good quiz bowl player; you have to be willing to put yourself out on the line and risk looking foolish AND losing points if you are wrong, so you better either know the answer or be willing to take the ego hit, which means your self-esteem needs to be pretty robust as well. Couple this with the fact that, generally, we have been socially ostracized so much over the years by our age-peers for being smarter, for knowing more, or for being socially awkward (speaking in very broad generalities here, but experience has shown me that while this is not always true, it can generally apply in one form or another to a broad swath of quiz bowl players) that when we get a chance to be recognized by people who share our interests, who prize knowledge and revel in being "smart", we want to embrace it fully. But if quiz bowl were just about being knowledgeable, we could just have the questions written out in test form. So it's something more; it's about knowledge and speed and anticipation and pattern recognition. The problem becomes that in a general sense, arrogance and competitiveness go hand in hand, and it is rare that anyone in the QB community, with their healthy ego rolling from their playing ability, is going to want to appear weak by saying that this was out of their league. Some will take it as a sign that they just need to hit the books harder, well, we have reached them, no problem. But what about the person, who, upon looking upon this paradox, decides that quiz bowl is no longer worth their time because they will never be good enough to win given they time that they can and are willing to devote to this pursuit. There has to be a place for them in the community as well. Do not rec softball leagues have different classifications for different levels of commitment from "softball guy", in his Oakleys with his three different ceramic bats, who laced it up in college, and the beer league, where a bunch of 45 year olds are trying to make it from second to third without spilling until they can get a refill from the third base coach. These two teams would never meet in the field of play, and yet, I suspect, that they both enjoy what they do for completely different reasons. People like winning better than losing, for goodness sakes, it's why we keep score, but isn't having fun, having a good time, having a chance to win in more games than not, also important? It will keep people coming back; it will keep people wanting to put in the time it takes to go to tournaments, to write questions for those tournaments, and the like. They cannot help but get better, but maybe that isn't what matters to them. Maybe they just really like playing the game, and really, what's wrong with that? No one is asking them to win a national championship; maybe all they would like is to make a playoff round every so often. This team is just as important as the overall health of the circuit as a perpetual contender is, just as the Kansas City Royals are as important to the overall health of Major League Baseball as the New York Yankees.

Circuit quiz bowl grew up with a DIY mentality, in stark contrast to the corporate side that so many teams became frustrated with. When you think about it, it makes sense, if you don't like the game, make your own. Sometimes you will succeed, sometimes you will fail, but with some experience, some luck, and some wisdom, you'll create something that people want and will want to help build. Have we reached the limits of DIY for the circuit? Certainly not. Whether you like ACF or not, what they do is exceptional, they take packets written by the players themselves and hold three tournaments a year to determine a champion in that field. They do it for very little compensation, but, for what I suspect, is a sense of duty, loyalty, and commitment to the game. Each of several exceptional players willingly sacrifices a shot at playing at one of their tournaments annually to provide a much needed service. ACF has grown because of commitment from these people, so I don't suspect that there is any reason that we should think the end of the DIY mentality is neigh.

Are there ways of studying to get better, well, yes, no one can deny the results that we have seen who have committed themselves to improvement, but I think even those who are the staunchest advocates of studying would probably also tell you that writing questions is one of the best ways to get better. This, of course, has the two-fold effect of improving your game and providing fodder to be submitted to an invitational tournament. People cite stats about a question a day, but it's scary to consider. If you wrote one toss-up and one bonus a day every working day for a year, you would have roughly 260/260 for use for whatever you saw fit. You would also have added benefits of learning key resources to look up questions, refining your understanding of pyramidal structure, and expanding your breadth of knowledge. Is every question you write going to be great, no, but that's why you have, hopefully, people who will edit your questions. Even if you have a lack of experienced players in your small circle, a second set of eyes can prevent even the most egregious mistakes from getting through. Similarly, reading your questions aloud are a great way to be nice to moderators and make sure you have not made a difficult question to read, whether you include pronunciation guides, or even just a comma or two. Does this mean that question writing is the only way to improve either? Of course not, just like you find, over time, what works best for you when trying to prepare for an examination, you're going to find a method of preparing that meets with your satisfaction.

Question difficulty. Has anyone ever considered that instead of writing "easy" questions with "hard" answers, we write hard questions with easy answers? How often do you hear Abraham Lincoln as a packet submission tournament anymore? Probably never, because the factions will claim that all of the clues are trite, all of the lead-ins well worn, all of the ground already trod upon. But you know what, if you have never played the game (and can we assume for a moment that there are a number of people who discover the game in college for the first time through the playing of intramural tournaments or during a campus activity fair or what not), you don't know those clues, and while you would be beaten to them, at least you have heard of them. I am not saying that the better players shouldn't win games, and in general, "better" means more experience in quiz bowl, having heard more clues, written more questions, played in more games. What I am suggesting is that question writers at least have answers that not just a group of quiz bowl regulars are intimately familiar with, but a wider cross-section of potential players. At least then, if you're getting smoked early in your tournament life, you at least have heard of the things they are asking questions on, and that is somehow less discouraging, because as you expand your knowledge base, you'll be taking what you know and making it better.

On the principle of studying, I have a fundamental problem with it as being the only solution to a player's ills. Certainly a goodly number of players who play college bowl are doing as an something fun to do on the side, they like going to practice to meet with like minded people, and to play trivia and have fun. Are they ever going to win a national title, probably not, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for them in the great big ocean of quiz bowl. Carrying 15 credits already gives you enough headaches of reading, being told that you also need to read Master Plots, Benet's and other assorted works merely to be competitive is not going to keep people in the game. Winning is better than losing, but without other teams to beat, those victories will be hollow. There must be room made in the circuit for all players of all abilities, all time commitments, and all experience levels.

One of the other fundamental problems I see with the theory that there is no difficulty problem is that too many people assume that the entire universe of people who play quiz bowl post on the Yahoo! board and since no one ever complains about things being too hard, we must be doing fine. Since I have seen over many moons what happens to a person who dares voice an opinion that is out of step with the mass of squeaky wheels, I would never even consider posting to the board about things being too hard. The squeaky wheels are the best players, the players looking for the next challenge, and since they play the most, tournament directors must please them or risk being pilloried on the message board for running a bad tournament. And heaven forbid that teams come out of nowhere and do well at a tournament while established teams struggle, because then obviously the results of your tournament are fraudulent. And heaven forefend that you use the packets as you got them with repeats and hoses removed, you might as well shoot yourself in the foot, because your tournament has just become a low quality pariah. Perhaps if more tournament directors had the courage to aim for the middle, to aim the tournament's difficulty at the middle team and let the best teams play it out to high scores while the less experienced teams still put up quality points. Losing 400-200 is far less discouraging somehow than losing 200-0.

One last thing to remember: Like a poorly edited tournament, history repeats itself. If we do not commit ourselves as a community of people who believe in something larger than ourselves and our own personal enjoyment of the game, we will never make the game more mainstream and enjoyable for more people. There are those who would probably be very happy about this, but there are many more, I suspect, who are willing to go to the front and make the charge, they just need someone to yell Virginians and raise their sword. People with vision can start it, but will they have the ability to sustain it. But it doesn't have to be one man, one woman, one group. It can be a number of us, if we are willing to speak, to hear, and to understand, be willing to compromise and be willing to be flexible, then we may have a sun rising on our game than setting.

Craig Barker