Good evening all!

Hi all!

Welcome back to the school year! We’ve got some exciting things going on for NHQBL this year, so I thought I’d take a minute or two and jot down some info for you.

First and foremost, here is a reminder of our tournament schedule for this year:

Sept. 28: Plymouth
Oct. 26: GHOST at Hanover
Nov. 23: Hanover
Dec. 14: Merrimack
Feb. 1: PCA
March 7: Kingswood
March 21: Potential date for snow reschedule.
April 6(?) State finals 

Also, as a reminder, this year, each tournament’s winner (who hasn’t already won a tournament), will qualify for the state tournament, regardless of geography. So, Jay will be hosting our first tournament, so stay tuned for registration announcements for that.

So, here are some other updates:

1. Recruitment- Over the summer I took the initiative of preparing a postcard mailing on behalf of the league. Leveraging my connections with NHPBS, I got a copy of their mailing list for all NH high schools. I had a postcard printed, and made labels. The postcards have a blank spot for the next tournament date which can also be filled with a sticker label, so the plan is to use them for several years. (Thanks to my wife for that brilliant suggestion!)  Those postcards will be mailed out next Monday. Most of you won’t see them (I think I skipped most schools already on the email list to save on postage, but a few of you might see one). Hopefully, this will at least get us some exposure in areas where there hasn’t been in a long time, and maybe a few new faces will join us. 

1. Questions: Our new questions are in process and will be here before our season starts. We are purchasing fresh, pristine questions from QuizBowlQuestions.com, an outfit out of Oklahoma. They are nice and current, and will come to us automatically divided into rounds. They will feature a standard distribution of topics in each round. We will be sequestering these questions after each tournament (questions will be collected, and not distributed). The reason for this is that we will reuse them 4 years from now as J/V questions, at that point, they will be released. In the meantime, we will continue to use Academic Hallmarks for j/v rounds, though that database has been updated as of this year. That’s the plan, anyway. 

1. Dues-Always voluntary, but please pay them if you can. We are currently doing fine for cash, given our donation from the Byrne foundation last year, but if we continue to purchase fresh questions every year, that will run out rather quicker than we want. Let’s put it this way, if we have 12 teams participate this year, and all 12 pay dues, it will cover the pristine questions. (The A-H database was another expense, but we will not be repeating that cost again. We’ll use this database until we can begin recycling our pristine questions.)

1. Tournaments: I hope to be a little more hands on this year helping people prep for tournaments. I’m going to be using Google Forms for registration, which I can share with tournament hosts. The reason for this is to try and tighten up our schedules ahead of time, so we can start closer to 10am. I know that late starts are an NHQBL tradition, but it’s one I think we’d all like to phase out. If you’re hosting this year, I’ll be in touch with you well ahead of time to set things up. 

1. On a related topic, but not really: Some of you know that I’ve been working with NHPBS to do some research on Granite State Challenge. The early fruits of that labor have been compiled at www.gscconnection.com. I’m still looking for information regarding the 1993-1994 and the 1995-1996 season, so if for any reason, you may have memory of, or know someone who does have memory of either of those seasons, reach out to me, please! 

That’s it, if you made it this far. Thanks for being a part of our group, and as always, let me know if there’s someone else I should be contacting about NHQBL. Look forward to seeing you all soon!

Hey all!

REMINDER: If you want to attend the “Rookie Players” exhibition tournament at Merrimack, remember to contact Sara (sara.campbell@sau26.org) as soon as possible!

We held our spring coaches meeting on Tuesday, and we tackled a number of important issues. You can link to the full meeting minutes HERE, but for those of you who just want the important stuff, here we go:

1) Finances: We have $10,682.65 in the NHQBL account. There’s an additional ~$1300 in the old account at Hanover High. We made a motion to officially request release of those funds so as to consolidate them.

2) Divisions: The plan had been to discuss whether we needed adjustments for the geographic regions, but what ended up happening was a decision to do away with them entirely. All tournaments next year will be played “at-large”, meaning whoever scores the best, wins the tournament, regardless of where they are from. If a team has the best record but has already won, the “winner” will be the second place team. These teams will still get automatic bids to the tournament, and we will still take the three top wild card teams. This eliminates the worry about about balanced regions. We also just want to remind folks that several years ago, we agreed that teams must play in at least 2 tournaments to qualify for the finals, even if they do win.

3) Tournament organization: We are going  to strongly encourage teams to please report to their hosts FIRM numbers by the Thursday before a tournament, to enable hosts to set up grids before Saturday morning, in an effort to get things started on time. Hosts are encouraged to work with the league to organize ahead of time. And a reminder to hosts to please acknowledge registration emails, so teams know you got their numbers.

4) Questions: We will be purchasing new questions for next year. What kind, we’re not 100% sure yet. We all took sample packets from a variety of companies, and we’re still gathering prices. We’re going to consult via email, and make a decision so they can be ordered before the end of the school year. We’re going to be considering cost and availablity as key factors, as well as style. No one really wants to change the essential style of the questions, (we’re not planning on switching to full NAQT pyramid, for example), but we want to consider cost and sustainability. No sense in contracting for question that will cost us 2 grand a pop, we can’t sustain that in the long term if we want to buy fresh every year.

5) 2019-2020 Schedule. Even though all tournaments will be at-large next year, we did make an effort to spread the tournaments around to at least one will be convenient for most people. We tried to avoid major conflicts, but we did have to make a choice between doing a holiday weekend in the fall and potentially conflicting with All-State Music auditions, and we decided to stay away from the holidays. Without further ado:

State finals will be held on Sunday, April 7th, at the State Legislative Office Building in Concord, NH at 1:30 pm! Spectators are welcome!

Annual Coaches’ Council Meeting will be held on April 16th, at the Hooksett Public Library, from 3:30 to 5 pm!

Current coaches are invited, and we especially encourage those who might be hoping to get a team in the future!