NH Quiz Bowl League

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: