The Ohio Quizbowl Forum

Hello all,
I was talking with fellow members of the CWRU Trivia Team and we discussed the possibility of hosting a tournament next semester - for decades, Case has hosted three high school tournaments a year, and they sort of fizzled out a few years ago after Steven Wellstead graduated. We were thinking of bringing back GLRAC and/or Buzzerpalooza.

The Great Lakes Regional Academic Championship (GLRAC) was a regular academic PACE-style tournament that we could host on March 19. We would get the questions from HSAPQ so no one has to consider our own question-writing abilities.

Buzzerpalooza was a winter tournament that had a format similar to Cleveland's TV tournament Academic Challenge, and it was popular for teams to get a chance to practice for the TV tournament. We would host it on Jan. 30 or Feb. 20.

I just wanted to get an idea of what sort of interest there would be in these events - would people come out to Cleveland for them, would one tournament be a better idea than the other, is Case Western's reputation so completely chattered from past years that I should just give up (I hope not!), etc. Just some thoughts - at this point, any input would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Tyler McMaken, Tribvnvs Plebis Praeparator Vvltis Svbcaesar

I've been meaning to respond to this for a while but just haven't gotten around to it until now...

NE Ohio is one of the most active parts of the state for quizbowl, so if you are thinking of hosting a tournament, there will generally be enough interest in that area to warrant going ahead with running one. With that said, if you do want to go ahead with a tournament, I wouldn’t have too high of an expectation to get high attendance (20+ teams) if I was in your position. Given that there are more yearly tournaments nowadays than there ever have been, and with funding always being an issue for schools, it is just harder to get a high number of teams to attend a given tournament, especially a new one (or one that hasn’t occurred in a while). Additionally, I have the feeling that some schools might be a little reticent to attend an event put on by someone without a track record of running quality (or any?) tournaments. If CWRU has a current reputation of running tournaments poorly (is this the case? I’m not really sure what the team got involved in after I left in 2011), then that obviously won’t help your cause, but it is not necessarily a dealbreaker for schools either. CWRU had a pretty bad reputation prior to me taking over in 2008, but I communicated openly with coaches that I was trying to change things, put on a few solid tournaments, and ultimately ended up being fairly successful at attracting solid fields for all of our tournaments.

If you do go ahead with a tournament, you just want to be sure you do your homework to give yourself the best chance at having a successful tournament, because running a bad tournament will just make it that much harder to attract for future events. The good news is that there is a good network of people throughout the state that would happily advise you in how to oversee a successful tournament, so if you have an interest in proceeding further, you should definitely tap into whatever resources you can find.

To speak about the specific events you mentioned: A Buzzerpalooza event would almost surely be a more popular event than the PACE formatted GLRAC, but there are some things to be cautious about with this event. For starters, finding a question provider for such a niche format would probably be difficult, and unless you have several experienced writers, doing the questions in-house would most likely be a poor idea. Also, you would need to be mindful of how many teams you think you can handle. The one year I ran Buzzerpalooza, I believe we had 48 teams (compared to our usual 20ish teams for our non-trash tournaments – so yeah, it was popular!), and it was definitely more challenging to run an event of this size and especially find enough volunteers to read. GLRAC would definitely have much less interest, but that is probably more ideal for someone trying to run their first successful tournament.

If you do go ahead with hosting a tournament, I wish you all the best. It would be nice to see CWRU hosting solid tournaments again! Feel free to let me or anyone else on the forum know if you have any more specific questions going forward.