October brings with it so many things that I love—cooler weather, cozy nights, quiet mornings, Halloween—but there’s something else:  quiz bowl.

I participated in quiz bowl (we called it “Academic Team” in the public schools) back in middle and high schools, and I coached my school’s High School Quiz Bowl team for many years.  I’ve handed that responsibility off to another teacher, but I still moderate tournaments from time to time, which is fun.

I wrote about quiz bowl back in October 2021; for a full rundown on how the game is played and what it is like, read “Quiz Bowlin’” before proceeding with this post.  It will provide much more context.

Earlier this week, I moderated the South Carolina Independent School (SCISA) Middle School Quiz Bowl Tournament.  It consisted of several “regional” pools of competing schools, with winners proceeding to two semi-final pools.  Two semi-finalists and a wildcard team (based on total points scored) then competed in the finals.

SCISA shifted to this format of doing everything—regionals, semi-finals, and finals—all in one day last year.  I attended as a coach for the High School Quiz Bowl tournament last year, and it was a boondoggle—a long, slow, tedious slog of a day.  Part of the problem was due to it being the first time SCISA had attempted the format.  The High School regionals also consisted of a whopping six teams per region, which makes for tons of games when done in a round-robin fashion.  My team did not make it to the finals, but apparently the tournament last until well into the night.

This year, SCISA made a number of key reforms to make everything run for smoothly.  For one, they changed venues to a church in Orangeburg with a much more logical layout than the church that hosted the last couple of years, which suffered from tiny rooms laid out in a byzantine maze of corridors and dead-ends.

Secondly, they’ve reduced the regional pools to three- or four-team round robins.  To put that into perspective, each team essentially plays the other once, so a three-team round robin only consists of three games.  A four-team round robin consists of six games.  From what I could tell, the Middle School managed to conduct all regional matches as three-team round robins, with questions from Rounds 1-3 reused in the second “half” of regional matches (those teams started slightly later, and were not permitted to listen in to the early morning “half” of questions, so the questions were “new” to the later teams).

No system is perfect, and seeding those regional brackets is always tricky.  Schools that are perennial powerhouses might have a weak year; schools that are typically weaker might have a phenomenal team—or even just one phenom (one kid who is good at math can carry a team).  My own administration is complaining that our Middle School team was seeded improperly, and had to face other powerhouse schools too early.

I don’t know how to address that per se, but current system seems to work overall.  Anyone who follows college football knows that seeding and rankings and the like can be notoriously subjective, even if we want to believe they’re the product of cold, rational calculation and hard math.

Regardless, I moderated my six morning games—three rounds each for the two regional pools—then had a break until the finals, which I moderated.  Two moderators were from the same school, so they took the two semi-final pools (their school had already lost out, as had mine, so there was no risk of us moderating for our own schools).  One mother from the team our feeder school fielded got angry with me because I called down her son for consulting on toss-ups (against the rules), which he’d done twice.  She complained that, because I called him by his last name as well as his first, that I was being too forceful, and therefore rattled him for the rest of the round.  Hey, that’s quiz bowl, baby.  It’s not my fault his coach didn’t teach him the rules (which I also went over again before the match!).

Bitter Karens aside, it was a fun day.  The championship matches were tense and close.  There was an unambiguous winner for the State Championship, but due to an unresolved discrepancy in SCISA rules, it was difficult to determine the runner-up.  Again, like college football, wins are the most important, but in the event of a tie in wins, the team with the highest score wins.

Here was the issue:  all three teams lost one game and won one game in the finals.  The State Champions clearly won the tie-breaker on points—they had way more than the other two teams, by about 200 points.  But the team with the second highest points lost to the team with the third highest points in the finals.  The question, then, was as follows:  does the second place in points team become runner-up, even though they lost to the third place in points team?

Compounding the confusion was that the team that was second place in points lost its match against the third place team abysmally—they only scored twenty points to the other team’s 200 or so.  For perspective, twenty points in quiz bowl is essentially two toss-up questions, or four bonus questions—it’s not much.

The SCISA official made the on-the-spot decision to award both schools the State Runner-Up title, so essentially they were co-runner-ups.  It was a reasonable stopgap measure until SCISA can clarify the rules.  It’s a rare situation, but it clearly happened yesterday, so it could happen again, and SCISA needs to clarify that discrepancy before next year’s tournaments.

All in all, it was a fun day, and I love seeing teams compete.  I’m always blown away by how much kids know, and how much we teach them.  Sure, we complain about our declining knowledge and skills, and quiz bowl is certainly a self-selecting population, but it’s great seeing these kids thriving and learning.