9) What is a good way to recruit people or get a club started? (College Bowl)
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This article is from the College Bowl FAQ, by George Atendido aten0001@tc.umn.edu with numerous contributions by others.
9) What is a good way to recruit people or get a club started? (College Bowl)
If you are interested in starting up a new CB club at your school, the
first thing to do is call your student activities office. Ask if your
school has ever been involved in CB, and if so which faculty or
administrators were involved. Also ask how one goes about getting
school funding for student activities. The next thing to do is to contact
CBI, at phone number 1-800-234-BOWL (or 818-788-4103). They have a wealth of
information and can walk you through the official mumbo-jumbo. The next
thing to do is to find a faculty person or administrator who is willing to
be your "coach" or do some behind-the-scenes work for you. Next, find a few
people who are interested in CB and who are willing to put in work to
promote the club and the activity at your school. If you can secure funding
for 10 or more packets of questions from CBI (10 packets will cost a new
program in the area of $500), order them and set up a campus tournament
for your school. Be careful about this: you will need a few game
officials and some equipment, and you have to be careful to avoid
conflicts of interest. A typical campus tournament runs 1-2 competition
rooms at the same time, and each room should have at least 2 game
officials. [Note: The official CBI script calls for four officials per room,
but most tourneys get by with only two officials, with no noticeable drop
in quality.]
Conflicts of interest are harder to avoid. If the club runs the tournament,
it is best if the director and other game officials of the tournament not
participate in it. If the director or other officials do participate, you
will have to sequester the questions carefully so that the director and
these officials do not see the questions they will play on before their
matches.
There is another way to start up a CB program, but you cannot play in
your CB RCT the first year if you do it. However, you may participate
fully in an ACF RCT and, if you make it, the ACF NCT. The first year, get a
group of people together to form a club, and send teams to invitationals at
other schools. You may or may not be able to get funding for this,
depending on your school's policies. After this, apply to your school for CBI
packets the next year, saying that you have a club already in place and
that you are ready to take CB to your entire school. [Note: almost every CB
program gets the money to buy CBI packets either from their school, an outside
sponsor, or a combination of both. There have been cases where individuals
purchase the questions themselves, but this an option left only to those
willing and able to pay the hefty $43-62 per packet.]
To set up an ACF program, contact Vishnu Jejjala at vjejjala@wam.umd.edu
or Jim Dendy at mrpbody@aol.com.
To recruit players for an already existing program, the first decision you
have to make is whether you want a year-round club or not. Many schools
run a campus tournament, and then just send the winning team to their RCT
(and if it wins the RCT, it gets sent to the NCT). Other schools, which
tend to do better at the national level, maintain year-round clubs, which
send teams to invitationals and practices year-round, and may even conduct
more than one campus tournament.
A good way to recruit for a year-round program is to find out from your
admissions department who participated in academic competition in high
school, and target those individuals. However, there is a problem with this
method: many potentially good players may not have had the opportunity or
the inclination to play in high school, but may want to play in college.
Once you've promoted and run your campus tourney, you have another
decision to make: do you want entry to the club to be competitive or not?
At some schools, all participants in the campus tourney are invited to
join the club, although standing on travelling teams is based on merit.
Some schools do this, but target particularly the best players in the
campus tourney. At other schools, the best players from the campus tourney
try out for as many spots as are open in the club/travelling teams. It is
up to your program to decide how to do it.
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