R. Robert Hentzel has been the president of NAQT since 1998. In his recurring nightmare, R. answers the control room phone and hears a full-scale riot in the background.

How did you get involved with quiz bowl?

The first quiz bowl that I remember playing, was in 8th grade: It was a series of very informal matches (no buzzer system) pitting home rooms against each other. My strongest memory of that competition is managing to pronounce “Dostoyevsky” well enough to earn points based on having seen the The Brothers Karamazov on my parents’ bookshelf for most of my life.

I was relatively good, but by no means a stellar player. I also didn’t really realize at the time that quiz bowl could be a serious competition; that had to wait until the next year when the freshman Extended Learning Program coordinator at Ames High School (who was also the school’s football coach!), asked me to be the alternate on the school’s quiz bowl team. At that point, I don’t think I really “deserved” the honor by virtue of being the fifth-best player at the school, but I think Coach Daddow recognized that I would take the game seriously and prepare for it (which I did).

I think it also helped cement my fascination with the game in that it was my ticket to being taken seriously by the older, smarter kids on the team, from whom I learned a lot.

How did NAQT come to be?

NAQT was formed in 1996 when collegiate quiz bowl was split between partisans of ACF (then the Academic Competition Foundation) and CBI (College Bowl, Inc.) To oversimplify things, ACF had longer and harder questions about an academic distribution; CBI had shorter, easier questions about a wider range of topics (including more current events and modern history).

The founders of NAQT—David Frazee (executive director), Patrick Matthews (president), Tom Waters, Mike Burger, Dwight Kidder, Peter Freeman, Eric Bell, Julie Stahlhut, David Dixon, and Kevin Olmstead—thought there was the potential to have a more popular “middle way” that combined the strengths of those two major traditions; in this, the model was largely that of the popular Penn Bowl tournament (then run by NAQT’s founding president, Patrick Matthews) at the University of Pennsylvania. This tournament was widely considered the "third national championship" and drew a strong, nationally diverse field.

NAQT’s founders also wanted to create standardized rules (and traditions) of play to be used at all levels of competition from middle school through open tournaments. They hoped that having nationally recognized standards would help increase the activity’s prestige and make it easier to convince individual schools, conferences, and activities organizations to buy into it.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve couched this section in the third person: I was not a founding member of NAQT, and, in fact, I competed (for Iowa State University) at the first Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (in January 1997). I became a member that summer (after I graduated).

What was NAQT like in the early days?

Questions sets were produced by emailing partial packets around, without any centralized database tracking questions, authors, versions, or anything else. This was all we needed, but it’s a far cry from the technical infrastructure that we use today for stockpiling questions to simultaneously work on nationals, intramurals, high school sets, middle school sets, TV sets, and the various custom sets that we create.

The only work that was actually paid was writing and editing; all administrative work was unpaid (though it did count toward an end-of-year profit distribution, if there was any profit). Writing and editing was—and is—of supreme importance to us, but this seems ridiculous in 2018 when tournament logistics, accounting, customer service, shipping, result-tracking, and so many other tasks take such a huge amount of our members’ time.

It was a lot easier to be considered for membership. Way back in 1997, the time commitment expected of a member was lower and the pre-membership period of “prove you’re serious about this” was much shorter. And for good reason: There was less at stake. In 2018 the responsibilities and opportunities are much larger, and there is a correspondingly higher bar for potential members.

Back then, nobody had NAQT as a full-time job. Every member worked a regular 40-hour-a-week job and then did their NAQT work in the early mornings, in the late evenings, or on the weekends. Over time, that became untenable: We needed people who could respond to emails immediately and who could be relied upon to put 40 (or more) hours per week into major projects. In some ways shifting away from “I’ll work when I can” to “I’m working every day” was one of the biggest shifts in company culture. I went full-time in 2001 after it became clear that the dot-com bubble had burst and my computer consultancy, Silicon Age, Inc., would have harder times ahead.

Of course, it’s not necessary to become a member to participate in NAQT: We always need writers, editors, nationals staff, and even people to take on positions of responsibility at nationals (like overseeing consolation rounds). Enthusiasm, attention to detail, and talent are all it takes to get set up there.

Were the questions aimed at more high schools than colleges?

NAQT’s first offerings (1996–1997) were purely collegiate sets (Intramurals, Sectionals, and the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament). The founding members wanted to spend a year focused on the college game before attempting to branch out into the high school market (with which they had less direct experience, especially nationally).

NAQT introduced “Invitational Series” in 1997–1998 in an attempt to market questions to both high school teams and (lower-level) college teams. Very quickly, we realized that the median high school team would need easier questions and the median college team would need harder questions, so we moved toward marking the Invitational Series easier (and introduced the short-lived Conference Championship Set/Intercollegiate Fall Tournament for college teams).

What do you wish you did differently?

I could do an 80-for-80 interview based on things NAQT should have done differently!

If forced to pick just a few, broad things, I think I would have liked to see NAQT start with easier questions for its high school offerings. Our first Invitational Series—while not notably difficult by today’s standards—were perceived as very hard (and very much beyond a typical quiz bowl team’s comfort zone). Our year-to-year repeat business is excellent these days, but it was very much not so in our first couple of years.

I also would have liked to see us put more work into marketing in the early years. Back in the day, I often heard comments about NAQT’s “slick marketing group” or similar things, and they always brought a smile to my face since I knew that, internally, we were spending almost all of our time writing and editing (and arguing about aspects of writing and editing), and very, very little time getting our name and our questions out in front of tournament hosts.

Where did you see NAQT going?

Broadly speaking, we’d like to see quiz bowl reach the level of cultural ubiquity as the major team sports in the U.S.: We’d like it to be as common for a school to have a quiz bowl team as a basketball team. We’d also like to see widespread recognition of quiz bowl accomplishments by the media and by college admissions personnel.

In a cut portion of his 20for20 interview, Dwight Kidder alluded to to your “incredible production numbers [which] saved us from the first production crises”; what can you tell us about that?

There’s not much to say there other than that NAQT often needed a lot of questions to be written, and I was a young, unmarried member of NAQT with flexible hours at my real job, so I would write lots of questions. Which isn’t that bad; I’ve always loved writing, and I take a real pride in finding new answers that are both significant and gettable and bringing them into NAQT’s packets. There were lots of very late nights in NAQT’s early days.

Do you still write questions for the HSNCT?

Yes, but many, many fewer than I once did.

Which topic(s) are your favorite?

More than anything else, I think I enjoy writing about a topic that is at least partially new to me. That is, having a chance to learn something. I’d say that the hard sciences, European history, and economics are probably the general categories that I enjoy the most. For more niche categories, I also enjoy producing questions on classic detective fiction, tabletop games, and the business/strategy of sports.

Was the HSNCT always on the minds of the members?

Hey, a question with a really quick answer! Yes. From the very beginning, NAQT’s founding members anticipating launching a high school program with a national championship.

What do you remember about the first HSNCT?

That we didn’t market it very well and had to cancel it!

The first HSNCT that actually occurred (1999) was my first exposure in person to high-level high school play since Ames High’s poor showing at the Stars 2000 competition in 1991. There’s not a lot of wallop in the story, but having a chance to talk with the coaches of all 26(!) teams in person really helped me understand the different situations faced by teams around the country.

Less seriously, I also still have very clear memories of the bright red Oklahoma dirt (the event was held at the University of Oklahoma). It just seemed wrong compared with the black dirt of my native Iowa.

Who were your opponents when you played?

In high school, our big opponent was Lincoln High in Des Moines.

In college, Iowa State’s local rivals were the University of Minnesota (at CBI), Carleton (at ACF, coached by early NAQT member Eric Hillemann), and the University of Iowa (both). We saw them at every tournament.

I considered my personal rival in the Midwest to be Chicago’s star (and future NAQT member) John Sheahan, though he probably didn’t realize it at the time as his team regularly cleaned our clock. I still remember ACF Regionals from 1995 where I was incredibly proud of being the #2 scorer overall (second to Sheahan), but was deflated to hear another team say, “Yeah, that Iowa State guy got lucky, but John’s been scoring like that for years.” Sadly, they were right (but motivating).

What did you think the HSNCT was going to become in 1998?

In 1998, I don’t think I had a conception of the eventual magnitude of the HSNCT: Most of NAQT’s discussions and planning still focused on the college game at that point. I would say that it was over the next two years that I (and the rest of NAQT) really started to understand just how serious the nations’ top teams were and how enthusiastic they were about a national championship along the lines of what NAQT had started.

What can you tell us about the structure of HSNCT?

Historically, NAQT’s members have thought that power-matched formats were a good thing: We like to maximize the number of matches between teams with similar abilities because those are more exciting to play and give us more information about ranking teams. A 600–120 pounding of a developing team by an elite team just isn’t that useful.

We used power-matched systems at some earlier HSNCTs, but they were fairly clumsy: We either had to wait for all games in a round to complete and then manually match teams (which was error-prone), or we had to do “delayed” matching where we arranged the games in round n+1 using the results of round n–1. That was more efficient in terms of time, but it had more mismatches than we would have liked.

I actually had the basic idea for the card system back in high school, when I worked it out during study hall. (As an aside, I’ve always been fascinated by tournament formats and how people decide to structure their competitions.)

I think I finally introduced the idea to NAQT in 2005 when we had an HSNCT field size that was appropriate (96): The field needs to be divisible by a fairly large power of 2, and it needs to be large enough that matching 10 games doesn’t lead to (too) many repeat matches at the top and bottom. I was concerned that the system’s issues like complexity, the insolubility of problems creating by playing the wrong opponent if not caught immediately, and the inability to find a team during the day would be overwhelming, but I was gratified that my colleagues thought it was worth an experiment on our biggest stage of the year.

Over the subsequent years, we’ve refined the system to make the cards (and room assignments) easier to generate and to make the round-to-round pairings fairer and less likely to be repeats. But the gist of the system has stayed pretty much the same.

Do you have an anecdote about them?

Other than moments of abject terror as a tournament director when somebody calls in to say, ”Hey, I think the wrong teams just played in my room,” my strongest memory is fielding questions about the system at the opening meeting of the 2005 HSNCT and being unable to convince a concerned coach that we could actually guarantee that each team would get 10 games (despite the card swapping). I ended up just having to tell him, from the stage, to play the Saturday rounds and come talk to us if his team didn’t get ten games.

Oh, and walking through the entire tournament by hand with NAQT statistician Scott Williams by passing cards from the back seat to the front seat on the drive from Minneapolis to Chicago. Just to prove the each pairing was correct. We now do this by computer.

What advice do you have to share with the players?

Today’s high school teams are so much better than any high school team of which I was a part (or against which I competed), that I don’t really feel qualified to give a lot of advice on gameplay.

It’s not really “advice,” but I hope that the players at today’s tournaments stay involved with the community as staff, writers, and coaches as they get older. Quiz bowl needs people with experience who are able to put time back into the game. Local tournaments need knowledgeable staff, every school needs a coach, programs might need an extra chaperone, and so on, in order for the game to develop.

How about advice for the coaches?

Don’t lose your team’s card!

Advice for staff?

Check the cards!

What part of your involvement with HSNCT do you wish the community knew/understand better?

I sometimes think that the community understands my role to be “The person to whom one should complain, about anything.” But, honestly, that’s not totally wrong: As president, my job is to be a spokesperson for NAQT and to ensure that our different departments are working in a coordinated way toward the same goals. Part of that is making sure I hear feedback, good and bad, from our customers, contractors, and tournament staff, and making the appropriate changes from there.

If you weren’t being the public face of NAQT during HSNCT, what would you be doing instead?

If I weren’t the tournament director, I really hope that I’d be out reading matches, getting a chance to see the great buzzes (and occasional mystifying buzz) first-hand. Resolving protests is important, but I really don’t enjoy having the outcome of a game depend on my ruling (or that of a committee), especially when there isn’t an ironclad case to be made for either side.

Any last thoughts?

There are a lot of changes at this year’s HSNCT, including, but not limited to…

LetterOne Sponsorship: NAQT is delighted that a company like LetterOne is taking an interest in quiz bowl; they went in search of academic competitions to find one with players, events, and a community that honored the same things they valued, and they came up with NAQT’s High School National Championship Tournament and Intercollegiate Championship Tournament. Being associated with them has opened doors to us, and we are looking forward to a long-term partnership that will bring more schools into the game (and more recognition for the schools that currently play).

Splitting the field in two: This one is pretty simple. We wanted to accommodate more teams, but we were having trouble finding venues with enough rooms and also with finding enough staff with a free weekend. The solution was to use rooms and staffers more heavily, which is tantamount to saying ”more byes.” In effect, we’ve redone the schedules so that every team has seven of its byes in a row; this makes for a significant block of time that can be used for sightseeing, practicing, or relaxation. As a (minor) side effect, it also allows us to accommodate teams that couldn’t arrive on-site until after noon on the tournament weekend (due to graduation or some other cause).

Advocates: NAQT wants quiz bowl to be activity that is open to all interested players; we don’t want anybody to feel unwelcome due to comments or behavior by staff or other attendees. The advocate program is intended to make it easy for players to report incidents or seek help without having to do so immediately and publicly. We’ve had incidents in the past where people tell us, "I had a great time, but…" and then go on to detail some small-but-not-negligible problem to which we think, “Wow. We could have easily fixed that.” I don’t know what sorts of things will be reported this year, but we want to do our best to address them when it still matters.

I’m really looking forward to the 20th HSNCT; doing this interview really reminded me of how things have changed (size, policies, location, format, magnitude of planning work) since the very first tournament. Year to year, each tournament really had fairly evolutionary changes, but, taken together, the event has undergone stunning changes in its first 20 years. I wonder what will be different for its 40th anniversary!