20for20: Dwight Kidder

Dwight Kidder

What if I told you nobody outside this room would hear you win the game? That there wouldn’t be consolation matches? That there was nowhere to play next year? That you weren’t familiar with the card system? Dwight Kidder has been to every HSNCT and tried to help make all the little things work better. Dwight is an engineering software tester and member of NAQT. He served as NAQT’s Executive Director for 15 years and has advised collegiate teams for over 20 years. His first book, The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, is designed as a first textbook for quizbowl players and coaches.

How did you get involved with quiz bowl?
In 1990, my high school, Chartiers-Houston, was selected to be part of a league in Washington County, Pennsylvania. It was a project of the gifted programs of the schools, and I was a senior who was known to know a lot of stuff.
The first match we had was a scrimmage where the scores didn’t count. They wanted to work out things at the auditorium, make sure everything would work for real matches. So we sat and watched a team play and pretty much smoke their opponents. And I sat and watched them, and told my teammates “they’re going to be tough.” We then went up and our opponent came and fought us tough early, but I just started rolling in the second half. The first official match pitted us against each other, and my team rolled through them something like 51–10, leaving me baffled as to how we could have done so well against them. I found out later, that team in their scrimmage match had been practicing on the questions earlier in the week (because it was a scrimmage, question security apparently didn’t matter). We had not. So everyone in the league assumed we had seen the questions as well. It took almost half the year for people to believe [we had not].
How did NAQT come to be?
The germ was a meeting at Penn Bowl in January 1996. Several people gathered in a hotel room to figure out some recourse to issues of fairness. College Bowl was too expensive for many teams to run without seeking funding from their schools. There were concerns of teams tanking games, and there were questions of how much bigger the development of the circuit could become, how we could include more people in it, and how this could be managed. ACF wasn’t really in a position to organize as a national format, as they had folded and re-formed once, and would do so again a couple years later. I wasn’t present at that meeting, but the people there overlapped with the core founders and first writers of NAQT.
David Frazee took the reins of the “committee of correspondence” that emerged from that meeting. He brought together people who could help organize events and could write large amounts of questions. Over the next six months, he recruited people who could build the company from the ground up.
Who were the members?
David Frazee organized the first group of twelve. Doug Bone was his teammate at Stanford, who wrote the question-writing guidelines that were our initial rules to writers. From the University of Michigan, where Frazee got his law degree, he brought in Kevin Olmstead, who had coached the team during his time there. Patrick and Jennie Matthews were the organizing force behind Penn Bowl, which was the largest college tournament at the time. Jim Dendy was the coach of Georgia Tech, at the time one of the most dominant programs in the country, and nearly unbeatable at ACF. He was one of the original guiding forces, but went to Europe shortly before the founding, and did not participate further. From there, he secured some of the best writers and players from around the country who were either out of school or leaving. Tom Waters was an incredible solo player in the South, and wrote most of our first years of high school sets singlehandedly. David Dixon founded the Berkeley team, and from his position in Delft helped edited and helped bridge a connection with Britain’s University Quiz Bowl teams. Eric Bell was brought in for his writing and his focus on high school competition. Julie Stahlhut, Peter Freeman, and I were selected as prolific writers with a particular stylistic voice, good ambassadors of the game, and for an unwavering view that we could make this a good thing for more people.
I was also valuable at that point because I could write while I looked for a job. The local job market for engineers flooded that summer when Westinghouse decided to reorganize, and thousands of entry-level engineering jobs were eliminated. I wrote applications in the morning, and wrote questions the rest of the day.
What was the target audience at the time?
Initially we focused on college quiz bowl. At that time collegiate quiz bowl was undergoing a schism. Teams primarily in the South were splitting away from College Bowl and migrating to ACF. But the biggest liberating force of that era was that the internet was just starting to be used at many colleges, and that reduced most of the barriers which held back quiz bowl. That was spurring a major growth in independent quiz bowl events. From 1990 to 1996, the situation changed from a team able to maybe go to three to four events a year, if they knew about them, to the point where a team could go to a tournament almost every weekend from October to April. That flowering of the circuit is where we began.
What were the “early days” of NAQT like?
We wanted to spend part of our first year researching all the different forms of quiz bowl across America. Where college was becoming a networked circuit, each state, and each region within was still in the process of finding out about each other. While there were national competitions, we didn’t have connections with all the high school teams. That would take time for coaches and leagues to migrate to email and the web. We knew that being the conduit between the two separate circuits, high school and college, were going to be the key to our growth.
What do you wish you did differently?
I probably could have been pushier. The league I started out in only converted to playing NAQT questions two years ago. The league is full of what we now term Small Schools, and they could easily have benefited from the knowledge that competitions like the HSNCT and SSNCT existed for them. That’s true across the country: there are thousands of schools that could be playing, but got missed.
Do you still write questions for the HSNCT?
I write for everything we do. I’m not as prolific as I used to be, but I often take a book, and simply extract all the questions I can out of it, regardless of the difficulty. Some of it ends up going to the HSNCT, some of it goes into every set we do. I actually think I’m incapable of stopping writing entirely. At least once a day, I see or read something and make a mental note to turn that into questions.
Which topic(s) are your favorite?
I started out as a player with strengths in history, physical science (as it was at the time), current events and trash [pop culture]. That was a pretty unorthodox mix at the time. Since nobody wrote questions in what I studied in college (mechanical engineering), all the categories were the same sort of alien to me, so I broadened out into lit, myth, geography, art and music. That’s an understated benefit of quiz bowl: if you are willing to move out of your own comfort zone or your specializations, you can pick up a basic education in dozens of subjects.
What do you remember about the first HSNCT?
The primary memory I have of the first HSNCT was worrying about all the flights getting into Oklahoma City. There had been storms through the Midwest, and I had sent some people from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to fly from there to Oklahoma City. They were scheduled to land at 10 local time, and we waited at the airport until 1 am when finally that flight landed. We needed the readers, so we were sweating out the flight.
I then remember running the first consolation tournament: we had eight teams that wanted to stick around to watch the finals, and we played them off. I then spent ten years doing the consolation rounds at the HSNCT. I think that it’s a unique challenge, as you have teams that want to compete one more time, teams that want to get one more match in against a rival, and teams that want to challenge their coach. For several years, it had been building, ad hoc, and consolation became the second-largest high school event in the country after the HSNCT itself!
The last memory I have of it was flying out Monday morning, still exhausted, marveling over how we managed to get a tournament of 30 teams to run without any visible problems!
Who were your fiercest opponents when you played?
To give you an idea of scale, I only played maybe 15 matches in my high school career. Seven in our league, three in its playoffs, two, in an inter-league exhibition, and three to go to states, or so we thought. Turned out in that case the team we beat in the finals already had been given the state berth, because our qualifier was postponed due to snow.
In my year of playing in high school, it would have to be Joe Wright at Beth-Center. His team ran second in the regular season, and he managed to get me to play on tilt for the second half of the championship, and we lost. I was a junior in college before I was on a team that actually won a tournament. Joe went to Pitt, and ran into me at a Penn State tournament, and a terrifying battle commenced. We became friends over the course of those years, and when he left Pitt to go to grad school, I became the team’s de facto coach. He was the best man at my wedding.
In college, it would have to be Harvard. For three years, my Cornell team was 0–17 against all Harvard teams. Late in my senior year, we turned finally took out their C team in a tournament at Williams. My year of grad school, I was paired with Eric Tentarelli, who came from MIT, and was ten times as good a player as I was, and taught me how to be observant about everything in quiz bowl. Harvard was not a problem after that.
In 1998, what did you think the HSNCT was going to become?
I was convinced that all our efforts would eventually pay off. I didn’t know the scale, and I didn’t know the timeframe, but I knew the direction was right. I figured 64 teams would be stable for much longer. I was right about the ICT staying there, but dead wrong about the HSNCT.
What part of your involvement with the HSNCT do you wish the community understood better?
When you fill out the registration forms for the championships, and see us asking for a media contact person, you should make sure to fill that out. Two weeks before the tournament, and the night after the tournament, I send out information to those contacts. We want to make sure people at home see all the hard work you’re doing, and all that you’re achieving. I try and email those out right after the tournament, so sometimes that means typing up things as I wait for my flight home.
Is there anything else unique about your NAQT staffing experience?
I was part of the second effort to record matches. (We did record one room at a very early ICT, which I believe is lost, partly because we recorded it for an online service that no longer exists.) From 2004 to 2008, I recorded the matches in my room for the HSNCT, with a big mixing board and heavy microphones that were lugged first from Pittsburgh, and then from Minnesota. So on those old recordings on the NAQT website, it’s my voice you hear. For the Sunday sessions of a couple of those, you had a three-man booth of myself, working the audio, Kevin Olmstead, who had just won $2 million on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and NAQT member Ken Jennings.
How do those recordings reflect on the work you do for NAQT today?
I get vague recognition from coaches and players when they hear my voice. I think the recordings have been an excellent tool to demonstrate NAQT at its highest levels. They’ve also been a great way to get the tournaments visibility back home for the teams.
Where do you see national tournaments evolving next?
The bounds on growth for a tournament are still teams, costs (travel, lodging, tournament), time at event, questions, buildings, staff, buzzers, and clocks. Everything is currently a tradeoff between these pieces. The next evolutionary step is going to have to be technological, something that can increase one of these without a tradeoff.
Where do you see HSNCT going in another 5, 10, or 20 years?
Where I hope quiz bowl is going, and I think it’s getting there slowly, is a greater density of teams. There are very few places, even in areas we consider established or strongly competitive, where every school competes. That sort of density becomes a game-changer as it drops travel costs if you have a full schedule of events practically next door to you. (When we talked about various factors, something that would collapse travel costs like high density of teams would be a game changer.)
The perpetual HSNCT goal is at least one team from every state. That would be a mark we could celebrate. Clearly we’re also expanding into new countries, I think our record is three countries competing at one championship, but as we see growth in Asia, that’s hopefully going to fall soon. Of course when we get to that point reliably, we might have to pull the “N” out of the title.
What are some of your favorite memories from a game room during HSNCT?
There are three absolute memories from matches I’ve recorded:
  • I was standing behind the teams on the platform recording the 2005 HSNCT final match between Thomas Jefferson and Lakeside, which for years was our most downloaded recording. TJ was expected to roll through whole tournament, but Lakeside—our only invitee from Washington State that year—kept dominating team after team. In the finals, Lakeside leapt out to a fast lead, and TJ calls a time out. There is a moment after the timeout is called, where it’s a moment of absolute silence. The crowd is processing everything they thought they knew coming into that, and everything they heard about both teams, and they’re realizing they were wrong. It’s a tremendous moment.
  • During a game in 2006 or so, I was recording and a team actually got me to crack up during a match. A bonus part on Wiccan religious practices asked for the book that initiates are asked to transcribe into their own copy. Having no better idea of what to guess, they said “Wiccapedia.” I almost lost it completely, but I managed to call out “Incorrect, 20 on the bonus. Moderator time out” and stop the clock before just falling out of my chair laughing.
  • The early days of recording the Saturday matches were recorded in a converted hotel room, and so if you had a large entourage for your team, you had trouble finding seating, which was made even worse because the mixing board for recording was huge, and often wouldn’t fit. During this game, one team came in with about 15 people, and so we had people standing by the window, behind both teams, and in the entryway and closet. As I am reading the first half, I hear a strange noise toward the door, but I don’t make anything of it, as I’m fixated on the task at hand. This happens again, but I don’t make anything of it. We get to the half, and I look over, and see a member of the team’s entourage come out of the bathroom. He then asks the assembled team “Anybody want coffee? I made some.”
What advice do you have to share with the players?
If you’re new to the game, at the risk of self-promotion, buy my book, The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl. If you’re experienced, realize that when you leave wherever you are, the next people down the line will need to know what you know, so start teaching them what you know, and leave them a legacy. You may not realize it, but you’re already a coach.
With the coaches?
See above. Also, the vast majority of coaching occurs before your team ever picks up the buzzer. If you can give them knowledge of question material that’s good, if you can teach them how to write their own questions, so they internalize the knowledge that’s good, but if you can stoke the hunger to seek out that knowledge on their own, that’s where you’ll see real progress.
With the community at large?
Realize that what you think the community is now is maybe one-tenth of what it actually is, and maybe one percent of what it actually could be.
Any last thoughts?
I’m the one who takes the senior data from HSNCT and SSNCT, and merges it with other data into a list of where people are going to college. What I wish people understood is that for this to really flourish, and really build up new programs in college, it needs to be not just a championship thing. If we had data from every tournament starting when seniors decide where they’re going to college, we could have enough people to fill teams at dozens of new college programs every year. That would create new opportunities for high schools as those colleges became tournament hosts and competitive teams. But setting up everything takes time and effort. Please enter your information in your registration forms and on our website.

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