[larrymcg421]

Offseason

One of the difficulties we have is there is no specific feeder program for our school. It's a pure lottery school. So we don't really know who we're going to have coming in each new freshman class. We had a festival for our rising 9th graders and I did an outreach program to talk about our club.

When the school year started, we saw a massive surge of interest in our team, with 30 players showing up for tryouts. Some notable decided not to return - Lalit, Jeff, Akash, which still meant we'd be a very young team.

I decided not to cut and let everyone have a chance to participate if they were willing to pay dues. This meant we were left with an odd balance of 4 juniors, 20 sophomores, and 6 freshmen.

I still ran tryouts just to get a sense of where my team was at. Day 1 was a written test of common quiz bowl material and Day 2 they were placed in teams for a typical buzzer competition.

Of the new players, I noticed two strong freshmen and a sophomore named Krish, who scored higher than everyone on the written test. It was also clear which players had spent the summer studying and which hadn't.

I think there is a chance we could find less success in some ways this season, since our top players can no longer play JV and will now have to play as Juniors against Seniors.