Host Policies
Introduction
The following policies apply to tournaments run on NAQT questions that involve teams or players from more than one school. Except as noted, they apply to all such tournaments, regardless of their level or nature, unless NAQT has explicitly waived or modified them for a specific tournament or host. Some tournaments (such as collegiate Sectional Championship Tournaments and Community College Sectional Championship Tournaments) are subject to additional policies not covered on this page.
NAQT’s Responsibilities
NAQT will respond promptly to inquiries from tournament hosts (and prospective hosts), coaches, players, and others to help them make informed choices about events they run and attend.
In most cases, NAQT will make questions available to attendees through their Study Library (if set up) after a tournament’s results have been received and processed.
When assigning question sets to tournaments, NAQT will consider geography, local circuit conditions, tournaments’ audiences, whether tournaments take place in person or online, and other factors with the goals of ensuring that quiz bowl is widely available to interested programs and that tournament hosts have reasonable opportunities to draw the types of fields they seek.
Hosts’ Responsibilities
Hosts must give NAQT accurate information about the intended audience of the event, the date(s), and any other information necessary to ensure that suitable questions can be assigned and delivered to the event. This includes prompt notification of any changes. Due to internal question-production deadlines and other factors, NAQT cannot always accommodate date changes.
Hosts must pay for their questions according to the listed prices (unless otherwise agreed in advance).
Hosts must uphold NAQT’s policy on question security. Most notably, this entails telling attendees and prospective attendees what question set(s) will be used.
Hosts must remind attendees not to share question content on the Internet in any form, no matter how private they think the communication may be. This includes the fact that matches may not be recorded or streamed.
Hosts must follow NAQT’s licensing policy. Most notably, this means that hosts may keep a printed copy of the question set, and may give a printed copy of the question set(s) to each school in attendance, but may not distribute the set in any other form, nor to anyone else at any time. Staff may not retain copies of the question set(s) after the end of the event (unless they are also affiliated with the host or an attendee, in which case they may only retain a printed copy). However, due to NAQT granting Study Library access, distributing printed copies is usually unnecessary.
(New for 2023–2024) Hosts must not publicly post (or otherwise make widely available) scoresheets, category statistics, “advanced” statistics, or other results beyond what NAQT posts on its website without permission in advance from NAQT. Such data may be shared with coaches and players of teams in attendance provided that those people agree not to distribute them further.
Within two weeks of the end of the event, hosts must tell NAQT what schools attended and how many teams attended. If any pseudonyms were used, identification of the actual schools is still required. NAQT strongly prefers to get more complete results (including team contact information) and incentivizes doing so by charging an extra fee for failing to provide this information, but identifying the schools and number of teams in attendance is an absolute requirement for question security and proper billing. Events in championship series organized by statewide athletic or activities associations are exempt from this rule because NAQT will work with the associations to obtain the necessary information; events that are not for schools (such as summer opens) are exempt from the school portion of this rule because it would not make sense for such events.
Hosts need to recruit their own staff (moderators, scorekeepers, statisticians, etc.). Hosts are permitted to require that teams provide staff, or incentivize them to do so; however, hosts may not require or incentivize any specific person to work at a tournament, except that coaches may require their own players to do so.
The preceding list is not intended to include tasks like “find teams and staff” without which a tournament simply could not occur. Rather, it primarily covers aspects of a host’s relationship with NAQT.
NAQT may waive or modify these requirements at its discretion.
Recommendations to Hosts
NAQT strongly encourages, but does not require, hosts to do the following:
- Inform prospective attendees what other nearby events (if any) will use the same or overlapping question sets, to help them maintain question security.
- Use NAQT’s registration system. This provides a number of tools to make hosts’ lives easier and also helps us maintain question security.
- Tell attendees about the national championship(s) for which the tournament is a qualifier (if any).
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Inform NAQT of any players who competed in their event but who are ineligible, or whose eligibility status is in doubt, under the relevant set of NAQT eligibility rules:
- For middle school tournaments, the Middle School Eligibility Rules
- For high school tournaments, the High School Eligibility Rules
- For community college tournaments, the Community College Eligibility Rules
- For four-year college tournaments, the Collegiate Eligibility Rules
- Report results to NAQT promptly after the event. This enables NAQT to invite top teams to its national championships, and we charge an extra fee for failing to do this.
- Provide NAQT with contact information for each school in attendance (if we don’t already have it). This is considered part of reporting reuslts, so there is a fee for failing to do this.
- Report any errata in the questions to NAQT.
- Inform NAQT of any cases of cheating or other gross ethical violations, or well-founded suspicions thereof.
- Inform NAQT of any other unusual situations.
- Tell NAQT about any high-quality staff who might be interested in working at NAQT’s national championships.