Chad and Shelly Kubicek are one of over twenty couples who work at NAQT tournaments together. Chad is NAQT’s CFO, and Shelly often works at the Information Desk. They live in Shawnee, Kansas with their son, Matthew.

How did you get involved with quiz bowl?

Chad: I began playing my freshman year at Iowa State. I met Scott McKuen at the Honors Cottage up on the hill, and he told me about the College Bowl intramural tournament. His team only had three players, and they needed a fourth. I showed up, and it turns out I was pretty good at it! Scott was also part of a team that was going to represent Iowa State at a tournament in Minnesota a few weeks later; that team already included [now-NAQT president] Robert Hentzel and [now-longtime NAQT nationals staff member] Karl Schmidt, but, once again, they needed a fourth. Having four math majors on one team is not ideal, but we went 8-8 as the Iowa State B team (despite my teammates seemingly trying to set the record for the most negs in the first game), and I was completely hooked.

Shelly: I did not play in high school or college. I didn’t even know about quiz bowl until I met Chad!

How did you meet?

Chad: We met online. It was the old Yahoo personals.

Shelly: Anyway, I just got into it from there, volunteering, learning to scorekeep, but not reading questions, because I can’t pronounce half the questions! Now that we have Matthew, I’m at the Information Desk.

Chad: So the dumbest thing is, for YEARS, I wouldn’t take Shelly to tournaments. And all of a sudden it hit me: wait, spouses are great for this!

How did you get involved with NAQT?

Chad: I played in the first ICT [Intercollegiate Championship Tournament]. (We had an ICT for 2 years before we had our first HSNCT.) The first Sectionals was even at Iowa State.

For our audience, when was the first ICT?

Chad: It was in 1997, Rob’s and my senior year. After that, Rob quickly became involved with NAQT because the founders decided they wanted to pursue him; he soon became president. He asked me if I wanted to write some questions, and I said yes. Over time, I became more and more involved. Now I’m the CFO.

Shelly’s first HSNCT was in 2004 in Houston, across from the Texans’ Stadium.

You guys get to work together a lot as staff. How does that make your experience different than if it were just Chad?

Shelly: I keep him well hydrated and well fed.

Chad: It’s a lot of fun to have my wife around. We get to joke around between rounds and during halftimes. I wish she’d scorekeep [for me] more, but ever since we had Matthew (whose first HSNCT was in 2010, when he was less than three months old) she’s been at the Information Desk. Also, since her birthday, our anniversary, and SSNCT all fall at about the same time in the spring, we get to celebrate all of those with the quiz bowl community.

Shelly: All the holidays get thrown in [to nationals season] with my birthday, our anniversary, and now, Mother’s Day [on MSNCT weekend].

Did you do anything special this year?

Shelly: I got a ring!

Chad: For our 15th anniversary.

Both of you do a lot of tasks that are very public facing. Do you have any favorite stories from that?

Shelly: People are just very pleasant when they visit the info desk, and it’s nice to just help them understand as much as they can about the tournament.

Do you have any favorite team T-shirts you’ve seen over the years?

Chad: I really liked “Keep Calm and Say ‘Smith’.”

What advice do you have for players at HSNCT?

Chad: Enjoy it. Playing quiz bowl is one of the funnest things. Enjoy every moment that you can. I only get to play once a year now, at ACRONYM [a pop culture tournament often paired with NAQT national championships], and until I started playing ACRONYM I had forgotten how fun it is. Enjoy it. Enjoy your teammates. My teammates have become my lifelong friends.

Shelly: Enjoy it. Encourage your teammates. It’s okay if you’re nervous or whatever, just have fun with it.

How about advice for coaches?

Shelly: Encourage your students. Don’t yell at them. Be supportive. Just help them as much as you can.

Any advice for staff?

Shelly: Be friendly. Don’t be rude. If you’ve heard the same question from multiple people, still answer it with a smile.

Chad: For moderators, your goal is not to go into a room, read as fast as you can, and then leave. Interact with the teams. Be friendly with the teams. Ask them where they’re from. Relate to them on a human level. We’re all people here—

Some are convinced R. [Hentzel] is a robot—

Chad: Some are, but in the sense of…they look up to you, so be friendly and get to know them.

Anything you’d like to say to the community at large, or your colleagues at NAQT?

Chad: My colleagues are fantastic. It’s a wonderful job, mostly because of the people I get to work with. I enjoy all of my fellow members and colleagues. We all have a common goal. One of the things I love most about NAQT is that we’re all former players, so we’re trying to put on a tournament that we all would have wanted to play in our days.

Chad: At the first HSNCT, a different group was the main story in national championships, so we wanted to do things better from the players’ perspective. What do players want? For one thing, they want more games. The other company offered six guaranteed games; we offered ten. We really put that into all the decisions that we made: “Does this make a better experience for the players?” And we really try to focus on that.

Shelly: It’s great to see people you only see once a year; it’s great to mingle. I feel like every time we try to make things better, things get bigger, so there’s more information that people need to know. I think the communication is pretty good, and NAQT staff help volunteers develop into better members of the overall community.

What keeps you coming back besides Chad?

Shelly: I like scorekeeping because I like seeing how smart the kids are. I like to see that, and at the Information Desk, it’s still nice to talk to players who come up to ask questions, and tell them “good job” and “good luck”; you can see how it makes a difference in their day.

Chad: If I could add one thing about the public-facing side: A lot of my job is sending out an ungodly number of emails. I’m a little afraid to one day count it all up. At some point it becomes easy to see people as electrons on some far distant computer. It’s really good, that a few times a year, I get to see everybody and just remember that these are real people who are supporting NAQT and giving me the ability to support my family doing something I love. It’s really good to welcome them and know that we’re putting on an event that people want to be a part of. It’s something they commit themselves to every year—there are teams who’ve come for well over a dozen years, and Detroit Catholic Central has literally come to every HSNCT and they have made the playoffs every year. It’s good to remember that these people are committed to our product and doing their best for students.

Shelly: It should also be noted that Chad knows them all by name. All 352 of them. [Editor’s note: He reviews them with flashcards before each national championship!]

Chad: I really like doing that. It’s one of the reasons I like being the first person in the check-in line. We literally give them a [card] number at this tournament. They’re literally a number. I want to make sure everyone feels we know you, we’re glad you’re here, and we thank you for coming. You’re not just a number to us. You are special to us. I really feel that way about each of our teams.

Chad: The network effect is the idea is that each person who gets added to a [social] network makes the whole network more valuable. I really feel like each team adds to the experience of the HSNCT. Everyone who’s anyone in the quiz bowl world is here. The HSNCT is the biggest tournament by far—you can’t make a whole lake without every individual drop of water.