About Us
The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is a student organization at College Park devoted to competing in and hosting academic competitions. If you are not familiar with such competitions, imagine Jeopardy! with better questions, more players, and the ability to buzz in and interrupt Trebek in the middle of the question.
Though the team is willing to answer almost any kind of questions, from sports trivia to Trivial Pursuit, we specialize in a format called ACF -- Academic Competition Foundation. Started in 1990 by John Nam and Ramesh Kannappan of the MAQT and Carol Guthrie of Tennessee, ACF has become a standard for quiz bowl questions. Games consist of 20 "tossup" questions, answerable by either team. Upon answering a tossup correctly, the team that does so receives a 30-point multiple-part bonus question. The questions are academic and structured to give more difficult clues first and easy clues last, thus rewarding the team with the greater knowledge.
In addition, MAQT competes in NAQT, or National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC, which is a timed format containing features reminiscent of both ACF and CBI, and probably best known for its inclusion of power tossups. A recent surge in interest in trash tournaments has also led to the development of TRASH (Total Recall About Strange Happenings), to whose tournaments we have sent several teams in the past few years.
Many eons ago, the MAQT was affiliated with College Bowl, inc. CBI, or "The Company" as it is affectionately known, used to be the only game in town if you wanted to play in a national tournament against other good quiz bowl teams. But the exorbitant price of CBI, along with the low quality of their questions led the Maryland team to de-affiliate and ultimately to start ACF as a low-cost, high-quality alternative to the low-quality, high-cost College Bowl game.
In addition to CBI, NAQT and ACF, quiz teams at individual schools host "invitational" tournaments. The "invitational circuit" varies from an approximation to CBI to ACF, depending on the style and format the host team chooses. Maryland's own invitational ACF-style tournament, the Terrapin Invitational Tournament, is one of the oldest in the nation. In the fall of 2005, it will be held for the nineteenth straight year. Maryland also hosts the David Scott Hamilton Invitational Tournament, named for arguably the best player in Maryland history. This tournament for first and second year players was held for the seventh time in the spring of 2004.
So, you may be wondering, how good is Maryland at quiz bowl? In the thirteen times that the ACF National Championship Tournament has been held, Maryland has taken second four times and third twice. In 2003-04, the team won five tournaments, placed second in two, placed fourth at the NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, and finished the season ranked 10th in an independent poll. But enough chest-beating. If you want to join the team, we would love to have you. One of our goals is to give everyone who wants to play the opportunity to compete at tournaments, and we often send 3 or more teams to tournaments around the country. All levels of knowledge are welcome, and it does not matter if you are a freshman or a grad student. The team is good not because of astute recruiting, but because players get better by playing. If you join the team, you can become a good player regardless of where you start out.
To join, come to one of our practices, or contact Casey Retterer at crettere@umd.edu. For Fall 2006, we are holding practice on Mondays from 6:00-9:00 pm in Woods 1130 and on Thursdays from 6-9 pm, in room 0120 of Jimenez.
Important: Although we enjoy practicing with players from other schools during the summer, we request that players not affiliated with UMCP do not attend our practices during the school year. If you have questions about this policy, please talk to Casey Retterer.