To the Bible Quizzing Family,
Wow! I was totally encouraged by the quizzing last weekend. It is so good to see new quizzers, and to see quizzers from last year “stepping it up a notch”. I appreciate your enthusiasm and the good spirits of comradery and sportsmanship that were evident throughout the day.
I’d like to especially encourage the new quizzers and coaches to hang in there. The October quiz was probably quite a learning experience for you, and now you probably have a much better idea of what you need to do to prepare for a quiz. Feel free to pursue some of the resources listed in the packet you picked up at the Kickoff event, especially those available from the World Bible Quiz Association, and from acmequiz.com. Also feel free to find someone who is more experienced and ask for advice. Maybe you can arrange to practice with a more experienced team or have scrimmage quizzes with them, just to help you get a better feel for how this all works.
It was a perfect night for a campfire, and there were a tremendous number of you who came. Martha and I certainly enjoyed having you all here. It is good to be able to hang around together after the quizzing is over. In future months when there is nothing special planned, I’d encourage you to take some other quizzing folks and find a place to have supper together, just to keep building the connections between us.
I want to encourage you to visit the Bible Quizzing website at yfcquizzing.novinger.net as a primary source of information about the quizzing program. (In case your weren’t aware, the standings from the October quiz have been posted there for a few days – click in the Results column in the Quizzing Schedule on the home page). Please direct any suggestions for how to make the site more useful, to Jim Benson or myself.
If you have not yet signed your team up for the Heartland Tournament (it takes the place of our normal November quiz), please do so as soon as possible. This tournament will be Friday evening and most of the day on Saturday, November 17-18, at Grace Evangelical Free Church in Stewartville. We will be quizzing on Acts chapters 1-8 in the A/B League, and chapters 1-4 in the Little League. There is no regstration fee for the tournament. Those of you from out of town are encouraged to stay either at the church, or in housing provided by local quizzing families. Please see the website for all the latest information (click on the more info... link in the “In the News” box on the home page). You can print the registration and housing request forms from there. Note that if for some reason your team is unable to quiz Friday night, we will do our best to accommodate you, and schedule your quizzes only for Saturday. Obviously that can only be done for a very few teams, so please let John, Paul, or Annette Raygor know right away if you need to be accommodated that way.
If you live in the Rochester area, please consider opening your home to out-of-town quizzers, coaches, and other adults. If you have extra beds, that’s fine, but it is also fine if you’ve just got floor-space for sleeping. If you are willing to house people for the tournament, and have not already provided that information to the Raygors, please get that form from the website and send it to them.
At the October quiz we gave you Blue Sheet questions and answers for the new November material, but they may not be all that useful for the tournament. Certainly you may want to use them as a study aid, but since the tournament will not be using “Rochester questions”, there is no guarantee that any of those questions will appear in the quiz. The list of memory verses on the Blue Sheet comes from the WBQA Primarily Verse List, so they are perhaps likely verses which may be asked as Finish/Quote questions at the tournament, but so are any other verses which appear in the WBQA Primary Verse List. At the Tournament, we will give you the Blue Sheets for our December quiz, and by then you’ll be able to get them from the website as well.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. And, thank you for your support of Bible Quizzing.
Karl Kirkman
Bible Quizzing Director