How matches and the season work.
Quick Recall every Thursday from September through December. NAQT pyramidal play in January, with the top finishers qualifying for the national championship.
Regular season
Quick Recall
Quick Recall is a buzzer-driven academic competition; it is the format Kentucky's Governor's Cup has used for decades. Two teams of four. Two halves of 40 tossups each. Packets contain 100 items total; 80 are played across the two halves and 20 are held in reserve as tiebreakers.
A tossup is open to either team. Whichever player buzzes in first answers individually; if correct, their team gets a bonus question. If the team misses the bonus, it bounces to the other side. There is no penalty for early buzzes.
Matches run about an hour. Each Thursday, all matches happen simultaneously across multiple Maclay classrooms, not in the gym. JV matches begin at 6:00 PM; Varsity matches begin at 7:15 PM. Most teams are home and back by 9:00.
Round-robin scales with the cohort. With all 15 schools committed, every school plays every other school once across the 13 Thursdays. With a smaller founding cohort of 7 or 8 schools, the season runs as a double round-robin: every school plays every other school twice and the schedule still fills the same 13 weeks.
January championship
NAQT-sanctioned tournament
After three Thursdays of Quick Recall playoffs in early January, the top eight teams meet for a Saturday NAQT-sanctioned tournament. NAQT uses pyramidal questions: a clue starts hard and grows easier through the read. Powers reward early correct buzzes; negs penalize incorrect early buzzes. Bonuses come in three parts, no bounce-back.
The top 15 percent of the field auto-qualifies for the High School National Championship Tournament at Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta. In a 15-school field, that is 3 teams. Seeds are set by regular-season Quick Recall standings.
Roster and eligibility
Each school fields two teams: JV and Varsity. Four players are active per match; alternates are allowed. A minimum of eight students must be rostered.
Each school sets its own academic-eligibility standards using the school's or district's published requirements, whichever is stricter. Until the League adds a middle-school division (a planned Year 2 or 3 expansion), middle-school students enrolled at a member or feeder school may be rostered on JV or Varsity at the school's discretion.
JV-to-Varsity sub rule: a JV player may sub up but cannot also play that night's JV match. A JV player who appears in four or more Varsity matches in a season is reclassified as Varsity for the remainder.
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