About

International Academic Competitions – Executive Director, David Madden

IAC is the world’s largest organizer of quiz bowl tournaments, overseeing nearly 200 events that serve students in over 40 countries each academic year. At the high school level, IAC primarily organizes the National History Bowl for teams, and the National History Bee for individual students. IAC high school level tournaments always feature a Varsity Division (open to anyone in the History Bowl and 11th and 12th graders in the History Bee), and a Junior Varsity Division (open to all students, including middle and even elementary schoolers!) which is limited to 10th graders and younger.

IAC Varsity / JV tournaments feature both a History Bowl (which forms the bulk of the day), a History Bee, and lunchtime qualifying exams for the National Science Bee, National Political Science Bee, US History Bee, and National Geography Bee / US Geography Championships. Students who finish in the top 50% of any of these events at any IAC Regional Tournament qualify in those events for the IAC Varsity and JV National Championships which attracts approximately 1000 students to Arlington, Virginia the last weekend of April each year.

IAC Middle and Elementary School tournaments comprise primarily the Regional Finals tournaments for the National History Bee, National Geography Bee, and National Science Bee. IAC also organizes National History Bowl and all-subject National Academic Bowl tournaments for middle and elementary school students at the Regional level in the area and at the National Championship level as well.

Students who typically finish in the top 25% at Regionals or top 50% at the National Championships then qualify for IAC’s week-long world championship-level events in History and Geography, which are held in alternating summers. These include the International Geography Championships (next held in Vienna, Austria on July 13-20, 2024) and the International History Olympiad (next held in London in July 2025). These events feature numerous buzzer-based, exam-based, and alternate format competitions, as well as field trip opportunities, ceremonies, a program for attending family members and friends, and much more. IAC also is debuting the International Environmental Science Olympiad from December 27-31 in Puerto Rico as a family-focused event for students who finish in the top 50% at Regionals in the National Science Bee or who qualify through alternate tracks.

IAC was founded in the Tri-State area in 2010 by David Madden, a 19-day regular season champion in 2005 on the quiz show Jeopardy! and co-champion in 2019 of the Jeopardy! All-Star Games Tournament. David was a Class of 1999 graduate of Ridgewood High School, and was the captain of his school’s quiz bowl team in his junior and senior years. In his senior year, he led Ridgewood to a 44-match winning streak and a second-place finish at the national championships. He then went on to play quiz bowl on the team at Princeton, where he graduated in 2003. David was then in the process of becoming a history teacher in 2010, when he had the idea for a history-focused quiz bowl tournament. That first tournament, the Tri-State History Bee and Bowl, was held in May 2010 with 34 teams in attendance. The following week, David founded the National History Bee and Bowl, thus permanently becoming a teacher in a non-traditional sense. The “National History Bee and Bowl” officially became “International Academic Competitions” several years later after the addition of geography and science competitions to the IAC portfolio. IAC currently has 10 full time employees, numerous part-time staffers, and hundreds of adjunct question writers, tournament directors, question readers, tech and design staff, and other helpers.

Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance – President, Joe Feldman

Joe Feldman is the founder and president of the Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance. He is an accomplished tournament director, having successfully directed more than twenty-five events both in-person and online, including co-directing an event with 120 teams competing. He played Quizbowl at Smithtown West from 2012 to 2016, consistently leading the team in scoring, and played for Suffolk Community College in 2021 and 2022, leading the team to a fourth-place national finish at the Community College Championship Tournament. Joe works for the Suffolk County Board of Elections by day and builds computers, woodworks, fixes his new home, and sings in his spare time. He lives in Smithtown, New York.

​The Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance, or the LIQBA (sometimes jokingly pronounced LICK-bah), is the largest tournament director in the Northeast. Founded in 2019 as a response to the folding of the last Quizbowl tournament in Suffolk County, New York, the LIQBA created the Island Cup to recognize the best team on Long Island each year. Each leg of the Island Cup corresponds to tournaments once held in Suffolk County: the October tournament replaced the defunct Smithtown West Invitational Season Starter, the February tournament replaced the Kings Park Academic Quiz Tournament, and the May tournament replaced a long-defunct yearly tournament at Half Hollow Hills West. After the success of the first two tournaments, the Coronavirus pandemic hit, and the LIQBA took the then-novel step of moving the tournaments online to Discord. The online tournaments proved extremely popular and established the LIQBA as one of the largest organizations in Quizbowl. It soon reorganized into the American Quizbowl League, which ran monthly online tournaments in the 2020-21 season, seeing Quizbowl through the pandemic. The LIQBA was spun off in May 2021, and, after the Long Island Season Finale comeback tournament, the Island Cup led the return to in-person play. From there, the LIQBA branched out throughout the Northeast, and held seven events throughout the 2022-23 season all throughout the New York Tri-State and beyond, including the new Northeast Regional Championships over two days in May 2023. The LIQBA is expanding again this season, hosting fourteen tournaments throughout the Northeast and Michigan, as well as the second Northeast Regional Championships in May 2024.