I'm Tom Michael, and I have participated in quiz bowl, especially College Bowl, as a player, volunteer, coach, employee, or consultant since the 1981-82 academic year. I was employed by the College Bowl Company and worked on College Bowl, Honda Campus All-Star Challenge, and Celtel and Zain Africa Challenges from June, 2006 through November, 2011. Currently, I occasionally serve as a paid consultant to Honda Campus All-Star Challenge and Richard Reid Productions. I also run the College Bowl Valhalla Facebook group, dedicated to exploring and preserving the early history of quiz bowl. I'm here to contribute information that will improve the quality of the College Bowl, HCASC, Africa Challenge and related quiz bowl pages, and also to contribute to unrelated pages that interest me.
My M.Ed. is in Counseling & Development, and in my clinical career I specialize in working with the seriously mentally ill. I have an extremely wide variety of interests, which has helped with other work I have done as a proof reader and fact-checker.
I have reviewed Wikipedia's policies and guidelines and will abide by them. Due to conflict of interest rules, my edits will be restricted to talk pages for quiz-bowl related matters, and I will not engage in editing directly any quiz bowl-related article except when allowed by the COI policy. Instead, I will volunteer information on the talk pages, and ask for Wikipedians' help. I am especially interested in working with a Wikipedia editor to improve the College Bowl, HCASC, and Africa Challenge page by adding numerous requested citations and helping identify unsourceable or incorrect statements. I can also work with College Bowl Company and my extensive personal collection to provide some photos for release into the public domain for illustration, and can assist with providing sources and information for the requested expansion of the section on G.E. College Bowl.
If you want to contact me about anything, and especially if you're an editor who would like to work with me to improve these pages, please leave a note on my talk page, or email me at tfm@africachallenge.com.