ACF is pleased to announce that the 2026 Carper Award winners are Alejandro López-Lago and Dan Goff!
Alejandro López-Lago received the award through the vote of the ACF membership. In a college career that began in 2007 at Claremont Colleges, where he led the team for several years, and later continued at the University of Washington, Alejandro has made immense contributions to the technological underpinnings of quizbowl. Back in the IRC days, he created the first automated question readers, and he also created the first score-tracking bots for IRC and Discord. He has served as the sysadmin for these forums for several years. And he was one of the very first people interested in advanced statkeeping tools for quizbowl, collaborating with yours truly on an abortive early effort at buzzpoint stats called “BEeS” and with fellow stats pioneer Ophir Lifshitz on the first packet parser. These efforts culminated with Alejandro’s development of MODAQ, the widely used online application for buzzpoint statistics and single-person moderating and scorekeeping. Over his entire career, Alejandro has dedicated his programming talents to help improve the game for everyone. We’re pleased to recognize him for his many years of contributions.
Starting a few years ago, ACF has empowered a committee of former Carper winners who are also ACF members to select a second winner each year.
This year, the committee recognizes Dan Goff. Dan’s college quizbowl career began in 2003 at the University of Maryland, where his highlights include playing the legendary “Alpha and Omega Bowl” mirror of Illinois Open and serving as a club officer. His next stop was J. Sargent Reynolds Community College, where he was also a club officer; although he was ineligible to play, the team won NAQT’s 2009 CCCT while he was there. Dan later served as a club officer for Virginia Tech, overlapping with his tenure as PACE’s VP of Technology, before grad school at South Carolina. During his career as a mid-Atlantic stalwart, Dan also filled one of quizbowl’s most important roles: for over a decade, he was the sysadmin of the hsquizbowl forums. (In a stroke of kismet, Alejandro was Dan’s successor in that role.) These forums are the backbone of quizbowl’s communication structure, and from circa 2008 to early 2020, Dan was the person who made sure it all worked, doing everything from routine maintenance to troubleshooting to overseeing the site’s move to a new server in 2018. We’re happy to recognize Dan for this important work.
Both Alejandro and Dan have made big contributions to the game but have largely remained behind the scenes. ACF is thrilled that both of them are now front and center to receive the Carper Award! Please join me in congratulating them!