Saturday, September 24, 2005

Department of Amplification

My first question is why anyone other than an HHHS person is reading this blog. I mean, don't you people have bio homework or something more useful to do? I can understand O'C, because he's in it more than I am, or the graduates, because I may harangue any one of them at any time without warning. But random people elsewhere? You might bring me to believe that I should blog more responsibly.

That'll be the day.

Anyhow, some freebooter passed along my comments about Yale to the Yalefolk, and I guess now Yale is reading the blog too. (Well, maybe not the football team and the law school; I don't want to inflate my importance too much, after all.) They took umbrage at my cheap shot about parli bar bills, and it was a cheap shot, but I have to admit that Cheap Shots was going to be the original name of this blog until I discovered that all my fellow Wild Turkey drinking old coaching sots who sit around moaning about the good old days might think that the drinks were on me, and I wouldn't want that, so I went to Plan B. Meanwhile, I thought that a slight elaboration might be in order about my feelings about college tournaments, or more to the point, Yale in particular.

First of all, Yale has, in my opinion, been consistently the best of the Ivy Tournaments over the last decade. I've had issues at times, but everybody always has issues with everything in this activity, and realistically, they ran efficiently with a solid tab room and had the best attitude and were the most fun. They drew a good field, and their own judges, even those not of the former-LD persuasion, were in the main reasonable adjudicators. I have supported their incremental increases in TOC bids when they have arisen.

That said, my main objection to their new increased size is simply that it's too clanken big. Its very size threatens its viability. I do, after all, sit in tab rooms almost every week and by now I have seen just about everything, so I know what the problems are that are endemic to the activity that are out of the control of the tournament directors. Those problems will be only exacerbated by increasing the opportunities for those problems to arise. I don't care if my team wins or loses—as you well know—but I do care that their bubble-round judges are awake, their rooms are unlocked, their schedules are adhered to, they have breathable oxygen in the staging area, they can find a bathroom that doesn't look like Katrina just came through. But if one is interested in succeeding at the tournament, let's face it: they are breaking only about 15% if they hit their proposed figures. This is pretty small. When I compare it to the other tournaments I know, it's about half as many as the norm. So even if they do manage to successfully control the physical plant, no matter how you slice it, we're paying $55 per head (plus hotels and food) for one of the toughest breaks in the country.

I want them to succeed. As I say, they have been my favorite Ivy tournament. I hope they can control all those tough variables resulting from the increased numbers. Do I think their hearts are in the right place? Yeah, I do, notwithstanding my brief against colleges in general in this activity, which is another thing altogether. So I trust this will set the record straight, as least as far as I feel personally. I really don't write this blog to make people feel bad, so I'm sorry about that; it's meant as a parochial tool to communicate with my own team and a few others on mostly an entertainment level, but nonetheless as a real diary of coaching. I do air my opinions on controversial issues. I encourage people who disagree to post comments explaining their disagreements. As you probably know, I really don't follow any other discussion area (I don't closely read VBD, for instance; I only check it to see if there's new tournament announcements or some reason to poke fun at O'C). All I know is what I see for myself. If you want to engage, feel free to do so.

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