There have been some late changes in the TOC bids, and as usual, WTF is full of students in the know about why, and full of reasons why it should be something else, why this tournament is wonderful and that one sucks, etc. (It is not WTF’s fault, of course, that they are the home of the all-knowing commentator; they’re simply the default site for all-knowing commentatoring.) I am reminded of the stint I put in on the LD advisory committee. Every year there was an announcement of bids, and every year the shadow advisory committee (i.e., everyone who wasn’t there) immediately pinned down what had happened and why. Remarkably, they got it right every time.
Yeah. Sure.
First of all, JWP does whatever he wants to do. He fully understands the meaning of the word advisory, and acts accordingly. So while often certain points are made and seemingly agreed to in the session, JWP may act differently than one might have expected. He has studied the advice and acted on it. He hasn’t necessarily accepted the advice, but acceptance of advice does not automatically follow from the act of listening to the advice. And often the advice had two sides; he’s picked one. So it goes. His tournament, his rules. And until you cut open Dr. P’s brain and find the piece that controls bid allotment and put it under the microscope for the real skinny, you’re sort of stuck with accepting what he does as what he does, because he feels no need to explain it, at least to the teeming multitudes. That’s also his call, and he’s entitled to it. If you don’t like the way he does things, don’t put yourself on the road to his tournament. He’ll survive, and so will you. Anyone who runs a tournament has things they do for their own reasons; if you don’t like them, don’t go. There are plenty of other tournaments out there. There’s even plenty of other culminating tournaments out there; CatNats and NatNats are wildly different from each other, and different again from TOC. At least one of them ought to suit your beliefs; go win that one.
That said, the world of high school debate is not a non-political universe. Plenty of people put a lot on the line with their commitment to forensics. For many coaches, it’s their career, and they are ambitious and competitive. Nothing wrong with that. For some coaches, it’s a sideline. Nothing wrong with that either. And there’s plenty of other shades of coacheana. All of these people are trying to figure out things like how to run the most profitable/prestigious tournament (often the two are closely related), which tournaments to go to on their limited funds, how to screw the s.o.b. who has been on their case for 20 years now (too much of that, unfortunately, but debate does occur in the real world, and a lot of people have histories), how to get a raise in salary (by what? more NFL points, more trophies, more members of the team?). Some of these people, with their conflicting issues, narrowly (or maliciously) see the world in the spotlight of their personal agenda. They act accordingly. And maybe they shouldn’t. But they do. Inequities occasionally arise as a result, sometimes over a long term. That’s unfortunate. But it happens.
Debaters also have axes to grind, usually of the nature of, how come there aren’t more bids available that I can get to, and why does X have so many bids, which is unfair to me. Measuring the quality of a tournament, from year to year, is hardly a precise science, but the committee tries. The committee also tries to insure good geographical distribution. Presumably so does JWP, when he acts on the committee’s advice. The biggest problem is, you can’t make statues when you don’t have any clay. High school debate does not consist of a vast number of potentially bid-worthy tournaments. In fact, once you get past the list of tournaments that have bids already, there is only a handful of reliable/predictable tournaments that don’t. I think the best example of this is California, which has plenty of debaters but not plenty of bid tournaments. However, there really isn’t some vast number of suitable non-bid tournaments being ignored. At best there’s one or two schools people argue about year in and year out, maybe over a handful of bids, but that’s about it. And there’s not much you can do about that. I run a tournament every year, and I know how hard it is, and I would be the last person in the world to be surprised that others won’t and can’t do it. To me it’s an annual miracle, and part of what keeps it going is simply its long-term momentum. How long did it take Bump to get long-term momentum? Beats me. It was already there when I got there. It took me a couple of years to get the hang of running the thing, and we lost policy bids and kept our LD bids (and now have PF bids). Why? Ask JW.
Anyhow, mostly I’m just amused by all this. A good tournament is defined as a tournament that benefits the people who attend it. Honestly, the number of people who are reasonably pointed to TOCs in a given year is a lot less than the number of people who are poised for their state championships, or surviving their novice years, or making new friends, or just getting out of the house once in a while. It is merely one small piece of the vast forensic puzzle, and for most people, a non-essential one. Nonetheless, it wields a vast amount of both perceived and real power, to some extent because other hubs, especially NFL, have created a vacuum of authority that has allowed this to happen (although I sense recently that NFL is trying to do something about this). That same vacuum has allowed WTF to become the participants’ voice of LD in the country, for better or worse (although the minds behind WTF are responsible and capable, and we’re not in bad hands with them, even though NFL should be doing most of what WTF does; for that matter, NFL should be doing most of what I’m doing).
There’s no moral to this story; it’s just a random comment on a regular event, the trouncing of the TOC bids. Happens every year. I probably comment on it every year. If it wasn’t for consistency, we wouldn’t have no stency at all…
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