Entering judge strikes is a mug’s game. (Or, entering mug strikes is a judge’s game. Whatever.) Last night I had an inbox filled with either people who magically registered for Bump oblivious to its being filled up (the magic arises from their looking at the invitation that clearly announces the fact, and acting as if I’m just making it up), and strikes for Big Jake. The former I diligently plopped into the data sheet in order of tardy arrival, but honestly, I’m not particularly sanguine about their chances. I may eke out some space at the grammar school for the novice gang that showed up late, if PF stays where it is, but that’s about it. So it goes. As for the strikes, I chugged and chugged and chugged. The thing is, if you want to strike as a school, one goes through the judge’s page, whereas if one wants to strike as a single team, one goes through the block page. Which shall it be? As a rule, the next email always wants it the other way around from the previous email. Sigh. Anyhow, I entered what I had, and I swept up the ones that arrived this morning in time for the deadline, and I’ll do them tonight. If I get the time, I’ll do any additional ones that arrive later. There was a deadline. Don’t blame me for having the Day Job.
The biggest issue about judge strikes, aside from our belief that both E and C TRPC don’t necessarily handle them well, is that, if you block a judge from a school, it actually blocks the judge against each individual team from that school. So if there’s a change, say a team drops and is replaced, since the whole school wasn’t blocked per se, the new team has not blocked the judge. It took me about 48 years to figure this out, but that doesn’t make it any easier to handle. It’s not like I remember who struck whom, and there’s no way of printing a struck sheet, so to speak. Sigh again. O’C allows 8 strikes. That’s too many. You should get to strike one person (the one everybody strikes, which makes you wonder why that person even bothers showing up, but then again, someone has to lay claim to the comfiest chair in the judges’ lounge), and that’s it.
To be honest, by the way, it’s not one person everybody strikes. There are a couple of standouts, though. I can’t imagine why on some of them. I guess people are reading the paradigms, or maybe this is a smaller community than I would have thought. I mean, I know who’s doing the striking, and I know who’s getting struck, and I say to myself, says I, why is that yabbo striking that yabbo? Some of them I get, while some make no sense whatsoever. I can understand a general swipe against parent judges, especially if you’re running something uniquely nonsensical and likely to appeal only to a select body of similar minds, but there’s some people on this list who would have to be excellent adjudicators who are summarily dismissed for absolutely no reason I can detect. What are you people thinking? I am always fondest of the lone soul in the hinterlands who goes out of the way to strike me, given that I’m clearly marked on the sheet as being in tab. I’m willing to accept that you don’t want me to judge you, but you don’t want me to judge you so badly that you waste a strike on me even when I’m not in the judge pool? That’s a serious block!
Unfortunately there is an obvious need to protect identities: I can’t say who has struck whom, so I can’t go into this in too much detail. But some of these strikes do tell stories. When I publish my book Coachean Confidential I’ll rip the lid off this activity and really go for it. Woo-hoo!
No comments:
Post a Comment