So a tab room staff needs to know how to run the software. If you’re planning a tournament with a tab staff that is inexperienced, you should publish this in your invitation. In big letters. That way, when everything gets screwed up, no one will be surprised.
But a tab staff’s job is not managing the computers, any more than a musician’s job is playing scales. One has to be able to do it, but the music comes from something else.
In the varsity event, we have over 50 judges for the weekend, and what I do is ask the participants to rank them in advance either A, B or C. Then I guarantee that every round will have the right judge for that round. If it’s a clutch, bubble round, it’s an A. If it’s a panel, it’s a mix, and every panel is mixed equally. Curiously enough, when the rankings came in for Bump, there were maybe two that I would have disagreed with. JV commented likewise. In other words, if we had been ranking in a vacuum, it would have come out about the same. It is important that your tab people know the players. While I can walk into any policy tab room and run it so it sings, what I can’t do is know the right judges because I don’t know a single person in the pool. You can say, well, if someone else does the rankings, all you have to do is push the buttons, but even then, that’s not enough. But let’s backtrack a second.
To at least a minor degree, the idea of ranking judges is not without controversy. I have made my opinions well-known about things like mutual judge preference (negative), and the need to use lay judges (positive), but some problems remain with the latter. I demand that a school bring trained judges, but at least one school brought a couple of parents who didn’t know the first thing about a debate round. (Of course, culprit schools like this are well known by tournament directors, as they’re usually repeat offenders, so it’s not as if anyone is getting away with anything, and the reputations of these schools is abysmal, and most of us don’t want anything to do with them. This plays out mostly in the long run. You graduated from one of these schools? Don’t think I’ll ever hire you to judge for me. Meanwhile, don’t think that your school will ever get any special consideration from me for anything. You want a break of some sort? Play the game. Bring bad judges that bring down the level of the pool? You’re simply not upholding your part of the bargain.) The thing is, though, once they’re there, there isn’t much you can do about bad judges except dump them into down-three rounds. Anyhow, the point is that I believe that knowledge of the pool, and manipulation of the pool, is desirable. I firmly believe that a good LDer should be able to pick up just about any ballot, adapting to the judge, provided there’s an idea about what the judge is looking for, but I also believe that in a crucial round, an experienced adjudicator is preferable to a raw recruit. Lots of people come to a tournament like Bump to get a TOC bid. I run the tournament knowing this is the case. I run 6 prelim rounds only because it’s a TOC rule. I have drunk that Kool-Aid. Therefore, I need to carry through on it. At any point where the competition matters, you will have the best adjudication possible.
A good tab staff evaluates every pairing before running off the schematics. The round is organized by brackets, and we can make sure that wherever it matters, there’s an A judge. In order of priority, this is the down ones and the down twos, the undefeateds, and everybody else. The down ones, because you’re guaranteed to break if you’ve only lost one, and the down twos, because you’re guaranteed not to break if you’re down three; as a rule, there’s almost always enough As to go around for both the down ones and the down twos. As for the undefeateds, if you have a few more As, you’ll apply them here, because often these folks are in the running for speaker awards, although since you’re dropping the hi-low points, one ballot won’t matter. The program, by the way, often puts a 4-0 and 0-4 round with the same judge, mostly because you can’t really damage either of them, and there’s a presumption that these won’t be your top As. And everybody else is everybody else, and you get what you get (usually balanced so that people the tournament is paying to judge don’t sit in the lounge all weekend, followed by people who haven’t judged yet, followed by people you want to torture).
It’s harder for the tab staff in the break rounds, where a balanced panel is important. As advertised, we made sure that the strength and weakness was equally distributed. But the Bump staff took it the extra mile. Knowing pretty much all the judges, JV and La Coin were making sure that, to the extent possible, the panel was uniform. That is, you know that some judges are traditionalist, and some are digressive. Mixing them on a panel means that the debaters, if they’re truly adjusting to paradigms, would have to adjust to diametric opposites simultaneously. Not good. The computer does automatic pairings, and we start with that, but then you adjust. That is, you don’t say, oh, these guys need a conservative panel or a digressive panel: that’s cheating. What you say is, okay, the computer has put in a conservative first judge, so if we have to manipulate for balance of rankings, let’s keep the panel conservative. Or vice versa. If you’re a good debater, you adjust to your judge, but adaptation has to make sense. From the tab point of view, you create panels that make sense, with balanced talent, that any debater would say, that’s a good panel, regardless of whether that panel is of that debater’s particular stylistic persuasion. In other words, a round shouldn’t be a crapshoot, especially a break round. Good tabbing insures that it isn’t. At most tournaments, including Bump, the only time the Tournament Director gets involved in tabbing is taking a look at the break round panels. Since the TD is the one ultimately held accountable, tab feels that the TD should approve what happens. Certainly O’C went over all my panels for Big Jake, as I went over all the panels at Bump. That way, if people like or dislike how the panels were handled, the Tournament Director can take the responsibility. This is as it should be.
Down at the grammar school, the issues Mr. Bacon faced were quite different. Needless to say, there’s no ranking of judges, given that most of them are upperclassmen, but there is a knowledge that a couple of people in the field are woefully unprepared, again usually parents dragged in by their teams who seem to feel that these important personages are best kept in ignorance of the proceedings, as if they’re some necessary evil rather than their selfless benefactors. These teams don’t seem to realize that an untrained parent judge not only serves no one well in the pool, but also personally feels lost and confused, which is hardly how you should treat the people who’ve enabled your participation in the event. Anyhow, these folks have to be attended to; often, they need their hands held and their heads patted until you finally find a round they can’t screw up too badly. Add to this that your entire field is novices who, to put it bluntly, haven’t got a clue. They’ve never been to an invitational before. They don’t completely understand rounds and flights and elims. Maybe they’ve debated once or twice before, at most. This is all new to them. And in their midst, is the Dreaded Ben.
The Dreaded Ben became a legend before the tournament was over. Most of the following is true, with only minor improvements of a narrative nature. The Dreaded Ben went into flight A of round one and debated the wrong person. Dreaded Ben then proceeded to go into some other flight B of round one and debated some other wrong person. Fortunately, since his opponents and judges were almost as clueless, they complied. By the time the Dreaded Ben got to round two, he was debating affirmative now for the third time in a row (one round ahead of the rest of the field) and, I gather, debating yet again the wrong opponent. While it will come as no surprise that, before the weekend was over, the Dreaded Ben was carried off in irons by his own coach for reasons having nothing to do with his naïve enthusiasm about debating everyone in sight as quickly as possible, provided he could go aff, this is the sort of thing that Bacon had to face, and solve, for the entire weekend. Novices tend to get sick, in a fairly Kirkegaardian fashion, and disappear completely. The judge pool consists of as many first-time judges as there are first-time debaters, and their youthful exuberance needs to be either dimmed or stoked. Judges are interrogated over their 22s and 23s, or their strings of 30s. Juniors seem to want to insure their pool of Facebook friends remains intact, and go all Point Fairy as a means of doing this. Or they simply can’t grasp that novices are judged on a novice curve, and not compared to the round you saw last week at Big Bronx against people who already had six TOC bids this year even though they were attending their first tournament. There are lessons to be learned all over the place. And Bacon is the one giving those lessons. And keeping things running smoothly over in Siberia where the entire school, absent the spaces devoted to the tournament, is given over on Saturday to a special event involving over 300 people participating in a lunch and basketball game. I went down there at one point and could barely make it down the hallway, it was so crowded with non-Bumpians.
So here’s my advice. If you’re running a tournament, bring in Bacon or Vaughan or Coyne, or better yet, bring in all of them. They will make your tournament solid. There’s just one thing. You can’t have them on Bump weekend. Their mine, I tell you, MINE!!!
You can have the Dreaded Ben.
No comments:
Post a Comment