While I concentrate during the event on what I consider the chief job of a tournament director—keeping the tournament running—there are other aspects of a tournament that also need to be run. I don’t believe that I could handle those in addition to managing the running of the rounds, so I ask for parent volunteers to handle these for me. These parent volunteers are every bit as important as the tab room in making a tournament work, except that their contributions are a little more indirect. That is, a tournament can run without housing and good meals nicely served and comfortable judges’ lounges, but it can’t be run well. To say these things are non-essential, therefore, would be true. But to attempt a tournament without them would be absurd. And considering the amount of work involved in them, for a tournament director to attempt them personally would be impossible and/or insane. In other words, if it weren’t for hardworking, committed parents, there wouldn’t be any Bump. There wouldn’t be many high school tournaments at all, probably. The world of forensics would be a bleak, uninviting place.
I seek volunteers to head up each of those areas: housing, meals and judges’ lounges. Each is a job in and of itself. Each is a lot of hard work, over long hours. Let’s look at them.
Housing is, apparently, something of a uniquely northeastern custom, but it’s a good one. It allows us to go to tournaments all the time. If we had to pay for hotel rooms weekend after weekend, well, we wouldn’t. The money simply isn’t there for it. I guess we’d redesign our universe to more one-day events, with the predictable decline in the quality of our debaters. (Yeah, the northeast sucks, except they seem to be everywhere in the country doing pretty well, so I wonder which northeast the legends of impoverished LD are about, anyhow.) But housing is a bear. If you have a big enough team, you could conceivably offer slots solely from your own parents, and that would be it, but few schools have that big a team. Hen Hud certainly doesn’t. And some schools may have the numbers, but not the facilities, because they’re city schools with long commutes that don’t translate into a five-minute ride home, or they're lower income schools where situations may not be amenable to a boatload of extra people spending the night. At Hen Hud, we now will guarantee only 150 housing slots. The housing parent has to come up with these by, essentially, pounding on doors. Telephone calls, emails, begging, more begging. Connecting with team families, former team families, team former families, friends, friends of friends, people walking into WalMart looking especially prosperous. Whoever. Then, once you get 150 slots covered, you’ve got to handle the roiling sea of registrants to be housed. Why do we start imposing fines? Not only because of my extra work, but the houser’s extra work. Names are attached to housing, then the name changes, so a new name has to be attached. There’s drops and adds. Changes every time you turn around. Next year, the fines will be higher, and the housing limit absolute. Add someone after the limit is reached? That’s your problem. You can’t get blood from a stone, or housing from a tapped out houser, but you can get rooms at a motel. It was Benjamin Franklin who first pointed this out, I think. In any case, there’s the housing list sent when registration closes. There’s the housing list when people actually turn up (or don’t). Then there’s the matching of names to slots and getting all the information to the right people in the hubbub of people showing up at 10:00 to pick up their charges for the night. I’m usually in tab pumping out the morning’s pairings while this is going on, but I’ve been in the housing area, and it’s like bedlam, only crazier.
Thank you, Ms. Raptoulis, for handling this for the team in 2007. (That’s Peanuts’s mom, if you’re wondering.)
Meals are, at least, predictable. You get what we had last year, unless I tell you that there’s going to be an appreciable difference in numbers (which I couldn’t really tell, this year, as we were offering fairly different events). You’ve got to deal with three suppliers: 6-foot heroes on Friday, dessert cakes on Friday, pizzas on Saturday. Food has to be ordered, paid for, delivered, set up and served. Parents are enlisted as volunteers to help the volunteer in charge, and kids are pulled in for the heavy lifting. A good food parent keeps an eye on the concessions table (thank God) and keeps that supplied if your concessionaire isn’t around at the moment. And a good food parent coordinates with the judge lounge parent to keep that site stocked. A good food parent is a godsend. You know this if you’ve ever tried to feed three hundred or so people a couple of meals served around their rounds and flights and coming in from two buildings.
Thank you, Ms. Theodore, for handling this for the team in 2007.
Judges’ lounges are stocked from contributions from team parents, which must be sought and processed in advance of the tournament, and then supplemented as necessary. Food must be laid out pleasantly in two venues (although next year it will be only one, as there are few adults in the grammar school) and kept neat and stocked for an entire weekend. There must be enough coffee for everyone including Erin, who drinks 6 gallons herself before the first Saturday round is even posted. As I’ve said earlier in this series of debriefings, if you have a place where judges enjoy hanging out, where they’re treated well, they’ll come back, and when you’re hiring, the word will get around. Plus there’s simply the question of hospitality. One ought to be nice to one’s guests, and treat them well.
Thank you, Ms. Gofman, for handling this for the team in 2007.
When I say these folks handled things, I mean they handled them. With little or no help from me. I’m from the delegation school of management: Here’s the job, you do it, if it goes well you get the credit, if it goes poorly I get the blame, what do you need from me to make it happen, see you when it’s over. As I say, it would be impossible for me, or anyone, to run a tournament any other way.
So there you are. I’ve written up this series to give you an idea of what goes on at a tournament, maybe just because you might be interested, or, heaven forbid, you’re thinking of running one yourself some day. Every year I try to improve things from the previous year. I’ve been doing it for over a decade and there’s still areas for improvement. There will be areas for improvement until I stop doing it, and then there will be areas of improvement for some other
And so, back to the business of everyday coachean biliousness.
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