Some wonderful things about Tiggers

One of the plebes asked me last night if there was a rubric for speaker points. Obviously not yet a member in good standing of the VCA…

The main thing coming up is Princeton. Long ago CP was apparently wondering whether he should get involved with the Tiggers, the last Ivy left standing other than Harvard that hadn’t been infiltrated by our traveling tabroom team. We all made vague noises like, yeah, sure, why not, what the hey, and the next thing I knew, we were signed up. Because of Bump I didn’t pay enough attention early on to the structure of the event, and there was an overabundance of a few teams to the detrimental closing out of a lot of other teams, so I rejiggered the limits and manually pared everyone down to 6 novices and 6 varsitians, and then I took away any request for hired judges beyond 1, plus removing some requests completely until the number of hired judges sold equaled the number of judges being hired. The Tigs apparently thought that this would cause the roof to cave in over all of New Jersey, and sent out sad little memos to some of the schools apologizing for trying to make it a good tournament, but from my perspective, things went smooth as a goat. Now whenever I have a few minutes I check the log and see that the number of teams is where it should be and that if there’s openings, schools with no LDers are slotted in. It’s looking good. I would expect that when registration closes we’ll be able to open up a few waitlisted slots to novices in oversubscribed schools, but that the varsity will stick to the limit of 6 per. This is a very good thing for the tournament overall. Or at least I’m happy with it.

Meanwhile, the RevBa has been juggling room assignments, and finally LD has all its rooms all to itself, which means that we can schedule rounds sequentially in a logical progression rather than randomly waiting around for some bloody Duo round to take its course. So the schedule has also been rejiggered for six rounds in both divisions and doubles early Saturday evening, thus allowing me and Vaughan to have dinner at a decent hour, which is the entire point of the scheduling exercise, if you ask me. And, coincidentally, debaters will be done around 8 or so instead of in the middle of the night, and they’ll probably be happy about that too.

We’ll also try for texting in round results. With judges and teams flung far across the campus, getting the results quickly will be a very good thing. We’ll still need ballots, of course, but the sooner we pair, the faster we move. Given the unwieldy geography of a college campus, no one will complain if we maximize the minimizing of time between rounds. Once upon a time Princeton was a two hours on, two hours off tournament. This was nice, I guess, when everyone sat around drinking a lot of tea with their pinkies out sharing ribald tales of Woodrow Wilson and the Good Old Days, but that was then and this is now. I mean, you can just go to Starbucks so many times on a Saturday before the novelty starts to wear off.

Anyhow, it is now on to a quiet Thanksgiving and some Christmas shopping, and then Monday we sign up for Bigle X and start moaning and groaning about the new topics. I’m looking forward to it.