Which raises the question, What dance, exactly? The hula? The fox trot? The hootchie-kootchie?

So, says you, how were the Tiggers?

Fine, says I. Although, as with any tournament, there were amusements and there were bemusements and there were befuddlements.

The Sailors and I arrived around noon (incidentally passing through more auto accident debris and generally horrific driving than one normally encounters on a debate excursion; the whole legendary New Jersey bad-driver thing could account for that). After the tars schlepped my stuff into the registration building I sent them off to entertain themselves, to do things like finding Halo’s Pub for ice cream and finding a plain bagel for the Panivore. Registration was just opening up, and we established a process for getting changes (which seemed to work perfectly) and getting judge info (a little less successful but still pretty good). Unfortunately the registration area smelled like a vomitorium, so getting out of there posthaste was mission number one, and before long we settled downstairs in the tabroom and got down to business. The smell, fortunately, was limited to that one area upstairs. We (literally) breathed sighs of relief.

There are a few things that seem to be prime issues at college tournaments, the first of these being rooms. My memory of Tiggerlands past was rooms all over creation, all of them locked, but this year the Tigs had things under control, and when a locked room popped up, someone quickly popped up with a key, and that was that. Still, people were scattered all over creation. To ameliorate the situation, we gave judges a number to text in their results. As far as we could tell, we generated no particular mistakes as a result of this, and it kept us zipping along in tab at top pace. It also meant that we seldom had a minute to breathe, but that’s why they pay us the big albeit virtual bucks.

A second college problem is control of judges, but once again, things were seriously under control. The Tigs had purchased a boatload of good judges, and those were the ones we hired out. Then we kept another serious boatload of Tig judges for the sake of the tournament. The Tigs who were experienced LDers went into varsity, the less experienced or newbies went into noviceland. We never wanted for judges. JV, who can push a ballot faster than Bill Clinton can chase a skirt, managed to get every ballot off the table before the scheduled starts of the rounds; I sat there with the computer inputting the changes (and occasionally barring one that couldn’t or shouldn’t happen), and everything worked. Of course, although tabbing a big tournament is easy enough on TRPC, tabbing it so that the good judges are where they should be, and conversely, that the bad judges aren’t where they shouldn’t be (including bothering the tab staff), takes a modicum of work. We had the ratings that Zayn and I had done initially, plus I’ve been collating my Big Book of Judge Rankings from all the tournaments I do, which helps enormously. (If you want to know what we think of you, btw, send me $20 and I’ll tell you what your rank is. If you want to know what we really think of you, send me $40 and a liability release form.)

One thing I had worried about early on was the division switch from JV to nov, but that worked out fine, with about 130 or so of the chilluns signed up. We had 161 varsity. These are impressive numbers. My goal was to transform Princeton from a service tournament for the locals to an Ivy-level tournament. This means nothing in terms of, say, TOC bids. That is, this sort of transformation doesn’t mean you will, or should, get a change in qual status. But it does mean that you can set a standard of competition that makes your tournament worthy of attendance on its own merits, rather than opening the doors to first-come, first-served, and three big willy-nilly entries make up half your field. We did that. I remember distinctly Soddie once announcing that he ran Big Bronx for its own rewards, and not as merely a qualifier for some other tournament. Of course, he was still getting octos bids at the time, but still, most people at a tournament are probably not there for bids except, perhaps, at Glenbrooks or Emory, which means that most people at most tournaments want to do well at that tournament, end of story. For the Tigs, we managed to get full entries in from about 10 schools that otherwise would have been shut out by big school entries. In my eyes, that is a good thing, even if a few people who considered attendance an entitlement were forced to see their entitlement disappear for the sake of a better tournament (one school, I heard, dropped their entire registration in a huff, an absolutely perfect example of, A) cutting your nose to spite your face, and B) good riddance). This is not to tar all the big-entry schools from the past with that same brush; I worked with some directly on making sure they got the most that they could out of the tournament, and there are plenty of professionals out there who understand that the world doesn’t end at the end of their own noses. Going forward, Princeton can serve the high school community quite well by providing a balanced, fun, well-run tournament for a lot of schools, provided they stick to the principles set forth this time out. Given how well things went this year, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t do that.

And yeah, JV and I succeeded unbelievably well on our end. The original schedule had 5 rounds for novices, 6 for Varsity, with breaks beginning with double-flighted double-octos on Sunday morning. The Menick/Vaughan schedule did 6 rounds for everyone and single-flighted doubles on Saturday evening, meaning that we ran the tournament in the fastest time ever. But then again, that’s sort of what we do.

Biggest screw-up? Somehow the pairings for the octos round got posted online Saturday night. This is a mistake of unbelievable proportions, so unbelievable that it never occurred to me that it could happen. It is like hearing that they’re dancing naked in the middle of the judges’ lounge; no one would normally ever even think of it (primarily because no one ever wants to see any of the judges naked, and no one ever wants to see any of the judges dance, much less both at the same time). If someone said that they were going to get the judges to dance naked in the judges’ lounge, you would just look at them as if they were speaking Swahili. As for overnight postings, online pairings for the following day means that judges not scheduled won’t show up, and therefore there’s no fillers for the judges who are scheduled who don’t show up. Worst, debaters get even less sleep than normal as they gather their teams and coaches together to prep out against their announced opponent, a seriously unfair advantage against schools with no team or coach nearby, or teams that didn’t see the unexpected online pairings. To say that Vaughan and I were spitting blood over this understates our reaction. We now know that it is something that can happen, and will act to prevent it from recurring in the future. Meanwhile, our ban against naked judge dancing remains merely implicit until such time as the event transpires and further action is warranted to prevent its recurrence.

(To be continued…)