The inside poop on the Gem

What happened at Columbia? I’m glad you asked.

Like most college tournaments, the Gem of Harlem is a long event. LD goes Friday through Sunday, plus along the way Congress and IEs are tossed into the mix. Also like most college tournaments, rooms are at a premium. College administrations do not willingly grant their debate teams free access to all their classrooms. Far from it. Each room added to the pool is usually fought for to the death, and often the event limits set by the tournament reflect nothing more than the hoped-for maximum amount of space available in which to hold all of them. Of course, best laid plans all gang aglay when some yabbo teacher decides to come in on Saturday and tutor some slackers on remedial brain surgery or whatever. Keeping on top of all of this is, one may be surprised to hear, just about a fulltime job. Rooms have to be acquired and then allotted, and often there’s an LD round followed by some IE rounds followed by a Chinese New Year drummer reunion followed by a Chautauqua complete with gospel music followed by PF semis. If, at any point, that yabbo teacher manages to slide in with his brain surgeons manqué, all hell can break loose with domino-effect ramifications. Our man on the room scene was CP, a master of this art, if we go by results, which was exactly one debate round slightly bumping into a handful of IEers one day, which was resolved almost immediately. On the LD side, given that we snuck in an extra novice partial doubles on Sunday and still that division ended before awards, we were real happy. (We managed to have VLD end during awards; we knew before the tournament started that they would occur simultaneously, so that was okay.) Occasionally CP would hand one of us the spreadsheet he uses to organize things, which is sort of like the map of M. C. Escher’s summer house only upside down, and we would look at it and remark that it set new standards for incomprehensibility, and he would reply that it was clear to him, and that it was a perfect representation of how his mind works. Q.E.D., eh?

Given that we were up against Emory, where O’C was pressing his hands and feet into the Georgia cement in his bid for debate immorality immortality, we nonetheless had what seemed to me a decent event. A strong concentration of talent in the field, certainly worthy of the semis bid, and enough A judges in the pool to cover every single bubble and then some. Scarola was wearing shoes the entire weekend, which is a good sign in and of itself. Caitlin was on top of everything in running the tournament, and her tab and ballot and running staffs were getting the job done. We tried texting results again, and aside from a couple of blips (all of which were corrected, usually by the strong double-checking by the Gems), it worked well. It was good to see that Mr. Bietz was there with all his electronic toys and his usual strong young California folk. Bietz’s fame precedes him, of course, so let me use him as exemplar of a certain mindset. He was not obligated to judge this weekend, but told us that if we ever needed him, he’d be happy to help out. We asked him only once, to adjudicate a novice break round. Novice. Little kids. He said he’d love to do it, that he loved judging novices, and then he took his ballot and went off and helped out. Consider this my plea for more people like MB in the world. (Although the rumors that he and O’C are miffed because they failed to gain entry as a twin brother duo in “The Amazing Race” are entirely unfounded.)

But where’s the dirt? I can see you tapping your foot. You’re asking me, Who did we throw out the window for being unworthy of existing? Who did JV hit over the head with a sledge hammer? Whose picture was used for dart tossing? Since my practice is, generally, if I don’t have anything good to say about somebody, put it in the blog, I will oblige.

First of all, there were the usual culprits, the no-show judges. As always, some teams hedge their overall judging obligation. This one can’t do this round, that one can’t do that round. One school sends a high school student to judge varsity. Yet, somehow, everyone expects their teams to be judged every round, even if they’re not judging every round themselves. Hmmmm. How does that work? Am I missing something in the math here? CP showed me a way in tabroom to track, and fine, every missed round. You know we’re going for that everywhere I have control in the future. At the point where you haven’t covered your entry, you get fined. At the point where you haven’t covered it so much I can’t cover it for you, you get dropped from the tournament. The cost of coming to a tournament is the requirement to cover your judging. Can’t do it? Find some activity where there’s no obligations, and do that instead. (Especially, find some activity that doesn’t revolve around the concept of fulfilling obligations, come to think of it.) Of course, no-show judges also include those who have “judged every round” and don’t want to judge the next one. Often these judges are being paid by the tournament. Often these judges have already asked for, and gotten, a round or two off. Often these judges think we’re listening to their whining. I assure you, we’re not.

Then there was the judge who, after numerous unanswered phone calls and texts, finally gave us the results of the last Saturday round an hour after the round ended. There is a special place in hell for this sort of stupidity, but, unfortunately, no place in debate tournaments. Pulling a bonehead stunt like this is probably the number one way never to get hired again. At the very least, you’ll be watching a lot of down five rounds.

And then, can you see that sign on the door that says we’re not going to give you your ballots? Do you really think that, while we’re pairing the final rounds, we’re going to stop what we’re doing and pretend that the sign wasn’t there? Do you think we care that much about you? Do you think we believe the story you concocted the second time we threw you out? How dumb are you? Rule number one: if you have not been specifically invited to join us in tab, then you have not been invited to join us in tab—tell your tales of woe to the ballot table, because that’s what they are there for: they are the concierges at a tournament. It is their job, not our job, to ignore you. The tab room got there in the morning long before you did, and will leave at night long after you are gone. We would like to take our ballots and go home early too, but we have the good etiquette to stay for the whole tournament. Don’t make our day any longer than it already is by imposing your bad manners on us. If you must slink out like a thief in the night, please do so making the least amount of hoo-ha possible.

By the way, have you ever noticed that if there’s one idiot on a team, usually the whole team is crawling with them? And vice versa. One nice person, and they’re all nice people. Note: if you want us to love you, act lovably. Judge all your rounds, don’t whine, don’t ask for special treatment, and don’t bug us when we’re working. (One school, by the way, had a very large entry, and a gatekeeper for all its judges. Throughout the weekend, that gatekeeper made sure that every round had its judge from that school, or if there was an issue, that there was a competent sub to take over. Professionalism to the core. A tip of the hat to Grandma J!)

One nice thing about the Gem of Harlem was ubiquitous wireless. I hear that people were online during rounds, so this may be too much of a temptation for some people who are sort of rules-adverse, but mostly it meant that every single person I saw all weekend was, when sitting around, poking away at their keyboards. We are getting very close to the future. It may be scary.

And I know that this is important to you: your happy, smiling tab staff discovered this really nice bistro a block or two down the road, and ate about every meal there over the weekend. A well-fed tab staff is a happy tab staff (absent all the issues above). Keep that in mind, sports fans.