Grand adventures

CFL LD Grands, where the top three debaters from each program in the New York diocese come together to fight over six slots was, as usual, a bloodbath. Almost every single pairing had the feel of a final bid round; few if any of the contestants were, as you might put it, walking byes. In the past there have been a few schlubs tossed into the mix by newer programs thinking to give their students some tough experience, but not this year. It was just a lot of serious talent having at it. The people who qualified all deserved to. So did half of the people who didn’t qualify. Whew!

Pfffft, on the other hand, had a different slant. From the mariners’ point of view, of the six slots, three would inevitably go to Regis. This is about as difficult to predict as guessing that the Latino restaurant down the street (Reason #1 to have a tournament at Stuyvesant!) will have rice and beans on the menu. That leaves three slots up for grabs. My guess was that my younger LDers who wouldn’t have a chance against the seniors in the LD division would be a reasonable entry in PF, hence the suggestion that the Panivore and the People’s Champion join sophomoric forces. The panivorous one watched a couple of Pfffft rounds at Lakeland to find out what the activity actually was, then we prepped the two of them Tuesday night, and Saturday, lo and behold, they qualified. Taking a play from our book, a similar albeit more elderly team from Monticello did likewise. This is the good news. The bad news is, of course, that now we have to go to CatNats in Albany on Memorial Day weekend. Oh, well. You can’t have everything. Still, couldn’t they have qualified to go somewhere cool. Like, maybe, any city that isn’t Albany?

Tabbing the event, which I had pre-whined over because of our traditional difficulty, turned out to be the plum of the year. It was positively balmy out, so the windows were open blowing in fresh air over the canned heat blasting out of Stuyvesant’s furnaces (in typical NYC fashion, the heat goes on and off by date, not by need). Because we had amended the constitution of the NYCFL organization this year so that if there were fewer than 20 entries we would use 2 judges instead of 3, and because LD came in at 18 (well, actually 19, but one brilliant coach apparently signed up a student and completely forgot about it!), and because everybody was obligated to bring one judge per student, and because we had a couple of extras (even after I had to disqualify one judge because it was his very first tournament ever, and would it kill that team to follow the rules just once?), we were able to single-flight with two judges in each round, meaning that, even pairing by hand, we were done by around 4:00. In the afternoon. There were, of course, issues during the day, the biggest being our dropping of teams from the tournament as it progressed. Once you are mathematically eliminated, there’s no reason for us to keep you in. It is, after all, a qualifier and not a tournament in and of itself. But dropping people in PF, as it turned out, meant that serious pull-ups (all double, plus in one case 3-0 v 0-3) came into play versus side constraints (yeah, side constraints, this being CatPffft, which has reformed NFL rules for no apparent reason other than to drive me and JV crazy at Grands). We checked the league by-laws, but this issue, side versus pull-up, was unaddressed The pull-ups seemed seriously unfair compared to going con again or whatever, and we consulted with Catholic Charlie and Kaz and everyone else sitting around, including our own history (one year I broke side constraints because otherwise it was somehow same-school v same-school), and we ultimately decided to flip some of the final pairings but to hold brackets. The pro still went first (the other half of the Catholic Reformation, so to speak) but at least it led to real debates. This was only in PF, though. LD ran more clockworkian. And one is more inclined to follow restraints in LD than in Pffft, which is inherently flippable unless it’s Catholic, go figure.

Anyhow, it’s over, and now I’m heading up to Albany on the best golf weekend of the year. Needless to say, I’m praying for rain. It being a Catholic event, and me being raised by the nuns, maybe my prayers will be answered.