Lakeland is now history, which means that O’C has memorized every round in every division, and will eventually etch it onto a plaque. The two of us worked tab together (once he got around to arriving in, yes, a Lincoln Town Car, for those who believe that I make this stuff up) and had a pretty interesting go of it. While the policy division was bigger than [insert humorous metaphor here for some really big thing; I’m too tuckered out from playing Wii Tennis yesterday], LD and PF were more of a boutique nature. Varsity LD was about 40 souls or so, which is pretty manageable, and to be honest, we had a disturbingly uniform and solid pool of judges, with nary a stinker in the pack. Not only were they all experienced, but they all mostly showed up when they were supposed to, except for the usual suspects who were, I assured you, given a good stern talking to. Brian Manuel was around tabbing Policy, and as he says, we always make a lot of empty threats, and nobody has ever actually punished a team for its judges’ sins, but then again, we all are more likely to be nice and quiet about things rather than confrontational, and even if confrontation doesn’t solve any problems, one always feels better after it. I’ve noticed that the older I get, the less likely I am to put off confrontation. I mean, if you can’t act the way you want when you’re an old fart, when can you? (For the record, I’m a very young-looking 92.)
So tabbing 40 LDers with good judging was okay enough, except for one thing. For a couple of rounds there were exactly enough judges. No extras. No sitting around in the judges’ lounge drinking apple martinis or getting Swedish massages. Get in there and judge, you meatball. For some reason I always spend more time running around looking for people at Lakeland than at any other tournament. But as I say, it wasn’t the LD judges who were a problem. And novice LD, which was smaller than [another metaphor, please] wasn’t particularly hard either because we did, in fact, have a couple of extra judges to work with in that division, and the balance among teams was spread out. It was Pfffft that was the problem child. With a very tiny field as we had (about 18 teams or so), you run through the judge pool pretty fast. Everybody has seen everybody, and then you start wrangling anyone who even marginally looks as if they’re breathing to adjudicate the rounds. The good news is that the official NFL Pfffft rules indeed specify only that the judges “marginally look as if they’re breathing,” so pretty much anyone who has graduated high school is a potential adjudicator. But one does need to explain the toin coss to them, and to explain that they marginally look as if they’re breathing and why this is all that matters. A couple of times I canvassed the judges’ lounge and saw a bunch of people who were doing a very good job of not appearing to breathe, so apparently they had read the NFL rules and knew how to duck this particular onerous judging task. But, one way or another, we made it happen (all on cards, by the way as we ignored school restraints in aid of a better tournament. More than half the Pfffft field was Lexwegians, and we made them face one another. Otherwise, before long the 3-0s are hitting the 0-3s and results are a foregone conclusion. Better to have more good rounds, was our philosophy. Remarkably enough, we broke to semis with 2 real rounds, so we must have gotten it right.)
While all this was going on, I was helping Catholic Charlie with Regionals. We were already strapped for rooms with the invitational, so we were putting Regionals rounds wherever we could fit them, including at various tables in the library where all the tabbing was being run, which meant that they had to debate while listening to the Best of the Doors Volume 1 (admittedly not what people expect to hear from my iPod, but variety is the spicy meatball of life, and if the 60s ever come back, I’ll be ready, except for the whole hair thing). There were a dozen novices, which meant an easy enough pick after two rounds of undefeateds and top point earners, and there were 4 varsity, which meant a playoff between the winners of round 1, but JV was three people, which was the least clean. X beat Y, then Z beat Y, then Z beat X, so realistically Z did qualify, having beaten X head-to-head, despite the fact that they had equal points. I don’t know what we would have done if Y had beaten Z. We’d probably still be there.
The high point of the weekend, in any case, was the occasional booming voice of Lakeland coach Stefan Bauschard over the school’s loudspeaker system. “You should now be in the final speech of your eleventh round,” or words to that effect. “Stop prepping and get to your rounds.” “If you don’t go home now, you’ll never go home.” These kept coming in perfect cadence with the policy rounds, and kept them moving admirably, but of course bore no relationship whatsoever to the LD rounds. Very amusing. I want Stefan to announce random stuff at all tournaments from now on. It just makes things that much more entertaining.
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