Throwing down the gauntlet

We ran Lakeland’s varsity division this last weekend in a challenge format. Interesting.

We got off to a late start on Friday because we were at the district middle school, which didn’t let out till about 3:30 or so. This was something of a handicap in terms of getting rounds in, but on the other hand, the division was relatively small, about 45 or so, having trimmed itself down a lot after losing its original date in February courtesy of the snowpocalypse. And we did not have a surfeit of judges (which is being kind). We had a pretty good pool, but very few extras. The word on the street was that, if you were a judge, you could expect to be judging something, either varsity or novice, and if you somehow escaped those particular fates, the guy running PF was sitting right across from me trying to wheel and deal, but only with people from his pool who could legitimately go into mine (which was not too many).

By the way, if you’re not on a pairing and you’re trying to hide out so that no one pushes you a ballot, it’s a good idea not to hang out in the tab room. Just sayin’.

We ran round one as a random pairing to give us rankings. Then the games began. It’s very simple. The lowest seed chooses who they want to debate, then the next lowest, until everyone is taken. O’C ran the barking, cajoling the folks into making their decisions, while JV kept an eye on availabilities (we had an odd number, which meant there was a bye to contend with, plus we didn’t want only one school left at the end with multiple unpaired entries), while I did manual pairings as they were called out, literally flipping a coin for sides as I went. Remarkably enough, this went relatively quickly once we got the hang of it (starting after round 2 we just handed out sheets with a list of the pairings we had exported into Excel). After I got all the pairings in I’d jog back to the tab room and run an automatic assignment of judges, which worked every single time! I was shocked. All I had to do was finagle some room assignments, which were sort of baffling TRPC a little bit but not too much. We ran flight A of round 3 on Friday and B on Saturday, which helped move things along, and we broke all 4-1s after 5 rounds, which seemed quite satisfactory.

So what is the point of all of this? Well, it’s late in the year, and it was fun for the participants. This was a regional tournament, and everybody knows everybody and mingles like crazy; I never knew which table to look for my Sailors at, since they kept sitting wherever with whomever, as did everyone else. A word to the wise: if you can make it till April and your team isn’t mingling with everyone else’s teams, you’ve got a serious socialization problem. Since one of my chief goals in this activity is generating that cross-team socialization, I was really happy about this aspect of the tournament. Challenging wouldn’t do for, say, getting a TOC bid, but for building community? Perfecto. (And, fortunately, not a problem for running an on-time tournament, with the three of us making it happen.) There were some goofy things like one Scientologist losing his first round then grudge-challenging the same guy, and losing, then losing his third round and grudge-challenging that guy, and losing again! Our favorite down-four got a special award for that. One way to get applause was to challenge the top seed, but plenty of people wisely stayed in their bracket. And if you weren’t there (as in, you decided that you’d go shoot baskets or go to the bathroom or something during the challenges), the obliging JV picked for you!

For the break rounds, we turned it around. Top seed got to pick. We broke 12, so we did a partial first, letting the top 4 sit it out. Then it got interesting, but still demanding. After all, anyone who made it that far was pretty good, so your choice of whom to debate wasn’t easy. We ended up with a Scarsdale-Hen Hud co-championship. It was either that or have the judges simply pass out from sanction exhaustion.

Would we do it again? Probably. We came up with this as part of the MHL championships rather than the Lakeland event, so next year, assuming that they will be separate, and that the MHL Grand Champs will be in April again, it should make sense at that latter event. I’m game, anyhow. And I think most of the people who were there will concur.