I Heart New Haven

Other things happened over the weekend Chez Pups.

First of all, it was like Okefenokee Swamp up there for most of the time. The usual nice autumn weather was replaced by a hot, sweltering fog that sucked the life out of you like something from a Stephen King novel. Some of the places one found oneself were all right, and some were pure hell, like, for instance, the cafeteria at the LD school on Saturday. Not much could be done about the weather, although we did talk about it a lot.

Didn’t see much of O’C over the weekend. He was apparently spreading Cruzian joy among all the fields, being that he had 50 or 60 kids in every event. Didn’t see much of CP either, for that matter, except at dinner. I guess he trusted us to do things right without him breathing down our necks the whole weekend. In aid of that we spent a lot of time scanning in the ballots for electronic posting. And I mean a lot of time, not that it mattered much, because the printer does most of the heavy lifting after all, but every time I turned around I was stuffing another batch of ballots into it. There was one kerfluffle over the Round 4 JV ballots. I scanned them in and posted them, and CP said they didn’t have them. Whatever. I scanned them in again and posted them again, and CP said they still didn’t have them. By now, I started to think that this was all part of some evil plan of his, but when we went back to scan them for a third time, they were gone. Piles of ballots taller than Burj Khalifa towered over the tab room, but JV Round 4 was not among them. No amount of scouring the territory turned them up. It wasn’t until I was alone during varsity finals on Sunday, packing up all the gear and lugging it to the car that, lo and behold, a pile of paper appeared in my briefcase that could only be them. Sure enough: JV Round 4. I immediately grabbed them, stormed over to the award ceremony, found CP, handed him the ballots and told him what he could do with them. Feh! CP is coming down next weekend for the MHL workshop, after which we plan on playing golf. Let’s see if I help him find any lost balls. Let’s see if he blames me when he loses them. Double feh!

The most serious issue of the event, which I mentioned yesterday, was deep-sixing the 7th VLD round. As I said, there was certainly a timing issue. We were running later than we expected, although at any one point there was no particular delay. It just takes longer to do MJP. In any case, prior to publishing the tournament info, we had had some discussions on the number of rounds. It all focuses on breaking all the down-2s. Expensive major tournaments really can’t afford to leave them dangling because of a single speaker point somewhere. A run-off solves the problem, and in fact, 7 rounds might not solve it: a couple of 5-2s, if the math proves out, still might not break. Nevertheless, making a big change like this mid-tournament is not done lightly. Once JV and I agreed that it made sense, we first ran it by a couple of coaches, just to see what the consensus was. Then we ran it by the YDA, from the folks with us all the way up to Mark, and we also ran it by CP. In other words, it was not a decision made lightly. For a moment we had stupidly thought we could panel the round, but that would have required a double flight, bringing us back to the getting-out-at-eleven, fifteen-hour-day problem. And when you think about it, anyone who was down two after six rounds, if we had had the seventh round, would have had to have won it, in front of one judge, i.e., the same sudden-death situation. So it was not terrifically unfair, unless you were at the top of the run-off bracket and lost to the person at the bottom of the run-off bracket, but in that case, it was sort of your own fault. I would imagine we’ll stick to this format in the future.

Other than that, it was all the usual stuff. And here’s a hint: if a round is over and the next round hasn’t been posted yet, and you see that suddenly the two hundred and fifty people all around you are jumping up and running somewhere, chances are that the next round has been posted. If you are going to come to tab half an hour later and say that you didn’t know the round was out, implying that it is our fault for not providing you an engraved invitation, the least you can do is come up with a good excuse like, for instance, nobody distributed schematics in the judge lounge. If you were in the cafeteria, as I say with two hundred and fifty of your nearest and dearest friends, and they all got the message and you didn’t, do you think that you might need to turn the dial up on your consciousness just a tad? It is ever thus, with both debaters and judges. Normally I wouldn’t say this, but sometimes it pays to follow the herd. Trust me on this.

And, oh yeah, if you’re thinking of going to Yale some day, keep in mind that Pups don’t use the same alphabet as we do. Or at least, not in the same order. This will become important when it’s time to do something like, oh, laying out the ballots for the judges to pick up.

And if you’re running a tournament with elimination rounds, forget about using TRPC to select judges for a time slot. It just doesn’t work. Make everyone available for every slot, print up a list and then mark it with who’s really available, and go by that. Again, trust me. You’ll save an oodle or two of time if you do. Time you can use to play quizzes on sporcle.com. At some point a Pup came by wide-eyed, startled that, as he put it, adults played on sporcle. The three of us in the tab room looked at each other and said that, as far as we knew, adults didn’t, and then we went back to our game.