A change of attitude

Another Big Bronx is over. And what, you are wondering, was it like? Or, if you were there, what, you are wondering, did the tabfolk think of the proceedings while the riff and the raff were all going about their business?

I absolutely felt a personal shift in the nature of the tournament this year. Last year O’C staked Bronx’s claim on a major tournament, and this year, he and the Bronckians simply delivered it. Of course, all I can speak to is the LD side of things, but that side was, as far as I was concerned, an event that the school can be proud of. I was explaining this at home last night. Bronx Science is, to some extent, a brand. The tournament is one way the brand is established. You could say this of any school and any tournament, but while some brands are local, others are national. To establish a national brand, you need a national approach, while regional brands require something unique in their region. No two tournaments are alike, even if they’re exactly the same number of people, with the same level (or not) of qual and whatnot. Each tournament has a personality. People pick and choose which tournaments they go to, like any consumers. They will choose your brand because it satisfies their needs not only on the forensic level but also on the financial and travel and competitive and fun levels, and probably on the levels of half a dozen other criteria. To work a national brand, you are certainly in the national spotlight, and given that your tournament will be trying to get people to spend a lot of money on planes and hotels, you’ve got to offer pretty solid value. It’s not that tournaments are in direct competition with one another so much as there’s just so many tournaments to be gone to and so much money to spend, and all tournaments are in competition for attention when teams decide where they’re going to go. They will pick the brands that suit them.

The Bronx brand builds on the history of the team and the history of the tournament. Given the team’s size and scope, its ambition to be a national brand is reasonable. I mean, by comparison, I could fit all of my novices in one of their novice’s policy tubs. So they have to deliver a class tournament. It is done by limiting the admissions, hiring scads of judges, providing enough food so that no one passes out from hunger, finding reasonable accommodations that people can afford, offering state of the art tabbing that the community expects. Bronx adds some niceties like a Round Robin, shuttle buses, some kid housing, and a Mr. Softee ice cream truck. (Okay, that last one is not one of the tournament’s direct perks, but Mr. S was there and I had my chocolate dipped soft chocolate cone and it was a personal high point.) O’C and all his award ceremonies connects people in a good way and recognizes contributions within the community at large, while not losing the focus of the team acknowledging those contributions. I joke about the awards, but they are part and parcel of this event, like keys are part of Emory, and say what you will, they have a good effect. In any case, the overall thing is, O’C was delivering all of this stuff before they got the octos bid. This is not the first year the tournament seemed like an octos bid. It just happened to be the first year it was an octos bid. I felt that last year they leaped the final hurdles in establishing the brand. This year, they just drove the brand through the weekend.

For me, this required a small change of attitude in tab. My tab rooms are always as relaxed as possible, as musical as possible and as efficient as possible, but this time I quietly (and often presumptively) acquiesced to all of O’C’s requests for the ephemera he likes so much, the pdfs of skems and things like that for instant posting to WTF. I became a part of the brand machine, in other words. Usually I would torture him about all this stuff, but this time I just did it—except for the one time I slipped in a Disney princess, just to keep him amused and on his toes. The thing is, I got caught up in the brand as well. We often talk about various events as being “Nostrum tournaments,” rather amateurish weekends that only marginally hang together. All our MHLs are Nostrum tournaments to some extent. But this was a professional tournament, requiring a professional attitude. I was happy to oblige.

My guess is that anyone in LD at this tournament felt good about it. They got all the possible rounds they could expect, they got good mutually preferred judges (which got better as the tournament progressed, and I’ll talk about that later), they got reasonable efficiency, they got openness. A couple of times people came in with a question and we just showed them the computer screen and they were satisfied. A few people slipped up in getting their prefs in on time, and we got them in for them as quickly as possible. We weren’t trying to punish them for missing the deadline—which we had to establish to operate the tournament—but helping them as much as we could if they did miss it.

So, that’s my take on the thing critically. Of course, there are tales to tell. I’ll start them tomorrow