This weekend is Wee Sma’ Lex for the Sailors. We started going there when we stopped sending an oodle-load to Glenbrooks. Not that I didn’t like Glenbrooks; it was and presumably still is a great tournament with a very high QOL schedule. I stopped going when I was starting to realize that I was flying somewhere almost every weekend, and I preferred to stay a little closer to home. If Sailors wanted to go, I was all for it, but it was no longer the team event of the weekend. Wee Sma’ provided instead a first-time housing opportunity for novices, and a chance for younger students to get some meaningful rounds in. I was, and am, all for that.
We’re up to our ears in Princeton. The events are all packed, and nobody has dropped out yet, but I’ve scanned the list and as far as I can tell, the furthest flung are in, if they need to fly or whatever. Now we’re assembling judges and prepping to sell them to the assembled multitudes. As always, O’C is in charge of that, and, shockingly, in charge of trophies as well. It was he who kicked the Tiggers in the pants a while back and got them to upgrade from Dollar Store generics to the real thing. The point is, trophies mean something, especially with college tournaments peopled by hordes of Speecho-Americans. If the colleges don’t deliver, they look sort of punk. And considering how expensive college tournaments are because of transportation and hotels and everything, that’s not the right look.
Columbia is just getting geared up. They always have issues with getting their rooms, which always happens late, but last year they pulled off a great tournament, after pulling off less than great ones, and I see no reason why they can’t repeat. What might be different this year is angling in some policy; we’re working on a bizarre solution to the problem of wanting it but having no place to put it. We’ll see how that works out.
And finally, on a different note entirely, there’s the Byram Hills tournament. For this one, I’ve been pushing for the introduction of Academy Debate, and we’re good to go as far as the school is concerned. Now we have to focus in on what the bells and whistles will be. Academy Debate could be a big deal in the future for some of our local tournaments, making events directed primarily at younger varsity students a lot more valuable. I’ll talk about that more in depth shortly, as we come to some conclusions.
Anyhow, we had our first Sailors meeting in a while last night. Apparently there was a better Sailors meeting somewhere else, because two out of three of the novices came late and left early. I wanted to discuss how to argue, but never got past the basics, so how any of this applies to a debate round will remain a mystery to them, I guess. We also talked about December PF. I like it because it forces people to learn a lot about something they may know literally zip on. Even our Zip, taking economics as a class, couldn’t make heads nor tails out of it. I consider that a good thing. If you don’t learn anything from studying a resolution, what’s the point?
I still haven’t organized the Bump follow-up, like getting the checks to the office and whatever. I’ll do that before we leave on Friday. And, as we say, another one will officially bite the dust. I didn’t get any calls from the schools, so apparently nothing horrifying was left behind in our wake, except a couple of
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