Monday, February 25, 2013

"September Song," readjusted for February and forensics

I’m really starting to believe that the season is ending. Barring anything unforeseen, one more tournament and I’m done. It’s been an eventful season. The big tournaments were unfailingly bizarre in the behavior of way too many people who should know better. School after school demonstrated bad debate citizenship, flouting rules, ignoring responsibilities, setting examples for their students not of the values of forensics but the values of obduracy and self-interest and gaming the system. At the same time, the universities themselves handled themselves with unflinching professionalism, one after the other. Yale, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn—the students running each of these did themselves proud. They all learned how to maintain their events, working with one or the other of our traveling tab staff as advisers but making the tournaments their own, as they should. The traveling tab staff changes over time; CP essentially started the commitment to organizing the university tournaments and working with them in depth, and now others of us, one here, another one there, carry on with the established frameworks. A decade ago, these college tournaments were a crapshoot. Now they’re part of the backbone of the region (and beyond). Not bad.

The high school tournaments were not quite as marked by nonsense. This may be because the players all know each other and work together more often, and shenanigans not only have more impact, they have more resonance. They’ll come back and bite you on the butt more readily. What really hurt us this year was the weather. Sandy, for all intents and purposes, took a month-long bite out of the calendar, cancelling Vassar, seriously diminishing Bump, and taking some programs offline for many weeks. Then Scarsdale managed to conjure up a major blizzard. Oh, yeah, it was also unseasonably warm for Lexington, so at least there was some positive side to all of this. In any case, the season took a hit, and harms were felt.

On the local circuit, things were more business as usual. The new registration rules have pretty much sunk in, and our first rounds are no longer what we used to call attendance-taking. I had a personal hit when Kate had her accident and I had to pull out of the Regis CFL, but others carried on admirably (although, for some reason, when I’m not around no one ever has 4 rounds—just sayin’). From the looks of things, debate is absolutely thriving around here. The NYC UDL gained national attention for both its hard work and Erik Fogel’s unprecedented use of exclamation points, the Jersey schools packed ‘em in at this weekend’s MHL with its policy novices, we’re starting to see more life in the previously underattended novice PF fields, and we continue to have LDers up the wazoo. We’re looking good for the future.

So we can look back at a pretty good year in all the respects that we could control. I’m not writing this as some sort of valediction; I don’t shut up regardless of whether anything is happening in the debate universe. I’m just thinking about the long strange year it’s been as the days start to get longer and everyone’s fancy turns to something else. With luck, you were able to survive the weather events unscathed yourself, or at least without many scars, and you were also not among the people given black marks on my ever-growing hit list. If you’re going to finals of any sort, I hope you have a good time. Or, as we say in the tab room, “Okay, time for Sporcle.”

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