The other big event this weekend, aside from the NYSFL finals, is the NDCA tournament. I have to admit that this is an animal on which I do not yet have a good fix.
I attended a couple of times, first with the People’s Champion and the Panivore in Scranton, and then just with me (but that one was in Las Vegas, so it was hard to turn down). I’ve been a member of the organization for a few years now, but I can’t say I get a terrible lot out of it. News does come down the pike about tournaments and the like on their listserver, and occasionally there’s some obscure discussion on some policy issue in which some yabbo says something controversial and then the usual suspects who were born not to shut up say everything they possibly can about it and then it goes away. I find it doesn’t hold my interest much, but then again, I’m not doing anything to make it better, as I tend to keep my own counsel (or, more to the point, I vent my spleen on my own turf, i.e., here). They maintain some general resources on their site, but again, that’s mostly policy. Come to think of it, having attended the tournament now a few times, it does seem like a mostly policy organization.
(Not to change the subject, but does the expression “vent one’s spleen” have any medical context aside from the obvious metaphorical context? Can you go to the doctor’s office and have your spleen vented, the same way you can have them, say, clean out your ears? I should ask next time I’m there. I once had a friend, by the way, who used to have his ears cleaned out every six months. I went to the ear doctor last year to complain that everyone in the world seems to be talking softer all of a sudden, and he used that ear-cleaner on me, and I have to admit, it was sort of cool. Made it feel like there was a leaf-blower cleaing out your brain. I’d like to feel what it’s like if they did that to my spleen.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do get the sense that the NDCA tournament is primarily a policy affair, much as the organization as a whole is primarily polician, and it is essentially a reaction to TOC. The TOC went on for years (and years, and years) rather unchanged, an apparent monarchy but probably more of an oligarchy, where if you didn’t like the way things were done, you were out of luck. (Things have opened up quite a bit lately under new management, I gather, but I can’t speak to this much from personal observation.) If nothing else, the great expense of TOC had to be a burden, especially if you added in the occasional at-large application. The policy side of NDCA, although to my eyes it looks a lot like the policy side of TOC in terms of attendees, is thriving. The LD and PF sides, on the other hand, are, while far from competitively easy, not terribly large. The LD community seems to be sticking with the TOC, and I do think at some point a lot of programs must make a choice; the events are weeks apart and require great planning and travel and expense no matter how you slice them. How many schools can reasonably and regularly attend both without an enormous financial machine and lots of available personnel? Why the LD community has stuck and why the policy community has drifted, I don’t know and can’t venture a guess. As for the PF community, well, they’re still new, and there’s a logic in their throwing their support to the older more established organization as they try to get themselves more established (although I would imagine that at this point there are few people left who disparage PF as a worthless newcomer, given its great popularity around the country).
This is one of those dramas that continues to be played out, that might be terminal. I don’t know if these head-on competing annual final tournaments of presumably the best debaters can both continue over the long term. If I had to choose between them, I don’t know which I would pick. With the Panivore, we just attended both, but the NDCA was close enough that we could drive, which meant it really didn’t hit the bottom line that much. If I could only attend one, assuming that, as is most likely in the future, it would be in PF? Tough question. A really, really tough question. At the moment, I’m glad I don’t have to answer it.
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