Next up, the NDCA (with some stats on MJP from Bump thrown in)

It’s amazing how the lack of having to run a tournament at one’s high school this coming weekend allows the mind to float freely. All I have to do is show up at someone else’s tournament; I’m not even marginally responsible for anything, aside from getting my yabbos up there in one piece.

How nice.

My next project is getting some discussion going on the NDCA site. Since the whole thing is open, member or not, it could be interesting, and it can invigorate the organization. I’m still stuck contemplating MJP, for instance, and there’s still a lot of unanswered questions. There may be a polarization at the edges, for one thing, where preferencing can isolate controversial teams, or where independent judges who coach for money can drum up business, that sort of thing. There’s the question of the sizes of the groupings, and how it affects the judge pool. There’s the question of the down 3s, and how much attention needs to be paid to them, with the understanding that there’s only so much time to put together rounds. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that every tournament do it the same way, but every tournament needs to know the ramifications of what they are doing and, as a matter of course, publish their procedures. At Bump, where all but 6 out of 96 preffed, we had maybe 2 4-4s (I think from judges not picking up ballots), 3 or 4 3-3s per round, and maybe 3 2-1s all weekend (where there was no mutuality whatsoever). Of 44 judges, 4 (all parents or newcomers) got only one round out of five, another 6 got 2 rounds, the rest got 3 or more. Presumably if I dumped mutuality for the down 3s, they’d get a few more, and the folks who judged every single time might have had some time off. With 44 judges, I set it up with 4 equal tiers, plus some strikes. In the end, most people judged plenty, but some were almost closed out, and I hate to think of them sitting around bored for two whole days. (Which is why I’m happy to toss them into PF, where they can be useful, but that’s not always an option.)

Anyhow, it’s the publishing/discussing at NDCA that started me talking about this. I went over some of the technical stuff with CP; I hope to get started this week, and tidy up with him over the weekend. We’ll see how it goes. I can now think about it clearly with no other things, like Bump, clouding my mind.