Wednesday, January 29, 2014

In which we wonder what makes a good tabber

We put together a whole bunch of notes from the Gem for the memory pool for next year, and I tucked it all into tabroom, where there’s now a place to store one’s notes. (I almost typed that there is now a way to store one’s nuts, but alas, that is a feature yet to be implemented.) Most of it was relatively small, like listing the schools that didn’t show up Sunday to fulfill their judge obligations (ta ta, my friends), our preference for a tab room location (one where we were able to take off our coats and there was a light, so that we didn’t look like we just stumbled out of a Solzhenitsyn novel), and a registration system that’s at least as good as Big Bronx, which until the Gem was the gold standard for Oh, Right, We Need to Set Up Registration, occurring in the mind after about 20,000 people spontaneously started lining up at the edge of the auditorium.

I mean, the tournament went well, but there was no question that my brain was fried way before it was over. Let’s face it. I do this every week. If that’s not evidence of insanity, nothing is. We’ve been talking a lot lately about tab staff. People have come and gone over the years, and most have been happy to be of the gone persuasion. First of all, most people at a tournament who could be in tab are coaches who would probably prefer to be out there coaching. As the VCA knows, I’ve never been big on prepping for individual rounds. I always associate it with cramming for exams: if you don’t know it by now, you’re never going to know it. I’ve occasionally parsed out responses to specific arguments at tournaments, but that’s about it. God knows I’ve never dug up a card or prepped a response or a block or suggested that someone run this against that person. What the hell do I know? (Okay, don’t answer that.) I may be the world’s worst coach for this, because I have certainly seen coaches who seem more involved in debate than their debaters, but to each the proverbial one’s own. The Sailors have always done pretty well historically despite me.

But I digress. The Traveling Tab Room is not that big, and with CP really not a regular anymore, and with everyone needing weekends off now and then to live that elusive thing commonly referred to as a life, we are pretty stretched. I would say that any fair-sized debate division needs a couple of warm bodies, and I would suggest 3 if you throw in MJP. There’s ballots to enter and rooms to find and pairings to double-check and judges to assign and problems to solve and complainers to deal with and ballots to push, and some of it is miserable scut work and some of it is challenging intellectual fun and most of it is time-consuming. And with our limited number, we need to have people we can call on to help out. Maybe not to throw off completely the chains of coaching and judging (and I for one think that a lot of the latter is necessary to be good at the former, which is why I try to get in at least some rounds now and then; fortunately PF is not redefining itself every season as LD seems to), but to join us a few times a year not as just a trainee but as partner in that weekend’s team. This year we’ve had a couple of newbies in there, and it’s worked out well.

The requirements include a good eye for detail, a love of music (I refuse to tab in silence), a sense of humor, and innate curiosity. A nice touch with a computer helps, but it’s far from essential. Plus there’s chemistry, as in, if you’re going to work with someone nonstop for an entire weekend, maybe weekend after weekend, you’ve got to enjoy one another’s company. (I would say that the upcoming DisAd14, where a bunch of us are going back down to WDW, indicates how that’s working out for us.) But more than anything else, the basic requirement for good tabbing is a desire to make a good tournament, whatever that means. I know that I have often bit people’s heads off, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly, but at least I want a tournament to run well. Moving the rounds is the top priority in that. Plenty of other things are important, but good rounds going off in a timely fashion is what brings people back to a tournament year after year. Everything else is just gravy—important gravy, but gravy nonetheless. That means that the novice PF round is every bit as important as the high-pressure MJP VLD round, despite not being as intellectually stimulating. There’s that sense of a job well done, and that’s what we’re looking for in new staff, the desire to do that job well. That precedes all other aspects of tabbing.

Come to think of it, mentioning as I did above the biting of people’s heads off, that may be the most noticeable thing about this year’s Gem compared to last year. I can recall three serious head-bitings-off last year, plus one total nuclear kerfluffle, while this year, there were none, or at least not truly serious ones. At least not by me, and I don’t think by anyone else. This is not a sign that any of us are mellowing out (wouldn’t you love to read the farewell emails I sent to the teams whose judges didn’t show up Sunday?) but that the tournament as a whole ran quite well.

It almost makes me want to do it again some time.

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