In which we ruminate

Twenty years is a long time. A lot can happen, and a lot can change. A lot can stay the same, too.

Chief among the reasons I’ve left coaching is that I no longer feel able to carry the responsibility of a team week after week. I’ve never been one to do what a lot of coaches do, things like cutting cards or directing arguments or, heaven forbid, writing positions and cases. That’s always felt to me like the sort of thing the debaters ought to be doing, and if I were to do it, it would be a disservice to them. After all, I’m an editor by vocation. We don’t come up with stuff, for the most part, although occasionally an editor will suggest an idea to a writer. We take what writer’s write and work with them on it to make it better. We’re a sounding board, in other words, usually with pretty good writing skills of our own that we turn to use in aid of others’ writing skills. I can make an unclear sentence clear. I can tell you when a scene is too long, too short, too obvious, too obscure, too anything. I’ve been doing this for a lifetime. If I can’t do it by now, I should be looking into a new career. Anyhow, it’s easy enough to adapt this skillset over to working with debaters. I might have an idea or two, but mostly I would try to work with them on their ideas. If they were good debaters, and this is also true of good writers, they would carefully consider my advice—always advice, never orders. They might disagree, but that’s fine, provided they’d analyzed it. In the end, it’s their work. And my goal was always that the debaters would learn to do this work, or if they already had good natural talents, which was often the case, to help them do it better.

This approach isn’t terribly competitive. Then again, I’m not terribly competitive. The really competitive students I’ve had over the years succeeded admirably, so I don’t think I held anyone back, but I never valued winning all that much. The educational value of debate that had nothing to do with debate—making friendships with new people, learning to travel, showing up prepared, chewing on new ideas, that sort of thing—were always more appealing to me. I really loved the old days when no LDer worth a peanut was able to proceed without a serious working knowledge of canonical ethical literature. I got to teach people that stuff, and I was pretty good at that. In LD, of course, the canon was long ago thrown out in favor of various reactionaries, which would make sense perhaps if the students involved already understood the canon, but to go straight from Dr. Seuss to Nietzsche or Judith Butler or whatever? Not such a great idea. To understand music, you have to first learn to play your scales. In aid of the win in a round, we’ve eliminated the metaphorical scale practice in debate and gone straight to Liszt and 13-key hand-spans. Then again, putting aside cause and effect, my going over to PF obviated the need for much instruction in the ethical literature. I may harbor a hope that eventually PFers understand that there is more to a winning position than a better card, but no one is seeing that happening at the moment. With a topic a month and maybe two tournaments at most debating it, maybe never.

There’s other things though than the nature of the debate beast informing my decision. Honestly, that was the least of it. As I’ve said from the beginning, time is a big issue. My day job becoming more demanding leaves me little time (or patience) for dealing with the minutia of running a team. Who signed up for what, reserving buses, reserving hotel rooms, adjusting and readjusting partnerships, submitting paperwork for reimbursements—very time consuming. And there’s another aspect to this, the safety issue. Twenty years and we've had only the most minor of incidents, the odd scrape here and there, and that’s about it. No major medical events, no major accidents, no major nothing. A charmed life, in other words, but that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t spend a lot of time worrying. There’s serious stress involved in shepherding students around week after week. After twenty years, voila, I made it with nary a scratch. After a while you get tired of playing this particular game of Russian roulette. I took it on voluntarily. I am in awe of those who have it as part of their job for the entire span of their careers. These folks are saints, and/or lunatics. I send them my compliments.

I wish I were leaving at a more settled time. As I’ve said, I intend to continue to work tournaments for the foreseeable future, at pretty much the same rate as before. But for a while now I’ve been moving away from things like the MHL and the NYSDCA, to let others deal with the issues of those groups. The hassles of getting the region more settled in light of the poor showings at the MHLs and the continued discomfort of two state leagues are a part of what I don’t want to address anymore. Again, too much stress and time consumption, time that I don’t have to spare. And to be honest, that I no longer want to spare. I feel I’ve done my bit as a grownup in the region. I’ve run the MHL, I created the Modest Novice, I started experiments with intermediate debaters in “Academy” debate, I’ve maintained websites and calendars and whatnot. Somebody else needs to step up to the plate. This stuff doesn’t do itself. Without regional leadership we’ll have a bunch of tournaments that work, and a bunch of weekends that will probably go wanting for lack of a vision to sort them out. We’ve got a boatload of debaters in the northeast. Keeping them debating at all levels, not just aimed at $ircuitry, is a matter of great and continuing urgency.

My personal goal is to start finding more tabbers. We don’t have many people who want to work the boiler room these days, and CP’s thoughts that we’re heading towards an automated tab system notwithstanding, we need people to run things, to make tournaments happen and then to make rounds happen. Tabbing will be fully automated when all the judges show up in their rounds on time prepared to cast electronic ballots in a timely manner at tournaments that have flawless wifi. They will probably, at the same time, have to duck all the flying pigs. So I will actively be soliciting new hands. I’ve got a couple in mind already, who have done a little work greasing the machinery, and I’ll grab them. But I’ll try to grab more. It requires a certain mindset to enjoy tabbing, and it does mean not rubbing elbows with your team for the duration of the tournament, no scouting rounds, no intense prepping, none of that stuff that a lot of competitive coaches think needs to be done. Instead you’re doing the math of prefs and balancing judge commitments and throwing more wood into the engine to keep things moving. I’m not arguing which is the better choice, just pointing out that it is a choice.

So I continue to assert that I’m not gone yet. I’ve got plenty of work to do. But aside from continuing to do the work of tabbing that I enjoy so much, and which gives me needed respite from the DJ (tabbing a tournament, for me, is a battery refresher), I have set the goal of getting my replacements lined up.

Uncle Jim needs YOU!