In which we debrief a bit on the Pups, and castigate the universe of varsity judges in general

There must be something about the first big tournament of the year. There has to be one kerfluffle somewhere to make it official. Sometimes the fault lies in our stars, other times in ourselves. When in the midst of said kerfluffle, I have found it best to blame Canada.

At the Pups, it was one of the rounds Saturday. It just wasn’t working. It came out odd, and when we started to fix it, it kept getting worse. I’m not quite sure why it came out wrong in the first place—CP says we did X but I don’t think so, rather the results of whatever we did looked as if we had done X, but that is neither here nor there—but wrong it was. And here’s the dilemma. When something goes kerflooey, you have to fix it. You choose your fix method and go for it. We probably took a longer fix method than the one we should have gone with. CP says just nuke the whole thing and start again. The problem is, once you’ve invested a bunch of time fixing what, on face, simply looks like a sort of problem, and then other problems arise and you fix those, a bunch of time has gone by before you realize you should be thinking of nuking, which is never your first thought, and by that point, you're most of the way through with your bandaids and lollipops. I mean, we did fix the problem our way. If we had thought to at the start, i.e., if we had recognized the depth of the problem, we might have gone in a different direction. We didn’t. Maybe in the future we will. I don’t know. Those Canadians are a wiley lot.

The upshot was once again eating into time that should have gone to the run-off. (There were no big issues on the JV side, as there was an open slot in the morning for them and we just moved their first break round there and went along as planned after that.) Last year we paired a single-flighted runoff that people didn’t like, and so, lesson learned, we just moved the run-off to the next morning. And you know something, it wasn’t all that terrible. We spent Sunday glued to our seats putting out all sorts of rounds, but with a couple of exceptions for schools who haven’t had a mutual 1 since the Eisenhower Administration, it was picket fences almost all the way. I have a sense that if people get what they perceive as satisfactory judging from start to finish, they will prioritize that as the most important thing a tab room can do, and while they might get antsy waiting for us now and again, if when the round ensues it’s the round they want, they won’t be terribly unhappy, just mildly irritated. Well, let me tell you, we’re not thrilled when things go wrong in tab either. We’ve got to dig in one way or another and usually do some incredibly tedious stuff to get things fixed. We are not, as you might suspect, sipping our margaritas and looking over at the computers at the other side of the veranda and idly wondering if the Mets will win their division. Let me put it another way: we didn’t run Sporcle once this weekend. That, I think, says it all.

As it turns out, we kept to paper ballots. I don’t regret it. Honestly, we didn’t have the staff necessary for building control of an e-ballot situation. And on outrounds day, putting that ballot into some judge’s hot little hand is the best way to know what’s happening, especially if that hot little hand isn’t there. Marty P was rightly wide-eyed at the effect of a judge not showing up. The computer spits out mostly pretty good judges. Then we spend some human time improving it, until we think that we’ve got a beautiful schematic with perfect pairings. And then the 1-1 doesn’t show up (never for a good reason) and all the extra judges are too bloody—what? Selfish? Lazy? Incompetent? Dumb? Pick one (or more)—so we have no choice but to push the ballot to the only unstruck soul, like a 4-2. As Marty said, usually these judges are the students who a year or two ago were complaining about bad judges. As I always used to tell student judges, adjudicating for the first time at MHLs, be the judge you wished you had had when you were starting debating. Many are. Many aren’t. In an activity that has given itself over to mostly college judges, you have to wonder why more people aren’t up in arms about the unprofessionalism of those judges. This isn’t a tab problem or a tournament directing problem. This is your problem. Are your judges “on their way” a half hour late to a judge call? Are they “in the building somewhere” or maybe conflicted against that student, and, “oh, I guess I should have told you that earlier”? Do they have bogus phone numbers on their tabroom accounts? Can they say “Nobody blasted that” with a straight face more than once at a tournament? I’ve already spent plenty of time railing against the activities’ adults abdicating responsibility to their college students on an intellectual level. On a practical level, it means sloppy tournament practices become the norm. In other words, you’re getting what you pay for.

Not all judges are unprofessional, of course. But let me put it this way: for one of our judge calls, announced well in advance, not a single judge was in the room at the appointed time. Not. One. Single. Judge. This being an outround, it means that all the obligated judges (aside from the hires) were from the top schools or, better put, from the schools with the top debaters. Impose fines? Sure. But money can’t judge debate rounds (per Sodikow via McGrory).

Ultimately, I don’t care. My job is to put ballots into the best hands possible. It’s someone else’s job to determine whose hands those are. If the best hands turn out to be the only breathing body in the room, so be it. You only have yourself to blame. Canada isn't going to take the rap on this one.