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| "I'm not quite sure how to enter speaker points on this thing..." |
There is a certain predictability in tournament life. You
open registration, everyone signs up for the waitlist, and a couple of weeks later you clear the
decks as best you can. Shockingly, there are only so many rooms available at
most venues. I’m sure there are sites with rooms marked from 1 to ∞, but I
haven’t worked those tournaments yet. Of course, there is a more important
concern overriding space considerations, to wit, a manageable number of
entries. There is, in a sense, a perfect field size, which is defined as the
number of people required to break the exact number of people into an
appropriate elimination round. If you have 6 rounds, for instance, the field
should be the size to break all 4-2s to elims. And so forth. You can attain
this goal by having more elims, which is seldom possible unless you want a
tournament to run forever, or by limiting field size. I prefer the latter,
given that there are always room issues in play already. According to the handy
dandy Debate Mobile App, 170 in the field breaks all 4-2s to triples after 6
rounds. That sounds about right. It’s also physically manageable in the tab
room. One can conceivably have a bazillion teams in the field, but someone has
to get all those ballots into the system (and don’t tell me to use e-ballots in
PF, because 25% of the field—parents, luddites, nincompoops—will always whine
that they can’t do e-ballots on their pay phone or whatever they’re carrying
with them, if anything, and 25% of a bazillion is, according to my math, still
roughly a bazillion). So I guess one could let a tournament grow out of hand,
letting in everyone as rooms expand to meet the demand, but a tournament loses its
legitimacy if its too big. A couple of 4-2s not clearing is sad but acceptable.
Tons of 4-2s not clearing makes one question whether it was worth it to pay for
the tournament. Plus extraordinarily large fields randomize the judging in a
bad way (they let us bring 20 PFers so we brought 40 parent judges who have
never judged before, and we've scheduled each of them to be available for a two-hour
span). Large fields, in a word, undermine competitive validity. I think I would have been able to let in nearly 300 PF teams at a couple of venues this year, but I
haven’t done it. It would have made more money, but it would have made a bad
tournament. There’s a limit to how much money these college venues need to
make. Tuition at Yale, for instance, is about $45000 dollars a head. How much
more money does Pupville need?
Back to predictability. So we set a number of available
slots, and we give out those available slots, and everyone else gets
waitlisted. So what’s predictable? Well, most of all, it’s predictable that
when you send out a message that all the slots are filled, you will get a
couple of huffy replies complaining that they thought they could register up to
that morning and how dare you not let in their people. I’ve had people demand
that they speak to a higher up at the tournament. I don’t have the heart to
tell them that, in terms of up, the only things I pass along to the students
running the tournaments are the names of the problem people to be aware of. Do
people who register today for a tournament that opened two months ago really
think that the Chancellor of the university or whoever is interested in hearing
their complaint, and on doing so will demand that we dump a school that was
paying attention and actually read the invitation for their school of
johnny-come-latelies? Sigh.
CP used to have a form letter he would send to people who,
when you sent out the message that there is no more space, would demand to have
more space. It was pretty priceless, and, if you can imagine it, far above my
level of disdain for the pikers of life. I tried modifying it to Menickean
dimensions, but couldn’t really pull it off, so now I just deal with people. I
do have to admit that, after the Tiggers, I began to take on a
customer-is-always-right attitude, and encouraged the TDs to do likewise.
People paying to come to your tournament are, after all, customers, and deserve
to be treated well. But the bottom line of treating your debate customers well
is to give them a good debate tournament. That has to be the goal. Everything
else will follow.
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