Registration for Monticello’s Kaiser tournament has not
exactly been gangbusters. You tell me why. I’ve gone on at length here about
how people want rounds for their younger debaters, and there’s little question
that the Montwegian hospitality is fine. It’s one of four invitationals
spanning September and October in the region. What’s the problem?
Beats me.
When I first started out, the Kaiser had two very big
divisions, one for JV and one for Varsity, for both Policy and LD. It had semis
bids for LD. The joint would be jumping. There’s no question that the death of
Policy in the region changed a lot of things, but the relatively direct
substitution of PF, which quickly gained in popularity, made up for it. (As
I’ve said often, I don’t care what kind of forensics you do; the benefits are
inherent in every event, even the ones I joke about, like Dec. It takes guts
for a first-year student to stand up in front of strangers and recite a speech
from memory. If public speaking is a requirement for most business success—and
trust me, it is—then this is what education is al about.) While there has been
some fluctuation in school participation in the region, the loss of any one program has
always been supplanted by the birth of some other program, aided especially by
the easy coachean buy-in of PF. Policy is for professionals only; on the other hand, any decent
teacher can muster up the skills to coach a PF team, at least at the starter
level. So, one way or another, the numbers of debaters in the region has
remained roughly the same. But a once-popular tournament, changing nothing, is
now no longer popular. Same staff. Virtually the same events. Same bus ride.
Again, beats me.
Here’s what happens when a region does not support its
tournaments: the tournaments go away. And they don’t reappear somewhere nearby,
the same as always but wearing a different t-shirt. There are only so many
schools with the coaching staff, not to mention the masochistic streak, to run
a big tournament. It’s not just the work. It’s the most stressful thing a coach
can do. The bigger it gets, the more you worry about, but at the earliest
moments you worry that it won’t be big enough. Tournaments cost money, and most
don’t make very much, if any. Dozens or hundreds of students invade your
campus, and you are theoretically responsible for their well-being, not to
mention supplying them with a good tournament. You need judges, food, runners,
tabbers, hall monitors, major domos, coffee, rooms—you need everything that,
during the normal school day, takes an entire administration, including the teaching
staff. And you do it all by yourself, or with your one or two assistants, if
you’re lucky enough to have any.
In other words, running a tournament is no fun, although
going home when it’s over is quite satisfying. The number of people both
willing to run one and capable of running one is extremely small. The number of
people who want to participate at tournaments, however, seems at least
constant, and with the growth of PF lately, perhaps even growing. I have no
idea where they expect to go to play their game. If you go to a couple of
tournaments a year, you lose to the people who go to a lot of tournaments a
year. If you only have a couple of tournaments to go to, whose fault is it?
One of the many responsibilities of a coach is the need to
play a role in the community beyond just getting students to become strong competitors.
That, in fact, is probably the least of it. There is no LD, PF, Policy, Worlds,
Dec, or pretty much any other forensic event in the Real World. There is,
however, community, morality, justice, teamwork, research, friendship, and all
that other stuff that is the real reason we all love debate. It is the
underlying values of the activity that make it worthwhile. And those values start
with the coaches. If the coaches do not support one another, what’s the point?
The game will be over soon enough, and you can all spend every weekend getting
on a plane to go elsewhere, because elsewhere is the only place you’ll be able
to play anymore.
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