In which we say nothing good about a particular tournament

Forgive me for disparaging the world in which we live, where UKy manages to conduct a Middle School TOC. Qualification, I gather, is simply a matter of paying an entry fee. Are public middle schools paying for this, for 11-year-olds to fly to Kentucky for the weekend? I doubt it. It’s parents who believe that this will somehow improve their students' chances of, well, getting into those Ivy League colleges. You can look at the entries on tabroom.com and make your own judgments.

I love the idea of middle schoolers learning the art of debate. I do not love the idea of buying their way into an imaginary elite. Have I not ranted endlessly on the idea of local debate at appropriate levels versus the $ircuit? And now we have a junior buy-your-way-in $ircuit? Feh.

‘Nuff said.

Now that my season is over, I’ve begun devoting time to polishing up the Tournament Toolkit. While there are a lot of documents already available, there is a big missing piece, contained in the presentation I gave last year at the NDCA. It only exists in a PowerPoint presentation, and as far as I’m concerned, PowerPoint is the Middle School TOC of communication. I hate PP presentations, which are coin of the realm in the business world. It’s not the presentations per se, it’s the clumsiness in which they are handled. If you want to send me a memo containing two sentence-long pieces of data, don’t send me a 30-page PowerPoint. And if you want to give a formal presentation, don’t stand up in front of me and read your slides aloud. Occasionally someone does pull of a good PPt presentation, but it’s rarer than the stinkers. So it goes. Anyhow, much of value is hidden in my own presentation, and pulling it out of PowerPoint is virtually impossible, because the notes on the screen were simply jogs to me to elaborate. The bullets were aimed at me, not at my audience. My job now, as a result, is to write up the material that remains, at the moment, in virtual memory only. The first of these was the three most important things a tournament director must know. Although, thinking about it, I decided that the thing to kick off with is whether or not (and why) you should run a tournament in the first place. Which means reordering things on the website.

This is the sort of thing that keeps me busy on rainy Saturdays. That and the Hephaestus level of Bioshock, where I finally gave up and googled how to release the nitroglycerin. You can follow the flow of the toolkit on its Facebook page. As for the flow of my gaming, you’ll just have to imagine it. (Attendees of the Kiddyland TOC$ will no doubt prefer that I spend all my time releasing nitroglycerin and keep my opinions to myself. That will be the day.) 

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