As I sat down at the registration at Byram Hills to help sign people in last Friday, I somehow managed to get my finger caught under the chair, sending rivers of blood (all right, a tiny sprinkle) in all directions. Fortunately a Bobcat (i.e., a BHHS student) was on hand, and quickly found me the necessary medical supplies (a bandaid). Thus began the season.
The BHHS Invitational was formerly called the Bobcat, after their school mascot. Zach F, the alum who directs the tournament, for some reason dumped the wild animal and went for something more quotidian, although given the prevalence of bobcats and other felines as mascots nowadays, quotidian is as quotidian does. It was a relatively small event, with 26 each in PF and LD and a mere 8 in Policy, a new division Zach thought he'd try this year. The 26s were easy enough, theoretically, except for LD because tabroom wouldn't auto-assign judges because of some bug related to prefs (which, of course, we weren't using). The good news with any universal glitsch in tabroom on a weekend is that it affects a LOT of people and gets fixed fast. For me, it wasn't terribly hard to hand pick the judges. Meanwhile the Paginator would run PF by pressing a button and then going back to writing speeches for some politician in Boston, which apparently is how he spends his free time nowadays when he isn't mowing down the competition on his new kickball team. (Don't ask.) Meanwhile Policy was a bit different than I had predicted. There were four Bronx teams, meaning that somebody always had to hit the Bronx, which was bad for any number of reasons, most especially that I couldn't use Bronx judges. So I did fudge Bronx-Bronx pairings for teams out of contention in the last two rounds. It wasn't pretty, but it made sense. And, one way or the other, the tournament happened, and no bobcats were harmed over the space of the weekend.
One thing I started during down time was a new guide to judging PF. Earlier in the year, I had read some rant about bad untrained PF judging and a plea for PF to use only experienced ex-PFers and turn itself into the same declining parochial self-important sort of activity as $ircuit-style LD. Yeah, right. The only reason PF is at astounding popularity is that it is not judged only by experienced ex-PFers. Nonetheless, while I have nothing against lay judges, I do have a thing about untrained lay judges. As often as not, schools simply rope parents into going along for the trip and throw them to the wolves totally unprepared. Actually, schools with good coaches don't do this, but schools that are in essence run by the students are almost inevitably guilty of this. (That's a subject for another day.) Anyhow, I have some older documentation on how-to for newbies, but I want to put together something new, covering evidence, a la my piece on doing e-balloting (http://www.jimmenick.com/vault/goodejudge.pdf). So over the weekend I wrote up some material on evidence, and passed it along to the Paginator for his input. I hope to have something ready to go by Big Bronx, which was where I introduced the e-balloting piece last year.
And, thanks for asking, yes, my poor finger still hurts. Oh, the pain of high school forensics!
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