In which we remember index cards

Beats there a heart so cold that it doesn’t get all warm and mushy at the thought of novices?

Saturday was the first debate CFL, which usually hosts a lot of folks who are debating for the first time. In Days of Old, this event was one weekend, and the Mid-Hudson League First-Timers’ Event was either before or after it, as often as not over in Newark. The first time I ever tabbed was at an F-T, back when it was on the Saturday of the Bergenfield tournament. It was all done on index cards. Unfortunately the pencil hadn’t been invented yet and we had to open a vein and drip our blood onto the cards and write the names with pointy little sticks. Richard Sodikow was the Grande Fromage of the operation.

We run the Regis event in a truly old-fashioned style, to a degree by choice, but also by necessity. The wifi isn’t up to the prospect, apparently, and I can vouch for that because, when I was near the auditorium, the internet was dead to me. But paper ballots also remove one potentially confusing item from the agenda. There are often a lot of new judges; it’s hard enough getting them to find the tab room, much less create a tabroom account, etc., etc., etc. We used to do four rounds, because I was very clever and could make it happen, but cooler heads prevailed and we went back to three, as more sane overall. The hardest thing about tabbing is the large number of teams from Regis and Bronx. Given that we have mostly judges from those schools, pairing becomes a process of doing the best you can not to have too many same-school matches, and engineering that the third round allows as many people as possible to hit in their (lagged) bracket. It keeps you busier than you might imagine. It’s not quite the same as hitting the scheduling button and watching it happen with a smug expression on your face, as if you were somehow responsible for the whole thing.

Needless to say, given the venue, PFers far outnumbered LDers. But even despite the venue, that’s true everywhere around here. JV was saying it about the Scarswegian registrations, and I certainly see it with Princeton. At Wee Sma Lex, LD barely raises its furry little head above groundhog level in comparison to New England’s thriving PF universe.

Unlike the folks still coaching, I’m off the next couple of weekends before Scarsdale. Sleeping in will be a high priority.