In which we finally come up with the perfect coinage

In what has to be record-setting, I’ve gotten my first attempt from a school to weasel out of its break-round obligation—six weeks in advance of the tournament. Those of us in the tab room love when someone tries to skip out early. It inspires us, because we want to skip out early too. I would love to go home Saturday night instead of lurking around Sunday. I could be lounging in my comfy chair doing the crossword puzzle at my leisure instead of sitting in a hard wooden chair in some drafty classroom doing the crossword puzzle between interruptions of people attempting to weasel out of their judging obligation.

We got a lot of this at Rather Large Bronx. We did set up a Sunday pool. For all practical purposes, we bumped about 25 % of the judges, all of whom had no teams still in play and who were at the bottom of the pref list. I mean, they weren’t going to judge anything, so why pretend otherwise? It was a gesture of goodwill on our part. And it left us with a 50% overage of our needs for doubles, more than enough to fill in for any no-shows with a decently preffed substitute. Not that we had any subs, though. Everyone showed up on Sunday at the Bronx, on time, fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That may have been a first, at least since the days when Soddy used to sit at the door to the building and hand out the ballots himself, just praying for a no-show he could hound until the end of time. Who would have dared to face that? Anyhow, I like the idea of a standby list, if the tournament has enough judges to handle it. I don’t want to get up for nothing on a Sunday morning any more than the next person. A reasonable chance you might get called? Okay. No chance in hell? Let ‘em ride.

Still, there seems to be a general lack of understanding among inexperienced folk (and a few experienced folk) about why they need to be there if their teams are no longer in it. I think I’m going to try my hand at creating a document that explains it. I don’t know how successful that will be, since even Kaz, the greatest explainer since the invention of explaining, can’t seem to get it through people’s thick skulls when they come to tell us that they’re hightailing it out of there that they really need to stay.

Which, of course, reminds me of the classic variety of aggression shown by the traveling tab team, which we defined as passive-aggressive (JV), aggressive-aggressive (moi) and educational-aggressive (Kaz). But it is so obvious, it is so clear, it is so right, that I can’t believe it’s taken me or any of us this long to come up with it: Kazsplaining. When Sheryl Kazsplains things to people, that usually is the end of it.

In which we describe the Wilderness Years, kind of

And now we just sort of wait.

First, Princeton opened. Then, a couple of weeks later, we cleared the waitlists. In a week I’ll delete the TBAs, following a lot of hoo-ha emails reminding people to put in names. But aside from that, and checking every day to see if there’s any late arrivals to let in, there’s nothing much to do.

There aren’t a lot of bogus entries. Given that historically bogus entries have not gotten in no matter how clever they think they are, the word might be out overall. Or maybe the fact that people know I’m running the lists with JV discourages them from bothering. We have a no-tolerance policy for freebooters, because we’ve had a lot of experience with their free boots. Independent entries do nothing to enhance a tournament, and potentially do a lot to unenhance it. (Disenhance? Dishance? Dishpan hands? Whatever.) At the point where the NSDA established a definition of a real entry, why would I not follow it? We follow everything else NSDAish (except at tournaments with a CFL-only IE that follows CFL rules). Why fluctuate from that?

On fronts other than the Tiggers, we should be hearing from the Ben Franklin folks shortly. We’ve already been talking to the Columbians; they’re having room issues, of course, but it may be more serious than usual this time out. Final resolutions remain to be determined. On the high school front, Scarsdale is out of space for all its entries, Wee Sma Lex is building nicely, with PF running 3 or 4 to 1 against LD, with Policy way at the back of the field. Y has enlisted me for Ridge, predictably. So everything is about as it usually is.

Almost makes me wish I had a debate team to coach. But just almost. Almost is more than enough.

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.