In which we are thinking out loud

I used to work with a marketing guy who always said, “I’m just talking out loud here.” I don’t think he understood the concept.

 

Anyhow…

 

The single versus double flight debate continues. 

 

The advantages of single flights seem to be mostly procedural, to wit, no need to move judges from room to room for the second flight, and straightforward tabbing and scheduling. In some cases, it can also mean more rounds, which can be a really good thing. The benefits, in other words, are solid.

 

The disadvantages seem to be harder to pin down. Single flights obviously means more judges, which can be hard to get. although, as pointed out earlier, there are those who believe that judges will fall from the trees next season like ripe coconuts. I question that; I am fine with likening debate judges to ripe coconuts, but not because of their ready availability. The presence of more judges, it is then argued in reply, will mean pool degradation and resultingly tougher prefs. That is, if you need all that many judges, the percentage of those in the pool who suck will be higher than normal. And finally, single flights are harder than doubles on both judges and debaters. Perhaps, but 6 single flights of LD is no different than 3 single flights of CX in terms of hardness, and no one is protesting that we should only run 2 rounds of CX in a given day. 

 

My leaning is that the harder the goal, the stiffer the rules. TOC bid at Qs or Os? Tough field caps, most rounds possible, probably single flights, MJP and obligations by the round. Otherwise, double flights, no caps, strikes and 1-3 judge ratio.

 

We’re meeting Monday to hash these things out for PPC (Princeton, Penn and Columbia). At first blush the three look alike, but digging into their pasts, one sees very broad differences. I’ve been collecting data on the three of them for the last 3 years, and that data is starting to talk.

 

I’ll keep you posted. 

In which there are flightless birds

I’m going to say that the biggest question some tournaments are going to have is the question of caps. 

 

If you previously had 240 entries in your PF division—normal at Ivies—and broke all 4-2s (54 of them or so) to a triple/runoff after 7 rounds, what do you do when you have 6 rounds breaking to doubles (32 of them)? If you still cap at 240, most of your 4-2s won’t break. The only way all your 4-2s break is to cap at 90. Dropping from 240 to 90 is pretty draconian. Not breaking with a 4-2 record is also pretty draconian. A field cap necessitates a school cap. It all gets pretty painful.

 

Of course, adding a Community/Open division at least lets you keep your numbers. With the Ivies especially, debating there and doing well has always been a feather in the cap above and beyond the bid issue. One wonders if that will hold with virtual tournaments. I tend to think so. Plus, second-years and lightly seasoned third-years and former MS stars in 9^th grade really aren’t (or shouldn’t be) in the bid hunt. In a way, they’re just easy pickings for the more sturdy bid-hunters. 

 

A limited bid division will be a tougher division, but I think that is as it should be. Still, where do you cap? Do you cap at the solid 90 for all 4-2s? Or at 130, for half the 4-2s? That latter option is a real one, especially in PF where 4-2 screws are relatively common. It sounds to me like a much better option than endless 4-2 screws. And while an unlimited C/O division might end up with lots of 4-2 screws as well, at least those aren’t screws of the bidworthy variety.

 

And none of this begins to address MPJ, obligations, single v. double flights…

 

Anyone who thinks virtual tournaments will be like IRL tournaments should say hello to the heads of the other ostriches down there in the sand with them. 

 

 

In which we are done for now with Virtual Tournament ideas

I've finished summing up everything we know so far. Check it out at http://www.jimmenick.com/vault/E_tournaments.pdf

This talks about schedules, divisions, caps, management roles, and some other stuff. It is not all-inclusive, nor is it definitive, in that you may wish to run your tournament some other way entirely. That is your prerogative. I wouldn't recommend it, but, well, it's on your head, not mine. Anyhow, there's more to come, but a lot of decisions need to be made for next season in the next few weeks. From that point of view, it's not a moment too soon.

Meanwhile, I assume you've seen the LD resolutions for next season, and the new system of selection. I am really pleased with the overall selection. It is possibly the most educational batch of rezzes I've ever seen. (The software wants to change rezzes to fezzes, but, to be honest, I've seen more educational fezzes.) Good job all. I don't know how some of them will debate, but debating resolutions is the least interesting part of the deal, if you ask me. All the education that goes into preparing for debating is what matters most. Not that I undervalue speaking—don't get me wrong. I just don't prioritize the competition. 

In which we come closer to a rubric

We’re coming into some sort of agreement on how to run tournaments next season. The NSDA finals gave some of the Usual Suspects yet more experience to draw from. I would say that our story so far includes the biggest question of single versus double flights, followed closely by the question of caps, which of course depends on the answer to the first question. Personally, I’m beginning to lean toward very tightly capped single-flighted Varsity rounds, with the resultingly high judge requirement, and looser double-flighted Community/Open and Novice rounds, not carrying the burden of lots of judges. In other words, if you want to aim for a bid, you have to want it enough to pay the (judging) price. Somehow I think that might cut out the ribbon clerks, but I could be wrong. In any case, we’ll be getting together soon to hash it all out. The goal is to present something concrete to all our tournaments to work with. For some, it will be a reality check. For others, it will remove much of the worrying, since we’re doing it all for them. And I mean that. I think about this stuff all the time. The thing is, there is no perfect solution, and arguments can be made for a lot of different possibilities. However you slice it, it won’t be easy. 

 

For those who miss complaining about the music in the tab room, please note that new tracks have been added to the playlist: a couple of k.d. lang songs (what a voice!), one Thin Lizzy (one was enough), a Squirrel Nut Zippers, yet another Delaney and Bonnie which I think finishes their run, a Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance, 3 Frank Zappa songs (including “Peaches En Regalia,” “Dancing Fool” and “Valley Girl,” the latter two of which probably will be deleted eventually, after they’ve annoyed the appropriate people enough), some rare Nilsson, some Fabulous Thunderbirds, two David Lindley, yet another Steve Earle (when he rocks, he rocks), a Big Star, a Walter Trout, a bunch of Eddie Money, and, after somehow missing this particular album completely earlier on, all sorts of songs from “Magical Mystery Tour.” We’re closing in on 2400 songs. Which is about 140 hours of music, just enough to last through Day One of most tournaments. 

 

I actually played golf twice this week, which is why I haven’t been writing here. The courses are open, they send you out one to a cart, and social distancing is a given, so why not. It’s the only thing I’m doing these days out of the house other than hitting the supermarket at the crack of dawn on Wednesdays with the other old-timers. I don’t see much else happening to break the pattern, though. Opening the various states, allowing the yabbos out maskless and witless, isn’t helping anybody. It’s not even as if the results will only affect the yabbos. They’ll get infected and pass it along to the rest of us. Where’s Darwin when you need him?

In which we analyze the Supremes

Gorsuch’s logic is, shall we say, a little tortured. The way I read it, it goes something like this:

 

Men are presumptively attracted to women. 

Women are presumptively attracted to men.

 

To discriminate against someone who is attracted to men is the equivalent of discriminating against women, and to discriminate against someone who is attract to women is the equivalent of discriminating against men. 

 

Therefore, such discrimination is discrimination based on sex, which is illegal.

 

I think that you, being of the forensician persuasion, can see the underlying flaw in this logic. 

 

Better argument, although it doesn’t really stand up to a lot of legal analysis: people are people, period, due equal rights and equal protections under the law, period again, end of story, shaddup about it. 

 

Nevertheless, today’s headline in the Times is the cheeriest news in a long time, and Lord knows we are due some cheery news. But it ain’t over. There’s still a lot of fighting ahead turning the policy of equality into reality. I mean, racial policy is set, isn’t it—in the 13th, 14th and 15 amendments, i.e., the effing Constitution, to begin with—yet that equality is still not forthcoming. 

 

Anyhow: Onward!

In which we contemplate the tin

If you ask me, the hardest thing about running a virtual tournament of any substance is going to be trophies. In theory, it's simple enough. 

• You figure out a budget
• You'll pass the cost along, of course, but you'll have to know what that cost is
• And it includes trophies, packaging and postage
• You study mail packaging
• You obtain trophies that you can easily package
• You mail them to the winners

Yeah. Simple enough.

In the normal run of things, going into a tournament you have a good idea, based on past performance, of how many trophies you will need. But past performance might not be a good indicator of our upcoming virtual season. Of course, a good rule of thumb is get the most you might need, and put neither dates nor division on them, just Groundhog Invitational Semifinalist or Chipmunk Challenge Quaterfinalist or whatever. That way, you can mix and match divisions, even speech and debate, and any leftovers are good to go for next time. But make them nice. It's bad enough that we're not anywhere in person; at least if people take tin it should be nice tin worthy of display. Remember, a lot of school administrations measure the success of their forensic dollar investment by the weight of the tin that comes home. Act accordingly. 

I would recommend acrylic, and flat. This makes them lightweight, and packable. Also, you can put really nice designs on acrylic for not much cost. 

I'd go with one size for all levels if it were me, i.e., same size for quarters and finals. Then you buy up as many envelopes (the stuffy kind) as you need into which they will fit. And remember, some schools will win a lot.

If I were you, I'd look into stamps.com. Or you can go spend a few weeks after the tournament at the post office with the clerks there posting the envelopes one at a time...

And here's the hardest part. You do have to mail them. You have to find someone to sort them, stuff them and ship them. Let's say you have 3 divisions of PF all breaking to doubles. That's 96 trophies, times two. And then there's all the other divisions. (Actually, you might want to do medals for doubles people. Medals are cheap, and quite popular.)

Oh, yeah. Where are you going to get the mailing addresses? No, they're not in tabroom. And what about programs that won 17 trophies?

That is going to be fun. But if you're prepared, and have a good team on it, it's doable. 

In which everybody's workin' for the weekend

A lot of discussion and thought is going on about how to handle things next year. One thing that is going to be problematic is the traditional two-day high school tournament starting on Friday and ending late on Saturday. The thing is, the most you can swing with a sane schedule is six rounds, two on Friday and four on Saturday. And that’s it, at least with double flights. If you can single-flight it, you’re better off, but the idea of single-flighting is almost inevitably some sort of wishful thinking unless your tournament is already established as such. They expected it at the Massachusetts finals. They’ll expect it at Scarsdale. And for a short one-dayer with upperclass judging, I probably can pull it off in the NYCFL events. (We’re thinking starting with 3 rounds at the first tournament to get noobs onto the bus, then going to 4. We’re also hoping to add policy; we’d have 3 of them.) But in the world at large, the judging for single flights just isn’t there, at least where it counts. I think some people have a vision of a virtual judge consortium where rounds are sold to the highest bidder, but even if that is a good idea—and I don’t know that it is—it would require a bit of personnel management that isn’t exactly the strength of our activity. It’s going to be more like freelancing in general, something I know a little bit about from my publishing days. Freelancers who want business have to work at getting it; freelancing is like having a job without the steady paycheck, in aid of getting paychecks steadily. (That’s a great quote. I’m wasting it here.) A loose amalgam of mostly college students looking to judge on occasion for the odd extra bucks? That’s a different thing. And you can forget the idea of judges around the country available everywhere; once tournaments realize that shifting their schedules for the purposes of attracting other timezones is a mug's game that only ends up punishing your regular guests, judges sitting on the dock of the bay are not going to want to be up and flowing at five a.m. their time at good old Bigle X or Rather Large Bronx. Ain't happ'nin'.

 

Anyhow, the point is, Fri-Sat isn’t going to hack it except for certain smallish tournaments with guests that want that sort of debate. Going Sat-Sun, on the other hand, solves the problem fairly decently. I don’t know how that will play in real life, though. I’m not so much worried about the debaters, or the LD and CX judges. It’s the PF judges that are going to be the ones most likely to balk. Then again, with decent management on the parts of coaches, resources can be organized so that the burden is well shared.

 

As you can tell, I’m thinking aloud here. The college schedule is pretty much set at this point, with 2 prelims on Fri, 4 on Sat, and elims on Sunday, with caps on some divisions if warranted. I don’t see the average HS invitational going to that (i.e., any tournament with less than a quarters bid) because it’s way too demanding. (And for that matter, there is some question about Friday afternoon rounds if school is in session. Can the debaters get home in time for round 1? A little of that will go a long way.) So I guess Sat-Sun is going to be a thing for the high schools in the region with semis and finals bids. The question is whether they are going to A) be able to get their heads around it early enough for scheduling purposes, and B) be able to pull it off.  

In which, like Futurama riders at the NY World's Fair in 1939, I have seen the future

NSDA has officially announced NSDA Campus. 

And away we go.

It remains early days for Rippin’, but their announcement is pretty gung-ho. Needless to say, the MSDL championships a couple of weeks ago was the real acid test, and Catholic Charlie and Kaz and I were all there in the trenches. The platform NSDA is using, jitsi, just works. It’s private and straightforward, and it works seamlessly with tabroom. We used it all this last weekend as our tab chat room at Byram Hills, and also for the rounds, both speech and debate. People had individual glitches, but what app doesn’t, and they were fixable. Everyone participated in all the rounds, except one yabbo who, when having problems, rather than fixing them, decided to pull their kids into their own private room on a different platform. Sigh. Some people just don’t get the idea that beta testing (and isn’t all virtual tournamenting beta testing at the moment?) requires a certain mindset other than Screw This, I’m Off to Neverland. They also don’t get that taking the first star to the right and straight on till morning does not solve the problem.

One thing that remains clear following the BH tournament is that, first, the day everyone reads the emails is the day I can announce that my work here is done (and there were only a couple of emails, so it wasn’t as if I was bombarding them), and second, the tournament that accepts independent entries is welcome to them. Lips that touch indies won’t touch mine. That will be my hard and fast rule going forward. They’re just not worth the hassle. Between their not showing up, and their lack of preparation and their lack of understanding of SOP, they suck the juice of life right out of you. I have a feeling I won’t get much argument on that, though. There will probably be plenty of virtual tournaments that will welcome anyone, which is fine if that’s what they want. In fact, I would like to see folks without teams get some chances to debate. I similarly feel that people who like to play tennis should be able to play tennis even if they’re not a member of the school tennis team. And so forth and so on, with arguments familiar to everyone by now.

The best thing about now having run 2 virtual tournaments is that I think we’re getting a real feel for procedures, which I’m working up for the Toolkit. Eventually I will publish it all, both here and on the site; so far all I’ve done is a quick stab on updating the instructions for participants, which, as noted, some people avoided religiously. Given that it’s my illustrated, laugh-a-minute material updated with a couple of virtuality notes, it’s both marvelously entertaining and it’s not even TL;DR. Whatever. Some people will never get it; it’s pointless to lose sleep over them.

Anyhow, some things on NSDA Campus remain uncertain, most primarily cost. It should cost something; bandwidth isn’t free, and tabroom.com is a busy hub. Whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t be prohibitive, and that it will be a lot less than the usual cost of custodians and the like. My guess is that the colleges that want to use it might have to pay a premium, and I feel that they should. So would John Locke, once he learned that tabroom is the NSDA’s property and that the colleges (with some exceptions, like Penn) are simply in the business of fundraising out of high school pockets for their own college business. What does worry me, but probably won’t really be a problem, is the possibility that the number of rooms available to a tournament might be limited. I think NSDA is a little worried about everything crashing around them. Probably a little more exposure and testing and they’ll get past that. We’ve already begun brainstorming other ways of handling virtual rooms if we must, but if you know a better one than an automated system where the room is built-in to the tab software, more power to you. I’ve seen Catholic Charlie on I think four different video platforms, and he looks the same every time. (If you have a platform where he looks decidedly better, on the other hand, please let me now. I’ll drop Campus like the proverbial hot pomme de terre.)

In which, as always, we say Fie to independents

Jeesh.

The problem with a tournament like the one this weekend is that we haven’t established any limits on who can register. Originally this made sense. Now, not so much. The main problem is the number of kids who registered themselves. Despite my normal position against it, this didn’t seem like a bad idea originally, because, well, covid-19, but the ones signed up for this tournament can’t follow instructions worth a damn, not to mention that it is unlikely that any adult on the planet other than me knows they’re at this tournament. Running tournaments is complicated enough without endless emails from teenagers who don’t know what their partner is doing, much less what their judge is doing. And perish the thought, when they send those emails, that they identify their “school.” Sigh. Did I really need any further reason to ban independents when the season begins in the fall? 

I’ve been beavering away at the toolkit to virtualize it. I am a sucker for sending out documentation for things, and I depend on my own files to provide the best stuff. The most relevant front end stuff, that is, how to e-judge, is completed and posted. The backend stuff is in fairly polished final draft form. One more run-through should do the job. I’m ignoring platforms in all of it. I’ve now done chats on a handful of them, and, surprise, they’re all alike, a bunch of faces staring out at you from your computer screen. The reasons to use one over another at this point don’t bear analysis, and maybe never will, given that some schools may have this school account and some schools may have some other account, end of story. I know that at the moment a lot of institutions are holding out against Zoom because of reasons that don’t hold a lot of water. People seem to forget or maybe never knew that Zoom has a background of solid performance in the corporate arena, and perceived problems with the platform are more likely a problem that you (or your IT people) aren’t technically adept enough to solve and not something intrinsic to the platform. Anyhow, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other in the trenches. Cost and access are going to be the big issues when serious virtual tournaments are a weekly thing. And I think you can rest assured that next season serious weekly tournaments, the ones run by pros and where people like to try for bids, are going to be virtual. Schools in the Hudson Valley are all looking at different ideas for classes, mostly mixes of IRL and online, that inherently preclude the idea of flying down to Rio for the Heart of Brazil Invitational any time soon. And that's just the covid side of things, which doesn’t even begin to address rampant, Depression-era unemployment and an economy going down the tubes. Schools aren’t going to have two nickels to rub together in 20-21. To paraphrase somebody on the NDCA call, nobody in forensics is going anywhere until the football team is going everywhere. Don’t run out to the bus just yet, Junior.

Anyhow, back into the trenches tomorrow morning, for the last time for a while. 4 single flights, starting at 11, over around 6-ish. (The California teams account for the late start.) Thank God we somehow managed to get a lot of extra judges. We’ve been talking about single-flighting all the local events next season, and the more I think about it, the better it sounds. 4 rounds in about 7 hours versus 4 rounds in about 12 hours. How much convincing do you need? 

In which we are judged as not quite judge material

Yesterday’s meeting of the NDCA to discuss virtual judging didn’t really accomplish much. In fact, much of it was déjà vu all over again. I remember back about 15 years ago when we had this one judge who appeared out of the mists and creeped everyone out for a while until he was escorted from a tournament in manacles by your friendly neighborhood fibbies. This started a whole discussion of things like creating shared lists of do-not-hires and tournament ombudspersons and all manner of things that seemed ultimately impossible to solve. And, well, we didn’t solve them. Most of what we said back then was said again yesterday, and, well, we didn’t solve anything yesterday either. I don’t think we will. I mean, if you had a do-not-hire list, how would you determine the criteria? Criminal history as a child molester would be easy enough. Questionable responses to identity arguments, as in possibly a racist? Not so easy. Discovering one is on such a list would not lead to happiness, and could lead to severe repercussions. Even having a shared list of do-hires is problematic, if exclusion from the list excludes one from getting hired. 

In other words, it’s all a mug’s game. 

Some tangential things were discussed, like fee schedules and things like that. It was suggested that paying by the round makes sense, as compared to IRL where you’re there for the day whether or not you judge so you should get paid for the day. That’s questionable. You’re still on the hook for the day, and available. Once you were hired, is it your fault you don’t fit in any rounds? The idea of paying a kill fee for rounds not judged and a full fee for judged rounds was floated, and maybe that’s the solution. I don’t know. No one else seemed to either. 

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that the Tournament Director’s Toolkit, which I’ve been gently updating over the last few weeks, needs some less-than-gentle updating on the virtual side. I started working on that today. Tis a bit of a biggie, but when it’s done it will give me something to fall back on when we start getting serious next fall. 

In which the bit is champed at

I have created notes on running virtual tournaments based on my vast experience in doing so, and I’m getting to put them to the test for Byram Hills this weekend. I’ve also created a rough Greetings email to go out when registration closes; there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed to the teeming millions. And I’ve also tossed together a guide to virtual tournaments incorporating a lot of what others have done before me. Given that this stuff changes minute by minute, I’ve got my virtual Wite-Out at the ready. 

It occurred to me from conversations with one of the coaches attending this coming weekend that familiarity with tabroom, which I consider a given nowadays, is not be as widespread as I would like. I did notice at MSDL finals that there were a couple of schools where all the team and judge emails were actually the coach email, which is a real rookie mistake, and often hard to detect because it defies all logic. Then again, logic is not necessarily being distributed free on the street corners yet, as far as I know, especially when it comes to tech. We expect people to be competent. But we expect too much. I ought to know. I did run a systems operation for a decade or so. Two important conclusions came from that experience: 1) Never overestimate your users, and 2) Never underestimate your users. Success in systems management is the ability to intuit whether to follow the first or the second of these conclusions.

Things have come together for the tournament, in any case. Quite runnable numbers in the debate divisions, although the couple of speech events are a little anemic. Then again, it’s a little late in the IE game for last year’s pieces and a little too early for next year’s, so that may explain that, whereas debaters in general tend to be more rabid about the whole thing, and will not only compete at the drop of a hat, but will go around dropping hats like nobody’s business given half a chance. Anyhow, registration closes tonight; I may be able to clear a couple of souls from the waitlist, provided they don’t flood a division, and then the Greetings email goes out and for all practical purposes, the games will begin.

Or as we used to say, Release the Kraken!

In which we tell Jeeves that we do not wish to be disturbed

Working on the little Byram Hills tournament next week—it’s free, it’s online, it’s posted on tabroom, and you’ve got until Tuesday if you’re interested—has hammered home something that has been hotly discussed by the NDCA TDs, to wit, the impact of time zones.

The thing is, theoretically anyone on the planet can debate at an online tournament because, well, unless you’re blocked by some totalitarian government (I’m looking at you, USA), you can sign up and there you are. As a general rule, most IRL debate tournaments draw from their own regions for obvious reasons, but some tournaments can make the claim to having a national draw, and again IRL, people have traditionally flown into them. This is especially true of the Ivies, where a sizeable proportion of the field is there for the college visit, but also of tournaments with a quarters bid or better in something. As a general rule, the attractive tournaments in the northeast draw big numbers from Florida, plus some Texans and Californians. It’s those Californians that are the problem, if we don’t pay attention to what we’re doing.

The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that virtual tournaments are very demanding in their own unique way. Sitting at a computer, either as a judge or competitor, tends to wear people out. The TD universe has quickly come to a general agreement that 4 rounds a day is enough in the CX world, or 4 double flights in LD and PF. Maybe 5 single flights if you’ve got the judging. Zoom Fatigue, or whatever you want to call it, is only one part of the deal. The other is location. If you assume that every participant at your tournament has all their own modern equipment, and an isolated environment for their videoing, and complete control of their at-home schedules, then A) you have a lot of freedom in creating your schedule, and B) you have no idea of who actually attends debate tournaments, not to mention that you’ve forgotten why we’re having these virtual tournaments in the first place. Families are at home—the whole family. Start from there and use your imagination.

(I did like that a lot of people on our local CFL call yesterday were talking about using their schools for participation spaces when the season actually starts. I've already talked about that a lot. It can help eliminate all sorts of—but not literally all—barriers to entry.)

The Byram Hills tournament was to some extent predicated originally on the participation of Californians. Golden Staters, therefore, are intrinsic to its running. The time in Malibu is now 7:35 a.m. The time in my kitchen in 10:35 a.m. So you can see the problem. For me to start a round at 8:00 a.m., I have to base my schedule on Pacific time. If I give 3 hours to each double flight, which is reasonable, that means 8, 11, 2, 5 for the prescribed four rounds. If you’re on the beach in Malibu, that is. On the other hand, if you’re at home in Queens with Ma and Pa and your brother Darryl and your other Brother Darryl and Granma Joad and cousin Orville, your rounds are at 11, 2, 5, and 8. That eight o’clock round might be something of a problem, as it is in competition with whatever Ma and Pa and your brother Darryl and your other Brother Darryl and Granma Joad and cousin Orville want to do at eight o’clock. Netflix anyone? 

“It’s eight o’clock. Do you know where your bandwidth is?”

When push comes to shove, I don’t think anyone will be adjusting their schedules to make them attractive to opposite coasters. It offers little to anyone, given that there are plenty of tournaments within a time zone or two of everyone all the time, so no one has to get put out and everyone can have plenty of geographic diversity without having to put anyone at a disadvantage. And let’s face it. For most debaters, debating at home at night is a disadvantage, and that doesn’t even begin to take into consideration judging. (“Hey, Mom. Step away from ‘Tiger King.’ You’ve got a PF round to judge.”)

Before the TDs started confabbing, Brian M created schedules that would cover every contingency, including four time zones. They’re great. But what they didn’t cover was where those rounds were taking place within those time zones. And that, people are pretty much coming to realize, is something that has to be seriously considered. 

In which we toss out the baseball

On second thought…

The conversation* so far, and it’s a good one, has suggested that one of the problems of virtual tournaments is deciding on and running elimination rounds. One of the things we started doing at Bump lo these many years ago, and which Scarsdale continues on that same weekend, is a novice division that has a bunch of rounds for everyone until they run out of steam, maybe after about round 7. Awards go to the top whatever. This gives everybody, not just a select few, a whole bunch of rounds all weekend, which is great when they’re just starting out (the tournament is in November). And when you come to think of it, at the earliest stages of one’s career, the more rounds the better. That’s how you get good. (I won’t go into the illusory aspect of novice debate, where students who start out as stars in their first year flare out in their second year because, well, as I said, I won’t go into it now.) 

So, thing one, in virtual invitationals spread over a couple of days, no elims in novice. 

Thing two, in virtual tournaments spread over a couple of days, there will be elims in varsity. The nature of the competition at the varsity level pretty much requires it; these students tend to be sharks, not to mention bids and qualifications and the like. 

Thing three, as already discussed, is that limiting varsity to meaningful numbers for breaking to elims means fewer people debate in that division. At most of the tournaments I work, we have way more candidates for varsity than we have space, especially in PF. I would say that on average I’m working on a loss of about 50% of registrants who never get off the waitlist. (And these aren’t ephemeral entries.) So we need to create a new division. I suggested yesterday Triple-A <sarcasm> being the baseball nut that I am </sarcasm>. Better yet, after a little more thought, maybe we should A) adapt the good old Open moniker, and B) to distinguish Open from Varsity, eliminate elims. This division would be open to anyone. And it would, presumably, be limitless, as rooms could expand to meet the need. After, say, 7 rounds, awards go to the top whatever, because these folks are looking to get rounds too so that, eventually, they can swim with the sharks in the Varsity division.

In other words, here are the PF divisions at the 3-day Grand Old Ivy Invitational:

Varsity, cap at 172, breaking all 4-2s, prelims Fri and Sat, elims on Sun.

Open, 6 or 7 rounds, awards to the top 16, Fri and Sat.

Novice (limited to first- or second-year students in their absolute first season [2020-2021] of debate**), 6 or 7 rounds, awards to the top 16. Fri and Sat.

I can live with that. 

*I seem to spend half my life these days in workshops or conversations or planning meetings or slack chats talking about next season and our online future.

**There cannot be enough clarity when it comes to defining novices. Last season we had multiple cases of second-year debaters in or attempting to get into novice divisions, the former of which caused some serious agita, and happened enough so that we developed an SOP to handle it. 

In which we hit, at best, a two-bagger

Here’s the problem. Virtual tournaments, for the most part, are going to be limited in the number of rounds. The biggest tournaments, the ones with octas bids in any of their divisions, are going to have to cap at a meaningful point. If you can only reasonably hold 6 rounds, and you want to break all the 4-2s, you’re at around 172. Meanwhile, a tournament like Princeton gets a field of about 240 in PF. We do 240 for no other reason than because we have room space for 240. 

On the other hand, Princeton IRL has no novice PF division, because there’s not enough room space. Princeton Virtual has unlimited rooms. Problem solved, add a novice division until RL comes back.

Meanwhile, the 172 cap in varsity meant about 70 teams don’t get in. There has been a lot of talk around the circuit about creating a new division in light of probable future caps. This would be a division with non-novices, on the belief that actual novices deserve a field of their peers. It would be a division of younger or less seasoned varsity debaters, what might in some parlances be called JV or Intermediate. Sadly, either of these terms has a slight pejorative tinge in the debate universe. Instead of being seen as a launch pad for varsity, as I think is the usual case in JV sports (“Sorry, pal, the varsity roster is all filled up this year”), it is seen as bush league or, simply, not good enough. What we would want to do is take away the faint scent of second-class citizenship in that division, and I think the name will be everything. 

I’ve heard a lot of suggestions so far, and none of them work for me. So for the time being I’m going to propose my own name for this division until something better comes along: Triple-A. Granted, this isn’t great, but it’s better than anything else so far. It has the least amount of negativity, except maybe among the avid baseball fans in the debate universe, which number, according to the last count, 7 or 8 countrywide. 

If you can do better, go for it. Until then, I'm putting together some AAA divisions.

In which we teach Siri to sit up, beg, fetch and pull Timmy out of the well

New computer up and running? Check.

Essentially I’m replacing my old Mac Mini, which over the years has slowed down to a crawl. It works fine, once it gets in the mood, but that takes a while. And honestly, who’s got the time? So what I did was take my MacBook (the 12-inch one that apparently is the most hated computer since HAL 9000) and hooked that up as a desktop, disconnecting it when I needed to travel. That’s been working great, but it is a little hinky about reconnecting when it’s been away from home for a while, sort of like a bratty kid coming back from boarding school. So when the new Macbooks came out with the good keyboards—not that the bad keyboard ever bothered me much, but I’m easy to please—I figured the time was right to get a new traveling computer, especially since I’m not traveling anymore. So, meet the new MacBook Air. I spent a while this afternoon getting it to work exactly like everything else I already have, and I’m quite happy with it. Plus ça change… On the other hand, the new Touch ID is a nice, uh, touch. 

One thing that took a while was getting Slack organized. I’ve been a WhatsApp person for a while now, but I can see how the functionality of Slack is better suited to our virtual tabbing. I’m looking forward to testing the jitsi interface, via which you go into a Slack channel, put in a jitsi command, and voila, a videochat of unlimited duration and unlimited size. Or so they say. We’ll see. Anyhow, I have a good half dozen Slack groups, which seems like more than enough. One of the things I’ve been hearing is that people are getting communicated up the wazoo these days, and enough is enough. Having had a career where if I saw another human being in any given month it was a remarkable event, whereas others around me in other divisions had more meetings than Trump has tweets, I can appreciate how some people need to communicate 25/8 while others just want to get some work done. 

What a world.  

In which we debrief on the MSDL virtual experience

I mean, I know you’re dying to find out.

This was, among other things, the first wet test of the NSDA virtual room system. And for most of the Northeast Traveling Tab Room, a first in-the-trenches working of a virtual tab. I’ll speak to the former first.

It works.

Now, on to the second thing. (No, just kidding.) I won’t go into the details of NSDA’s system of virtual rooms. I’ve got a marginal understanding of the underlying technology, and a general idea of how to use it in tabroom, but I don’t trust my knowledge enough so far to pretend to be able to explain it to others. The point is, it doesn’t really matter. In the event, you pair a round, and the system assigns them a room. Debaters and judges go into the rooms, and let fly the dogs of war. If there’s an issue, an admin can go into the room and sort things out. From my vantage point, issues were few and far between. Most people just hit their appropriate buttons, and it worked. For what it’s worth, the backend setup for tab staff to use the system looks mostly like just a couple more buttons setting up the tournament in tabroom. No big deal. My understanding is the NSDA will be using this system at NatNats, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t. I’d like to say that Massachusetts got the kinks out of it, but honestly, there weren’t any kinks beyond a few people not being able to connect because of non-unique issues on their end. 

Ain’t that just a kick?

As for virtual tabbing, there we learned a lot, or maybe we just confirmed what the early pioneers already said. First of all, tabroom remains tabroom, aside from the fact that every time you run it someone has snuck in a few new buttons without telling you about it, but we’re used to that now. It’s everything else that has changed in a meaningful way.

We had a zoom room up for our tab room conversations. That is a must (although it doesn’t necessarily have to be zoom). We learned that the fewer people in the room the better. We had LD and PF and some general staff in one room, and it was occasionally cacophonous. At most relatively large events I’d isolate LD and PF and Policy from one another (unless the same people are doing them). 

Since the system assigned rooms, we didn’t need to use the zoom breakout function. We did have room managers, though. These were people assigned to the rooms to make sure the rounds were really happening. You would think that seeing that the judge had pressed start would be enough, but I imagine there will always be judges who hit start independent of any sane definition of the word start, and that has to be accounted for. The room managers made sure each round was actually happening, and fixed the couple of tech problems that might have arisen. They reported back to us on a slack channel. 

Slack was the app of choice for all backend communication other than tabbing. Essentially it was channels for each division, plus one for general and another for tech issues. Unfortunately everyone running the jernt was in all of them, and we’d be more specific next time. Again, cacophony is a possibility.

We had a judge room and a student room for hanging out, and a manager for each. Again these were in zoom, but that was happenstance, and presumably any system would work. Given that Chrome seems to be the default browser anyhow to run any system we’ve heard of so far, a Google room probably makes as much sense as anything else. Anyhow, when someone wasn’t in their round, presumably they’d be in the lounge. Other judges could be found if a replacement was necessary. 

Finally, we single-flighted almost everything except an elim or two. That really helped. We had the time built in to get the job done. 

In the aftermath, I couldn’t be more sanguine about the workability of virtual tournaments. And I’m guessing that they will be the norm for 2020-21. After that, they can become a backup (no snow cancellations) and an addition. Personally, I don’t really see tournaments being half virtual and half in-person; something about that intuitively doesn’t gel. And I don’t see in-person tournaments disappearing, because we’re all human beings and we are social animals. But as I’ve maintained from the start, I do see a new avenue to explore not out of necessity but, when the time is right, out of choice. That is going to be fun. 

In which we remain retired

My freelance job for the DJ has concluded. I took it on only because they asked, as they needed someone with a fresh style but nonetheless an RD mindset to have at something. As it turned out, I’m not that much of an RD stylist. They have a meatier, pack-it-all-in approach, no doubt as a result of the magazine mentality, whereas I have a slower, more dramatic, let-it-play-out approach, born of my book mentality. I think the work I did for them acted mostly as a structural starter set than anything else. But, hey, it was only a few days and it was sort of fun. And they didn’t threaten to sue me for dereliction of duty, so I guess I didn’t foul it up too badly.

The thing is, having been retired for over a year, I don’t miss the DJ at all (although I do miss a lot of the people). Having started working when I was thirteen, caddying at our local golf courses, I was ready to stop when I tumbled into my seventies. This is not to say that I sit in the rocker all day, as I’ve been doing all my usual tournament stuff (until the pandemic came along) as well as various other bits of business. It’s just that they’ve been my bits of business, writing stories for my granddaughter and archiving my photos in digital format and things like that. Spending more time cooking and getting pretty good at it. Nice long daily walks to keep the blood flowing. Reading what I want to read. It’s interesting, actually. For years I couldn’t imagine retiring, and then one day I was done, and now I can’t imagine working. I have friends my age in various stages of the same. One thing that unites us is keeping our hands into some sort of real labor. They tend to have just one or two workdays a week, or they take on the odd freelance job, while for me it’s tournaments. None of us are doing it for the money (if there’s money in running tournaments I have yet to find out about it), just for the connection. If I didn’t have tournaments I might not have so completely severed the DJ connection. But I do have tournaments, and if anything, they’ve unexpectedly gotten a hell of a lot more interesting lately. 2020-2021 is going to be one hell of a roller coaster ride. 

Anyhow, so much for my little freelance moment. Short, sweet, done. On to the MSDL championships. 

In which we tackle a few odds and ends

I’ve started watching Jessica Jones on Netflix and so far I’m enjoying it. There’s something about both the narrative style and content that strikes me as very comic-bookish in a good way. As I watch it I can envision it playing out on a comics page. Just out of curiosity I went to Wikipedia to check out the heroine’s backstory. Whoa! If all that comes into play it’s going to be hard to keep up. We’ll see. I’ve also been watching The Clone Wars. It has clunky animation and a narrative that plays fast and loose with continuity, but somehow it is mildly addictive. Come to think of it, The Magicians has that same problem with narrative flow. Way too many things happen offscreen, if they happen at all. I’ve put that one on hiatus for a while. Given the almost pointlessness of the drifting plot, I won’t easily lose my place in it. I’ve still got Doctor Who on hiatus as well, come to think of it. When it went off Amazon (or was it Netflix?) I was not happy. I know there’s ways of streaming it again, but I don’t want to sign up for too many services until I’ve run out of content on the ones I already have. Amazon, Netflix, Disney+ and PBS Explore seem to offer more good stuff than I’ll ever be able to watch. I don’t want to replace my old ridiculously high cable bill with a ridiculously high streaming bill.

I recently rearranged my office space, and right now I can see a very yellow butterfly working its way around a light purple spray of flowers outside the glass doors. Used to be all I could see were the spines of my fiction books from C to G. I bring this up because at this moment I’m communicating with Catholic Charlie and Kaz about working spaces as we gird our loins for Massachusetts this weekend. Among the three of us, we seem to have enough tech to launch a cyber attack on three or four rogue nations simultaneously. Whether or not Massachusetts is a rogue nation is debatable. 

Finally, some of the latest additions to the Tab room playlist: lots of Three Dog Night, some Eddie Money who was never on my radar, some of Magical Mystery Tour that I can’t believe wasn’t there in the first place given that the Beatles were added in early, the Walker Brothers, some Nilsson rarities, some Beachboys that I can’t believe [see Magical Mystery Tour], the odd Bill Wyman Rhythm Kings track, a couple of Doors tracks without Jim Morrison, Barenaked Ladies, Elvis P [yeah, I can’t believe etc., etc.], and some Band rarities. 

And that is that. 

In which we face the future

I watched some of the workshops from the NDCA over the weekend. Mostly, of course, I stuck to the ones about tournaments; I don’t have a team, so at least that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. As the speakers went through their paces, I was struck by one thing most of all: We don’t know anything yet about our covid forensic future. 

What we are undergoing now is a paradigm shift in the classic sense of the phrase. We are finding out that everything we think we know is relatively worthless in the light of present phenomena. The past is no longer prologue. This applies to many, many things, from office work to grocery shopping and everything that underlies those things, be it supply chains or how we consume media. It applies as well to forensics tournaments, and everything that underlies those tournaments, like coaching and training and recruitment and team-building and judging. For decades we have built a paradigm of debate as, first, learning how to do it, and second, doing it competitively once we’ve learned how. All of that needs to be thrown out the window.

One thing remains true: debate ultimately makes smarter people. (Forgive me for isolating debate, because other forensic activities are also strongly, albeit differently, educational. Debate happens to be what I know best of all.) Debate training is a strong educational activity. The thinking skills that are learned through debate can be applied to innumerable other pursuits. The Newark Superintendent’s keynote address said exactly that, and explained why, budgets and pandemics notwithstanding, in the long run he will want more debate, for more age groups, in all his schools. It makes education better on all counts, in all branches of knowledge. That is core, and that is unshakably true.

What the pandemic has just begun to do, and will do more of for at least the coming school year, if not longer, is challenge how we will get to have debate in our schools. It may for some be an existential question. For others, I hope the majority, it is a survivable challenge. And, in a word, creating a digital analog to the pre-covid world is not the answer. You can’t simply take everything you were doing and now do it online. It is not that everything is going to change. It is more that EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CHANGE!!!! Every notion we already have about tournaments, which is my subject in particular, is probably wrong slash inapplicable. It just ain’t the same anymore.

All the processes need to change.

All of them.

This is where the expression “thinking out of the box” comes in. We’ve thrown away the box. Our thinking has to be new. You can’t run rounds the same way, in the same number, for the same people. Online has its own demands. Time and space are redefined. Given that Kant says that the only two a priori facts are, indeed, time and space, you’ve got some big issues here. 

Maybe one-day tournaments take two or three days. 

Maybe weekend tournaments start on Tuesday.

Maybe new divisions need to be created to satisfy possible increased demand once travel costs are eliminated.

Trophies?

Qualifications/bids?

Availability to economically challenged programs? (As Jonathan Alston stongly and correctly pointed out, online tournaments do not solve economic issues, it merely changes them.)

Socializing between teams, both students and coaches? I’ve always loved that tournaments bring different people together in a shared activity. How do virtual tournaments do that? Should they? Can they? 

My point is, the sooner we stop thinking about how to do what we did, and start thinking about how we can do what we can, we’ll be better off. My standard advice to people in the past who wanted to create a new tournament was to ask themselves why, and then to go about creating a tournament that fulfills their goals. On top of that, given my history as a systems manager, I’ve always worked with the idea that we have to give people what they need, and not what they want. As Steve Jobs rightly pointed out, if Apple had dedicated itself to giving people what they wanted, they never would have created the iPhone. If, as tournament directors, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do what we’ve always done, we will accomplish little, and run some pretty punk tournaments along the way. We have to think differently. Outside the box. In a word, we have to set our goals for the virtual tournament universe, and find the best way to achieve those goals. The main thing our goals should be is NOT to replicate what we’ve always done. That just won’t hack it. 

As I’ve said before, I’m hoping that when we come out of this pandemic crisis we will have created a new paradigm of virtual debating that will endure beyond its origins. I’m not saying that we eliminate in-person debate, but that we find a way to add virtual debate to our overall menu in addition to in-person when in-person finally comes back in force. If we can do that successfully, we will, in a word, create more debate. And, as I said earlier, more debate = more and better education. No further reason needs to be given to aim for that particular goal. But in any case, the time has come to realize that the paradigm shift is here. Throw out the old paradigms. They won’t do you any good anymore. They’re based on a reality that doesn’t exist. We are in a new reality.

Deal with it. 

In which we do some book reports

The latest upgrade to MacOS took about a month to load this morning. I’m not used to that. Made me feel like I was running Windows again. 

Two books worth talking about, in the order I read them. Lathe of Heaven is, by my definition, a perfect example of classic SF. Le Guin takes an idea, effective dreaming (where one’s dreams come true), and comes at it from every possible direction, sinking her teeth into it and then shaking it like an overexcited dog until there isn’t anything she hasn’t considered. (Was that as poorly a done metaphor as it feels? Oh, well. You’re not paying me for this.) I’ve only recently begun reading her, and I’m glad that I have. Very satisfying stuff, if you’re in the mood for it. I was discussing classic narrative styles with a friend earlier this week. Contemporary styles tend to play fast and loose with structure. This isn’t exactly new—it’s what the modernists were doing prior to WWI—but it’s no longer avant garde. It’s sort of expected. As a matter of fact, contemporary writing of all sorts (and virtually every other art form) seems to provide fast and loose handling of something. Again, it’s sort of expected. Certainly that’s the rule in SF. Read the Hugo winners of late. You’ll see what I mean. 

The other book is The Fire Next Time. So much prescribed reading on race nowadays is impenetrable academic stuff that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, the value of its content notwithstanding. This is a problem of contemporary academics, not in any way limited to racial theory. Most inhabitants of the halls of academe have lost the ability to write clearly. They are not interested in getting their message across to anyone other than those who have the same inability to write straight. In fact, they have theories about unstraight writing to justify their inherent obfuscated approach, much in the same way “progressive” debaters have theories to justify their inherent obfuscated approaches. But getting back to the point, Baldwin published TFNT in 1962, and I think it ought to be among the first books one reads on race in America if one really wants to understand things. 99% of it could have been written yesterday. Toss in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (ghosted by Alex Haley) while you’re at it. Then Mills’s The Racial Contract if you’re of a debatish bent. Three really good writers lay it all out. I would imagine that your average white student would benefit from these more than any others as a starting point. (I wouldn’t presume to suggest a starting point for students of color, aside from it not being hifalutin academia.) Educators do need starting points, n’est-ce pas?