What really happens at Districts

You can run just about any tournament the way you feel like running it. It will succeed or fail on its own merits. But a Districts tournament must run according to the rules established by the NFL in 1807 (updated for the new technology -- the invention of the Cyrus reaper -- in 1834).

Every piece of information you receive from the participating schools must be copied over to a card. This is not the worst problem, because given the numbers of attendees, cards make sense probably for just about any district. Even the rules governing how the rounds are set make decent enough sense. But, everything submitted to the district chairman must have more names and information and signatures than an Iraqi election ballot. And it has to be exactly just so, and it has to be delivered by camel (email or fax, since they came after the Cyrus reaper, are not acceptable), although I tend to ignore that rule and allow delivery by horse or mule, provided the horse or mule is not plugged in. The amount of paperwork that ensues during the tournament is the real boggler. I have just spent two days copying information over and over and over. My favorite example of what Ripon supplies is a spreadsheet of the cumulative points the schools get during the tournament. This spreedsheet looks exactly like the piece of paper I have to submit. And it has the exact same amount of functionality. Don't these people know that spreadsheets can do arithmetic? Don't they know that if we enter it once into the computer we won't have to enter it a hundred times again because there's such a thing as copy and paste? Do they really want to read my handwriting?

Oh, well. The tournament was okay, I guess. Who knows, because I spent two days writing up stuff. There were some noticeable great moments in forensics, however. To wit: the sight of all that candy table money sitting unattended while Craig when around getting people to sign petitions allowing schmoozing to be recognized as an official NFL event; the sight of O'Cruz walking around my house with only a single thought in his head, "All this crib and no camera"; the sight of a good half dozen parent judges coming into the tab room and saying, "I don't know nothin' about birthin' no PF"; the sight of the APs with their rifles aimed out on route 9, waiting to ambush any bus arriving before 2:30; the sight of In School Suspension kid reading Buffy novels; the sight of all those policy teams when they read the names of their judges; the sight of everyone leaving on Saturday... Of course, I did spend a couple of more hours today on paperwork, but now, it's over.

And what's next in my exciting life? Evaluating at-large bids. Whoopee!