Rebellion in the ranks!!!!

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The natives are getting restless. I expect an attack any minute. No doubt the attack will take place via rocking chair, the known weapon of choice of our Hardware Engineer. He has balked at a final act of his long and storied HE tenure (I refer to the Endorian, not DebateismylifeandsomedayImactuallygoingtodosome).

Jeesh.

So I made the final decision re Bump, and have updated things accordingly. Once again I'll sit on it for a little while (maybe JWP will come up with yet another thing we have to do), but I should have it out officially in a couple of weeks. I did decide to throw in the sixth round. I do agree with the need for the round to select the best prelim contestants; five rounds is a little dicey with 100+ people. With a TOC bid involved, one really has to do it. And that's the question. How badly should Hen Hud want to be a quarters tournament? Well, at the moment, we're the only quarters tournament in New York. My bottom line is that we owe it to the debate community. We may, to some extent, also owe it to ourselves. In my tenure, we have certainly been seekers after TOC bids, and we've sent plenty of folks to Kentucky to compete. Since Bump isn't really a "national circuit" tournament, it does in a way represent everything I think a tournament should be--for high schools, by high schools, fun, enjoyable, fed, housed and knee-deep in crappy prizes. And since it's a tournament I get to control, I get to set my personal paradigm, which I trust is also the team's paradigm, of a solid tournament. To be honest, I am pretty much enamoured of all high school run tournaments; my bad experiences have for the most part been at colleges. The high school people know the score, they know what's what, they care about each other. We're all us. So, for the moment, we will be us with six rounds.

Aaarrrgghhhh!!!