Districts is the most amazing of tournaments. You arrive on Friday morning and start doing paperwork, and at 5:00 Friday you stop doing paperwork long enough to announce who won what, then you eat Indian food and go home and collapse. Sunday I should have got everything ready to send to Ripon but I just didn't have the energy. Instead, we went down to Westbury and picked out the Little Trooper.
Looks to me as if he'll be terrorizing debaters before you know it. He's due to arrive at the chez toward the end of April.
Anyhow, back to Districts. First, there's getting all the congress stuff started. There weren't too many changes; I moved one or two people, and somehow I left out Scarsdale's star Policy debater, but other than that, we started almost exactly on time. I gather that the cloning of an army of Joyce-Turners proved to be rather controversial. Some congressfolk, it seems, when faced with wacky stuff, respond by going into a snit. Better to handle it like a pro. Accepting it on face value is probably the best way to get past it. It's like when you have to debate someone who hasn't got a clue. Treating them like a pro makes them feel like a pro and makes you look like a superstar. Treating them like a schmuck makes you look like a jerk while making them look like victims. You will win, but at what cost?
While congress was happening, Emily and I finished coding the cards and getting all that organized. By the time congress was over, we had a very swift transition into the regular tournament. My paperwork switched at that point, first, to bookkeeping, then to loserkeeping: as soon as anyone dropped from the tournament, I entered their results onto the yellow sheets that NFL requires for each person. Endless... When I got a chance, I tabulated the congress results, although Charlie and Joe did a couple of the houses' preferential ballots. We're getting good at this. By the time we all retire, we'll be able to do it in our sleep. I also have to go through all the congress ballots and sort out who gets how many points for speaking. As always, a couple of people didn't open their mouths for 5 hours, but I was pleased to see that the Jolly Ts wouldn't shut up. Even the novices spoke their piece. Well done. And McLean and Harrison got to be best P.O.s. Excellent. McLean even qualled in congress! Good grief.
So Saturday progresses with occasionally my overseeing round creation and pretending to remember the preferences for who gets the byes or something like that, but mostly I continue to enter results. Then there's the entering of the final rounds, which is my responsibility, which I do with Kaz. Because of the all the double- (and if you count congress, triple-) entry stuff, the letters of intent must be consulted every 2 seconds. Considering that the winning duo preferred their individual events, we had to wait forever to push the first domino. I even called Ripon to doublecheck, just to make sure that the rule was, if you do a team and individuals, and you both qual in and prefer your individuals, you can do those instead of the Duo. There was a situation as the results arrived in almost every event, where there were dependencies on at least one other event. One never knows, does one, as Fats Waller might say, until the end of the end of the end. Then the awards. Since Emcee and Hush qualed in PF, and Katie and Spencer as well, and Katie and Emcee were also doing well in LD, there was lots of ba-zing and ba-zang there, and when all was said and done Ewok managed to qual. Amazing. Scarsdale was rocking all weekend, and qualled about umpty and a half mill before the final bell was rung. We got out of there around 5:30, which was a little later than usual but not terrible.
Note to self: tell these yabbo judges next year in the explanation letter that they are required to judge for the whole tournament. There is no obligation that ends when your own stinkers are eliminated. Au contraire, the fewer rounds you are in, the more likely you can judge. #(*&$^ judges!
Of course, all of this pales against the most important news, that CLG is now dating either some soap opera character or the lead singer of Aerosmith. I'm not quite sure which, but she didn't seem to be worred about any medical issues, so I'm assuming it's the former.
No comments:
Post a Comment