Bump debriefing, part one: Judge maintenance

The first goal of any debate tournament is to get it over with. I don’t say this facetiously. Top priority is making the rounds happen with efficiency and dispatch. This means a combination of cooperative judges, experienced tabroom, and runners who literally run, with a ballot table that successfully connects those three disparate groups. If you’re in two buildings, as Bump was, that means doing it twice, simultaneously. And O’C is wrong. We don’t traditionally dispense with a final round; we had one last year, for instance. But, for a variety of reasons, we need to start that round before 9:00, as is clearly explained in the invitation. In other words, although my goal is getting the tournament over with, this is not at the expense of having rounds. But as I say, any tournament has this goal, however many rounds they run over however many days: you’ve got to get the rounds started, and finished. Everything else takes a back seat to that imperative.

That first cog in the machine, getting judges to cooperate, can be tough, depending on the competitive stakes. A lot of coaches like to prep their teams before a round, advising on what the opponent may or may not be running, analyzing the judge paradigms, maybe generally Knute Rockne gippering them. Whatever. Personally, aside from the most overarching of strategic advice, I’m not one for this stuff as I think it smacks of cramming for the exam the night before, and I wonder how useful it really is. Anyhow, there traditionally isn’t a lot of that at Bump, or at least not so much as you’d notice. Rounds aren’t often being held up while some coach goes over the opponent’s flow card by card. Which is good, since there isn’t too much the tournament can do about that, because when it happens, the offenders tend to disappear while they confer, and you can’t hustle warm bodies you can’t find (and they usually hold up two rounds, the one the coach is judging and the one the kid is debating). On the other end of the process, there’s the oral critiques, where sometimes the judges go on longer than the debate. These are usually first-year-out judges (or the spiritual equivalent) who think that the debaters want to squeeze out every ounce of their rarefied mental juice, whereas in my opinion these judges would be better off expending this same energy back home trying to get a date. The point is, the debaters want to know why they won or lost, and that’s about it; your reasons, if you gave them the loss, won’t be convincing them to change their stripes any time soon, nor will they be meaningfully dazzled by your intense and sparkling oral critique. Trust me on this. Given, for example, that most debaters ask you your paradigm and then ignore it completely when the round starts, stripe changing is just not in their bag of tricks, and don’t expect otherwise. What a tournament director can do about this is, at least, get the ballots into a runner’s hand before the endless/pointless blather commences. The worst case scenario from a run-on-time perspective is when a judge takes forever to reach a decision, regardless of how much you poke and prod; that one judge can cost the tournament serious time, and there’s nothing you can do about it. So judge cooperation, one way or the other, is the one area the tournament director is at the mercy of an outside force, i.e., the judges themselves.

Still, you can ameliorate the situation to some extent. Most of all, have a judge lounge that judges want to lounge in. Comfy chairs are nice, although they may or may not be accessible, but good grub, coffee, snacks, water, etc., are entirely at your command as tournament director and will keep your judges where they need to be when you want them. It centralizes them when schematics are released, and when a judge you have scheduled doesn’t show up, you know where you’ll find another one. Bietz suggested that hospitality, which he claimed was lacking at the Pups, is a real selling point for a tournament, and he may be right about this. I certainly can tell you where the good judges’ lounges are that I know of, and I’m always happy to go back to a place where I was treated well, and less happy to go to a place where I was not treated well. As Tolstoy said, all debate rounds are the same, but each judges’ lounge is different in its own way. As tournament director I can’t control the debates, but I can control the environment of those debates. Or more to the point, the Sailor families can control that. I enlist some generous parents to help out, and they inevitably pull through with the flyingest of colors. They’re the ones stocking and manning the judges’ lounge, not me. I’m concentrating on priority one, getting the rounds going. If you don’t have parents to do this job for you, don’t bother running a tournament, because you can’t do it yourself. You need a dedicated hospitality staff; parents who have pride in their kids and their team, are the perfect people for it.