The second theme of the well-tempered tournament is the tab room. (Forgive me two entries in one day, but I'm on a bagel.)
Needless to say, I am found mostly in tab rooms nowadays when there’s a tournament to be had. This does not come from fear of debate, but simply from evolution. The longer you’re around, the more likely you’ll end up working behind the scenes, if you are so inclined. When I first started helping out in tab, it was at MHLs, and they were still being done on index cards; real old-timers like to regale comparative newbies like me with tales of doing invitationals on index cards, taking up entire gymnasium floors with the pairings and, no doubt, barely making the things happen even remotely accurately. When I started, the tabbing software was Mac-based, and touchy. People would literally massage their machines while the bits and bytes of the pairings were assembled and printed, because the slightest sand in the programming oyster inevitably led to [I can’t imagine where this metaphor is supposed to be heading, but the point I’m trying to make is that all hell would break loose more often than not, so if you have some way of cleverly saying that, have at it]. The software was much more stable after it was ported over to the PC platform, but even today it’s still occasionally touchy, as I have often remarked. But the problem is, it doesn’t look touchy. It looks as easy as pie. Enter the data, press some buttons, print up the schematics, hand out the trophies.
If only.
It has been said, accurately, that around here we have something like a floating tab room, with the same people alternating through it week after week, and this is true. There is nothing you can throw at most of these people that they haven’t seen before (especially now that we’ve gone through the 96 Tears episode a few weeks back). When a problem comes up, someone knows how to solve it. When I first started going to tournaments, there was inevitably at every tournament a point where everything went into suspended animation, where the computer ate the data or something, and everyone just sat around waiting for someone to fix it. Often that meant reentering skadoodles of data while the parents sent out for another round of debate ziti. Those moments nowadays are rare. Even when one of us magically erases the first five rounds, there’s a backup handy on a flashdrive, and even a second computer. We’re always ahead of the game. You can trust us on this stuff.
So the first thing you need to do is have an experienced tab room. And you have to understand that you, as the tournament director, will have little or nothing to do with the tabbing of your tournament, except during the break rounds. If you’re like me, at a tournament you are exhausted before it starts, and you spend two days running around trying to be everywhere, putting out little fires. You have not only no time for tab, but no ability at it, even if normally you can do it in your sleep. Your brain is on hold, while the tab staff does the thinking for you. This is as it should be. I’ll do it at your tournament, you do it at mine. Works like a charm.
In my case, of course, there were two tab rooms. JV and la Coin at the high school running PF and VLD, and Mr. Bacon down at the grammar school running NLD. Two different businesses, actually, with different sets of issues. But here’s the bottom line. These are three people I would trust with my tournament. These are three people I did trust with my tournament. There are a few other people I know I could confidently ask as well, but that number is small. Sabrina and Kaz have been in there for me in the past, and I’m sure will be in there again at some point in the future, and Rose JT used to be the cornerstone of the operation (because we needed someone to complain that the high school library was too cold), and I’d put O’C in there in a minute if I didn’t want to torture him by having him judge declamation rounds in the middle school (never telling him that we don’t have dec, and there is no middle school). But in the event at hand, as I say, it was Joe and Lynne and Michael. I never worried for a second about what they were about. If you’re a tournament director, you really do have to be everywhere at once, but one place you shouldn’t have to be is tab (except, as alluded to above, during breaks). But to be honest, it’s not because these folks can run the software that I have confidence in them. It’s because they can run tournaments that I have confidence in them. A tab staff isn’t about pressing the buttons. It’s about making the tournament happen the best way possible.
I’ll explain how tomorrow.
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