Pups 08

So, sez you, how was Yale? At the risk of jinxing it for all time, it was pretty good.

We got the Friday schematics and ballots over to the assembled multitudes at the round one start time, which means a few minutes late, but mostly this was because we weren’t in the same building as registration, and changes took a few minutes to get to us. Plus, there were strikes to enter. (NOTE TO WHOEVER YOU ARE: When you fill out a sheet for your team strikes, as a general rule, entering the name of your team on the sheet is what you might call helpful to the tab staff.) As always, rooms were at a premium Friday night, and debaters were scattered to the four winds, but there were no bizarre incidents, space was found for everyone, and round two went off roughly on time and got back roughly on time, and there you were. We did have to impress (the second definition in Web) a few myrmidons (including the legendary Michael known to one and all by his last name, which isn’t Michael, which meant that when we addressed him, he didn’t know that we were talking to him. Of course, I kept calling him Richard, but at least this one time my dysnomia wasn’t the issue it usually was. At the point we found out his last name was Zucker, none of us ever had a problem again. Zucker is just that kind of name.)

Day two was, as last year, at Hell House High School, which is the size of downtown Minneapolis. I was there a tad early, but let out an appropriate sigh of relief when the Pups arrived in force at 7:15, driving camel after camel laden with hot coffee and doughnuts. We set up in our tabroom venue of last year (where anorexia and latose [sic] intolerance are listed as grooming issues) and let the games begin. We put out Varsity first, with JV hot on its heels. For the most part we kept the judging pools separate, but it was nice to be able to push varsity judges on JV ballots occasionally. Of course, when you’re isolated as we were, with nowhere for judges to drift off to, pushing isn’t much of an issue. On the other hand, this particular tournament did seem to reach a high tide mark in vomitage. If one person wasn’t spewing, another one was. A few people demurred from attending rounds as a result, but the general consensus among the hurlers was damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. It was like a really bad Gallagher concert. JV and I stayed in tab with the door locked, letting in only good old Zucker and assorted other Pups (e.g., Jeff, Pam, James, Shaina—if you know who these people are, you know the tournament management was in excellent hands).

From a debating point of view, tabbing was joyful. Every down-two round had an A judge. Every down-one round had an A judge. After round three, every undefeated had an A judge (round three just has two many downers, to wit, everyone who isn’t undefeated, and unless a pool is all A judges, you’ve got to move down a bit on the food chain). Anyone who wants to complain about the judging at Yale should found their own Ivy League college and give it a try for themselves. Unless, of course, you’re an A judge, which meant that we worked your little tail off. But you were there to judge, not to sit around in the judges’ lounge playing tiddlywinks (which the Sailors had no idea what it was, by the way, when the subject was broached at lunch Friday; they’ve obviously had deprived childhoods).

NOTE: If you strike in varsity, you get a runoff of that same strike in JV. If the problem is a school conflict, fine, but if the problem is a preference issue, not so fine. There is no reason why JVers can’t be thrown to the sharks. We need to figure out a way around this in the future (short of creating entirely separate divisions, which can easily be done but which may not make sense for registration purposes). At Bump I have created totally different pools with unique obligations, so that won’t be an issue. NOTE SOME MORE: I can’t find a way to mark judges as needing best-venue rooms, but then again, even with marking this for contestants, we managed to find a different way to screw up AE’s rounds one right after the other; we were very creative that way.

Day three was back on campus, and at least the day was occasionally dry, as compared to the rains of Friday and Saturday. At this point we were running only breaks, and we just moved the hell out of them, and we managed to finish before the awards ceremony; JV is good at keeping people from dithering when they should be judging/debating. I think we continued to keep excellent panels all the way through, which I point out not as some tribute to our tabbing skills but as a reflection of the high quality of the pool in general. Some very good hires, some very good coaches, all that sort of thing. It was something like 142 people in the field, if I remember correctly, plus about a hundred JVers. And this time we had good old Zucker (and a bunch of other Pups) double-checking the rounds in a timely manner, so we (I hope) minimized tab error.

All in all, a good weekend on the technical side. Tomorrow, most likely, we’ll talk about some other stuff, like the food.