Coachean Life, Time, and Sports Illustrated

I won't comment much on MB's last point, on program retention. It is certainly a concern of the MHL, which I co-direct. We exist for younger debaters, and are running a free workshop next season, with material for new coaches, plus we will be offering the first year free of annual dues for new member schools. We're doing our bit, in other words, which says it all...

I hate to give away the trade secrets, but this last bunch of entries, commenting on Mike Bietz’s Rostrum article, were pretty much all written at once, and then strung out as daily entries. I don’t do this to make myself appear busier, but because I try not to overload this blog with endless entries if it’s not necessary. It’s one thing to bloviate at length about something that actually requires lengthy bloviation—I do not underestimate the attention span of the VCA when an attention span is necessary—but another thing altogether to go on and on about a lot of different things at once in a medium that generally relishes brevity. My guess is that the average member of the VCA pops in, reads a little, and then goes elsewhere, using RSS (if you’re cool) or whatever (if you’re just sort of lukewarm). The original Bietz article covered a lot of interesting areas, and I wanted to touch on all of them meaningfully, one at a time. That done, we can get to the bottom line.

The thing is, as the article clearly stated as its core message, that coaches simply are not communicating as they could, and perhaps should. One could theorize why until the Guernseys return to the roost, but I’m not sure that it really matters why, unless the solution is tied to the cause (that is, if they don’t communicate because they’re all computer illiterate, then suggesting a literate computer solution would not be much of a solution). My sense is that it’s a combination of things. Yes, they are merely average when it comes to computer skills, or maybe better put, computer interest. There is nothing about being a debate coach that connects to being a computist. And there probably is a natural fear of spilling trade secrets, not so much in “how to coach” as in giving away some strategic edge that belongs with the team rather than the world. I certainly would not want to be perceived by my team as giving away their ideas, but at the same time I see nothing wrong with sharing ideas in the first place. One has to tread gently here, but one can tread. I think the real issue is, simply, we have no place to do it, not that we don’t have the fire in the belly to want to do it. The institution that, naturally, should be underlying this is the NFL, but, of course, they don’t. Or if they do, they’ve hidden it so well that they might as well not. They do provide plenty of stuff on their impenetrable website, but when you click on “community” there’s no sublinks. It does take you to some page where it asks you to sign up for something, and some random clicking brought me to this monstrosity, redeemed to some extent by Ella and Louis in the video, at least. For all I know, this is, indeed, what we’re looking for, but I seriously doubt it. NFL is mostly about their annual tournament. My history with them as the world’s worst district chair did nothing to dissuade me from this opinion.

Bietz is Mr. NDCA these days, and reasonably speaking, everything I’ve seen from NDCA (I’m not a member) gives at least lip service to building community. My guess is that they want to go further than that; I can’t imagine what other purpose they’re supposed to serve. In lieu of any viable alternative, then, let’s say that whatever we do should be through NDCA.

As I’ve been blogging about all of this, people have been suggesting some forum software, including bbpress, invision and vbulletin. I’ve looked at all of them, and if we absolutely had no choice but a bbd, then bbpress looks like the one to go with. But I’m not excited about bulletin boards slash forums (although at least bbpress does feature some RSS). I have never found these sort of forums that useful because it is so easy to miss something. There’s no center to them, no focus. And I have to admit that much of the commentary is mere noise (some people would say, rightly, that most commentary on the interwebs is mere noise). Meanwhile, NDCA also has their listserver (and thank you to whoever got rid of all the addresses in the digest), but an active listserver can quickly become a pain in the patootie, as any of us old ld-l folks can attest.

I would propose a different solution, sort of based on blogging. What might work is a sort of virtual publication. It would be managed (presumably by MB). First, we request volunteers who want to be writers for this publication. One can canvas the usual suspects. Then we publish an article by one of these US people on something, let’s say, #2 on the Bietz inventory, research and evidence. The article is then distributed from a blog slash webpage (with RSS available). We prod people to respond, but not just in comments but in response articles. In fact, we could even suppress comments altogether. Our managing editor then moderates and publishes the responses (and, if necessary, prods other US people to make those responses). Using the normal tools of blogging would allow us to tag the articles in archives, but I would also suggest that, if we get something good going, with agreement, we put together greatest hits (like I do here), maybe making pdfs of the good stuff aggregated from different sources.

Thoughts?