BBv3.0

The Big Bronx is not back. I can attest to this first hand. I used to attend the Big Bronx tournament. It was pretty good, in its heyday.

The tournament that took place this weekend is a whole ‘nother animal. It’s not merely Big Bronx rebooted: it’s Big Bronx version 3.0 for a new millennium. It was not pretty good, it was the strongest tournament Bronx has ever run. Let me put it this way: the 4-3s were all pretty much bid-worthy. The 5-2s were epic. I don’t even want to think about the higher brackets.

Putting this sort of tournament together requires a couple of things. First of all, you’ve got to have judges. If you’re going to get on an airplane, you want a certain level of adjudication that is professional, predictable, and readable. This is not to say that you love all the judges, but you can strike enough of them that you don’t like, and rank all the rest in such a way that you are unlikely to get them in a clutch situation. But here’s the key: there have to be enough of them that only the strong judges ever get their hands on you if you’re in any sort of jeopardy, including the presets. With the number of judges at BBv3.0, hired by the tournament, we were able to place ONLY A judges in the presets, except for the tiniest number of Bs (who certainly looked like As to me, but I was only following the rankings of the community that Anjan and I had struggled over for hours.) After the presets, it was a slam dunk: only As in all the down-2 and down-1 rounds. As the day progressed, only As on all the top three brackets. While this meant that a handful of lower-ranked judges were storming the tab room begging for a round (which ‘ardly ever ‘appens), from the debaters’ point of view, this is as good as it gets.

The second thing you need for this sort of tournament is a machine capable of processing about 500 kids and the attendant number of judges, coaches and innocent bystanders. This is problematic at any tournament, but the issue at Bronx Science is that the building is bigger than downtown Peoria. Making things run in a timely manner—keeping the machine oiled and operating—is an absolute bear. What this takes is, mostly, a team, i.e., students, oiled and stoked to work intelligently. They’ve got to know to get rounds started and to get rounds ended and to get the ballots to tab. At a lot of schools if there’s a problem I can just mosey out of the tabroom and get the missing ballot from the classroom down the hall, but at Bronx, I would need whatever is the equivalent of Peoria’s public transit system. Or a team that knows how to do that job. It wasn’t easy, but the Bronx team figured it out amazingly. Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. Let me phrase that another way: Saturday, we were ahead of schedule. A seven-round tournament, with a runoff. Ahead of schedule. Amazing. Kudos to the Scientists: they did the job!

Even I managed to get into the swing of things. BBv3.0 is a rather serious, complicated tournament, and I wasn’t goofing around with silly stuff on the schematics or anything, not because I couldn’t but I didn’t have the inclination. It was neither the time nor place. I was even obligingly providing O’C with pdfs of the schematics to post on WTF! When has that ever happened?

Of course, the thing was exhausting. For me it started on Thursday and went through some pretty short nights up through Sunday. By Sunday, needless to say, things were on automatic and we were listening to Ukelele Ike songs on the MegaPod, but I have to say, I was pretty pooped by the time it was over.

Bottom line? By me, BBv3.0 has arrived. It has met the standard for top national tournaments by any measure. It has added its own spin to that standard. It treats the participating students with respect and enthusiasm; it treats the coaches with similar respect and enthusiasm. (Crab legs in the judges’ lounge? Great googly-moogly!) I’m even thinking of going again next year.