A coach's mind is a terrible thing to waste

I learned a lot last night.

First of all, nobody wants a seventh round at Princeton. I have this on the authority of both the Panivore and SuperSquirrel, who told me that, to be more specific, “nobody wants a seventh round at Princeton.” Nobody? says I. Nobody, they insist. Everybody doesn’t want it. Everybody has discussed it at great length and come to this conclusion. Why doesn’t anybody speak up in one of the bazillion venues I offer them, says I. What venues, say they. You want them all commenting on your blog? How about commenting somewhere, I suggest.

My thought is that nobody, everybody and anybody need to get together and agree to something.

I gather the issue is one that CP and I discussed between ourselves, which was whether the nature of a tournament somehow played into a tournament’s math, and we didn’t go far with this. There seems to be an unfortunate acceptance of some tournaments having a lot of rounds and others not having a lot of rounds, entirely tied to bid-ness. As the VCA well knows, and for that matter as the Sailors well know, each tournament exists for its own sake, not the sake of something else. Aside from the qualifiers for CatNats and NatNats, every event we attend we attend because we want to be at that event. We want to gain experience or maybe take some tin or have some fun or whatever, but each tournament needs to stand or fall on its own terms. Think of it as dating. You can date people all your life as a process of evaluating them as a mate, and dump them the second you learn that they aren’t going to marry you, or you can date people all your life and have fun with them and then, someday, you might marry one of them. The latter is highly preferable to the former (and will both get you more dates and a more likely compatible spouse). So I go back to the pure math. Tournaments, standing alone as they do, need to break a reasonable number of its participants. This means a certain number of rounds, and possibly runoffs if the stakes are high enough. This has always been one of my biggest objections to the NY State finals, that they only have four rounds in what is a high-stakes (state championship) event. That’s just not enough. There seems to be some logic in attempting to achieve the paradigm of lose two and break. That is, at any tournament, we should try as close as possible to break all the down-twos. If we can break them all, we’ve hit the ideal. Since often the ideal is unattainable for practical reasons, we aim to get as close as possible.

Other things I learned last night is that when I talk about Chris everybody looks at me like I have a hole in me head. CP and Palmer, on the other hand, are like old friends to them. Additionally, Sailor freshmen don’t know an economic sanction or a foreign policy from a beached whale. And none of the Sailors (spoiled as they were by the audio version) realized that all the coaches names in Nostrum are anagrams. For that matter, some of the Sailors also still labor under the assumption that I wrote Nostrum, whereas I was merely the go-between for Jules and the Nostrumite. And Zip did not know which Beatle’s first name is James.

Interesting night.