There are some hearty perennials out there. You have no doubt seen them all, and heard me talk about them, but a tournament like Princeton seems to bring them out in force.
Problem:
There’s the varsity judge who picks up a ballot for round one and then walks over to me and says how he’s never judged before in his life and no one, including his absentee coach, has told him what to do.
Solution:
Talk to him briefly. Put him in novice. Find out what school he’s from. Punish that school’s coach until one of us retires.
Here’s the deal:
Schools are obligated to train the people they send to judge. In the case of parent judges, these heroic folks are really helping out the teams enormously (which the team reciprocates by turning their kids into debaters). For a coach not to train a parent, to send a parent into the fray totally unprepared, in varsity no less, is simply an indication that the coach has no respect for either his teams’ most important supporters or the tournament his team is attending or his team’s competitors, who are stuck with that judge at the back of the room. In this particular case, not surprisingly, this coach is among the loudest complainers about judging when he actually shows up. We will have words about this soon.
Problem:
The judge, for some reason or other, wasn’t paying attention. A predilection for texting rather than flowing leads the list of offenses, but there are plenty of others.
Solution:
Study the judge closely. Read ballots. Investigate. Lower the rating. Remember for all time.
Here’s the deal:
Debaters come to tab and say that such and such was going on. The thing is, tab can only do so much. The hard and fast rule is that once a ballot is submitted, that’s the end of the story, and we’ve talked about that here. Tab rooms execute the laws; they do not create them or even interpret them. It is the tournament directors who are responsible for making all the decisions, although occasionally tab will step in if we are confident of our position. The thing is, at college tournaments, there really isn’t a TD as such, or at best, the TD isn’t available because of the scope of the tournament dragging that person elsewhere. In egregious cases tab can do a few things, but we did not hire the judges, we did not bring the judges, and we have no authority over the judges. When there are problems, coaches need to come to tab, not students, and then tab needs to put their problems to the tournament director. (We heard one story that we bought into pretty quickly, for instance, that became sort of a meme for the tournament, but it turned out to be untrue in the long run.) Students love to take control of their judges, and I understand that. But if I were to take out all the “bad” judges from many tournaments, we wouldn’t have anyone left to eat the donuts in the judges’ lounge. And one person’s bad judge is another person’s god—trust me on this, as I go through the MJP for Ridge. The bottom line, again, is that if there is a problem, the coach needs to bring it to the tournament director via tab.
Problem:
Judges who do not pick up their ballots in a timely fashion, or who otherwise whine, weasel and act wascally.
Solution:
Usually none, although occasionally we find ourselves blessed with a judge who seems to work so well in the down-4 rounds…
Here’s the deal:
Certain people, the same ones every single tournament, are the last ones to pick up their ballots. As a result, the entire tournament must wait for them, because we can’t pair without all the data. This is why we push ballots as soon as feasibly possible. At Princeton, we ran about an hour behind our schedule on Saturday, more from overaggressive scheduling than anything preventable. At one point, it was nearing two hours, and the only way to get on track was for all the judges to get there and do their jobs. Most did. A couple didn’t. Those couple are the barnacles on the ship bottom of debate. Always were, always will be. By the way, these same judges complain about not having a meal break (this is a debate tournament, not a getaway spa, and besides, at Princeton the tournament was providing plenty of judge food), have no idea where their students or other judges are when they’re late, and are generally pains in the patootie in all aspects of trying to run a tournament. Unfortunately, murder is still illegal in New Jersey.
I’m not trying to make excuses here because, frankly, I know that our traveling tab room does an excellent job week after week. But tab’s job is tabbing the tournament. We may look like we’re in some position of authority, but what we really are is good at organizing things—if Vaughan and I had been in charge of D-Day, for instance, we would have stormed those beaches in late December of ’41. At our own tournaments, we are indeed in charge of things, but we don’t also tab. I mean, JV tabs my tournament and I tab his, and ditto Cruz and, back in the day, Kaz, a deliberate distinction between tabbing and directing. And when there’s a decision to be made, the TD makes it, not tab. TDs determine the nature of the tournament, which is why all the tournaments I tab are not the same. I have no control of anything except the computer and my trusty roll of masking tape, which I guard with my hardware engineer’s life. Everything else is up to the TD. Good, organized coaches have good, organized tournaments. Goofballs have goofball tournaments. Colleges have complicated tournaments. On your end, you need to factor all of this into your personal debate math. You go to this tournament because it’s good and you don’t go to that one because it’s bad. Define good and bad? It changes from tournament to tournament. The tabbing per se, however, at least in those rooms inhabited by the northeast traveling tabroom, is virtually identical. Judge a tournament by its venue and its directorship. Judge a tournament by the nature of its student staff. Judge a tournament by the quality of its hired judges, and by how effectively it insists on schools bringing their own quality judges. Judge a tournament by the quality of its food! There’s a lot of factors that go into the math. Have fun trying to figure them out.
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