Important announcement? Who cares.

Princeton was fine. Maybe some details later, but in a word, the Tigs were great to work with. There weren’t any horrible messes, but when things went mildly awry as they usually do over the course of a weekend, they handled them with concern and good spirits. Plus we learned a lot and should be able to improve things for next year. So, all in all, a good event.

Here’s the problem, though, which has nothing to do with Tiggers, since it’s true of every tournament we go to. You, the tournament management, wish to communicate with the people at the tournament. You have something really important to share with them. Let’s concentrate on communicating with the judges, who are in many respects the extended management of the tournament insofar as they are the adults making things happen, things that you in the back room are merely setting in motion. You want your judges to know where to go and what to do, which varies from tournament to tournament. That is, while I may wish the LD judges at Princeton to go to McCosh 46, at Ridge I may wish them to go to the cafeteria. One assumes that even the most arrogant of judges would nonetheless have a fleeting interest in hearing where to go and what to do. I mean, I know that the judges at Ridge, having it their head that they should go to McCosh 46, would find the results distressing.

So why can’t we make this basic transferal of information happen?

I send out email blasts, for one thing. These are directed to whoever registers for the tournament, i.e., the email address of record for that school. The emails have information of great importance to all the judges. The information never gets to all the judges. Where is the problem here? I mean, it looks suspiciously as if sending information to whoever registers for the tournament is not working. Now, is that person the coach of the team, or some myrmidon? If it’s the coach, why isn’t the coach disseminating that information to the troops? If it’s some myrmidon under the team’s shield, one still wonders likewise what that information isn’t being disseminated. I’m talking here about emails sent before the tournament starts, when everyone has email access. “Click ‘forward’,” is my implicit advice here, unheeded.

So, question number one, why don’t people pass along the information we send them? I offer some possibilities. 1) They deliberately wish to keep their judges ignorant. 2) They deliberately wish to keep the tournament from running successfully. 3) They are inept at their job as coach and don’t know any better. The VCA most certainly knows that since I am a fairly mean-spirited person, I assume that the order in which these are potentially true is 3, 2 and 1. Remember, these are emails sent days before the tournament. The excuse that people don’t have email available doesn’t hold. I mean, there’s no excuse. Simply no excuse.

It seems to happen all the time, with a surprising number of coaches.

Now, there’s also the tournament website or invitation. That seldom is looked at by anyone other than the person registering (if even that person looks at it). Here, the responsibility can go directly to the judges (we’re still talking about them). Why would they not take a peak at the home of the information for their upcoming weekend? Same three possibilities, probably the same order of likelihood. Again, it happens all the time, with a surprising number of judges.

So we know that emailing the information to the coaches doesn’t necessarily work. Hoping that people will find out for themselves doesn’t work. Without going into details, trust me that Twitter doesn’t work. And once a tournament starts, sending emails doesn’t necessarily work because access to the internet is compromised. And, oh yeah, writing the information on the blackboard in the judge area in letters as tall as the average novice doesn’t work either. Again, trust me on this.

One solution ought to be the judges’ meeting. Get everyone into a big room and tell them what they need to know. We don’t do this enough, and I’m thinking that even at smaller events it won’t hurt, but even this isn’t a perfect information delivery system. The point of the meeting is, of course, to get everyone on the same page, and there are always judges, usually the ones most likely to be on some other page, who blow off the meeting, or, more likely, since they haven’t been getting any information so far, don’t know there’s a meeting. Then there are judges who aren’t scheduled to arrive in time for round one, or are only judging on day two or somesuch. Even allowing for the best of intentions, unless you have meetings over and over again, and take attendance, this won’t be a foolproof solution. It will help though, and as I say I will do more of it. But it’s still not enough.

Passing information from the ballot table to people mano a mano might help, but this isn’t necessarily a good idea strategically because you’re trying to get 50 or 100 ballots out as quickly as possible so that rounds can start. It has occurred to me that pertinent information can be printed on the backs of the ballots. That might help. Of course, at Princeton, where we wanted text messages to speed things along and printed the number on every single ballot, at least a third of the judges ignored the request. A third of the people judging at Princeton in the LD pool don’t know how to text? Good grief. (The good news here is that when two thirds do text, the time gain is enough that things are speeded up nicely, unless there’s that one ballot you must have to run the elims, and that person is off in the ether somewhere, and, inevitably, is one of the non-texters.)

So, I don’t know. Can someone help me here? I’ve learned that email, broadcast texts (Twitter), meetings/blackboards, invitations/websites, and printed instructions on the ballots don’t work.

What, in the name of all that is holy and moly, does?