Ave atque vale!

So yesterday CP sent a message out to the forensics community, via the agency of an email blast to the attendees of Yale, explaining why he wasn’t running things behind the scene anymore for the Pups. I have talked here before about Chris’s contribution to the community overall. In addition to creating tabroom.com, which would have been enough, somehow he got involved in working with a bunch of Ivies on their tournaments. Longtime members of the VCA know well how I felt about colleges back in the day; I don’t know if I every used the phrase bloodsucking leeches, but I saw again and again how colleges were raiding the high school community, running tournaments against local schools on established weekends, using their name value to offer amateur hour events that were often embarrassing, and generally taking the money and running. Worse, many of them seemed to get TOC bids (which still bothers me: yeah, a bid should go to where the bid people are, but just because we’ve established a precedent doesn’t make it right—call me the Clarence Thomas of forensics). (Actually, please don’t call me the Clarence Thomas of forensics.) We’ve had that discussion before (and quite actively on TVFT).

Anyhow, then along came CP. I have no idea how he got started doing this, but the next thing you knew, he brought professional management to the Ivies. Their tab rooms knew what they were doing. Their organizers gained a sense of stability impossible to otherwise attain as students come and go. They learned to work with the community rather than solely for their own ends. It was an incredible transformation, and he deserves the credit for it.

Now he’s taking a less active role in these tournaments, because they do take an incredible amount of work, and there are just so many hours even in his day. Plus he believes, and I think rightly, that they are ready to go on their own. So I take this opportunity to thank him once again. Without Palmer, the landscape of high school forensics would be radically different, and nowhere near as good.

(Then again, if the Pups goes to hell in a hand basket this year, we now know who to blame, that *&^%$# CP!)