Once upon a time, kiddies, you registered for a tournament by fax. This was considered quite modern. (As a matter of fact, in some schools, fax is still considered quite modern; if your school is one of these concerns, you might want to consider starting up a pony express operation. I hear there’s good money in them thar horses.) In this Periclean age, you got your invitations to tournaments by mail, if you happened to be on the mailing list. In other words, invitationals actually had invitations attached, and I remember spending a lot of time getting onto the right mailing lists. Some schools were very prissy about this, with limitations and pre-ordainment and elite regulars, but no one is like that anymore. (Oh, wait a minute. They are. Can you use the word pompous and the word tournament in a sentence?)
Email replaced fax for most people. For one thing, in the Faxiclean Age, the machine was usually in the administration office; every Tom, Dick and Harry didn’t have the ability to fax from their printer as we can now, when we no longer need to. Email was more democratic. Anyone with an AOL account and a telephone could email to their heart’s content. (I can hear the crunching sound of the electronic handshake even as I type this.) This was a civilized era. Maybe you received your invitation by email, and then you responded by email. And as changes came along, you emailed them. And then you emailed the next changes. And the next. And the next. Such joy. Such rapture.
Then came electronic registration via Joy of Tournaments and tabroom.com. Now, you set up your tournament online, open for one and all to see. (Although, if you’ve still got a you-know-what up your you-know-where, elitism can still be perpetrated.) And on a given day, at a given time, usually well known to prospective entrants, registration opens. And at most major tournaments, within hours it fills up, and closes.
What’s wrong with this picture?
JV and I were hashing this out over the weekend at the MHL. This is not a good situation. First of all, not everyone is up at midnight to register. Some people might be on vacation, if it’s a summer registration or if it opens on a holiday of some sort. I opened Princeton, if I’m not mistaken, in the middle of Big Bronx, which was pretty dumb on my part, because everybody was busy working the tournament rather than remembering to sign up for another tournament in two months. Anyhow, plenty of people do sign up, getting in immediately—but not really. That is, they get slots, populated by any name on the roster, and then they hold on to those slots until it’s time to pay fees, at which points tournaments slim down like someone just let the air out of the forensic balloon.
How do you solve this? How do you not provide victory to the fleet, where fleetness is no great quality since it inevitably results in exiting before the end of the race? [Sometimes you just have to torture the analogy beyond what it can stand…] I tried waitlisting everyone at Columbia, which worked okay, but it meant that faraways got in and made their plane reservations first, then the locals came on board, but there’s only so much last-minute planning a local can do, even a big combine like Regis, the most dependable school in the universe when it comes to providing judges and debaters, especially when the tournament is in their backyard. And at high school tournaments where there’s housing, a whole ’nother level of waitlist kicks in.
Is a puzzlement… I wish I had a solution to it.
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