Ah, the joys of sleeping in on Monday

Penn was pretty straightforward. With all the registrations being done on tabroom, there wasn’t any point in going to the school Friday, so after our bus navigated the shoals of Philadelphian traffic, I just socialized with my team and, for a little while, with CP. The tournament hotel, the Crowne Plaza, once again did a fine job of settling us in and, what I like more than anything, supplying us with tokens for the trolley. One expects a trolley to be very Clang Clang Clang and Judy Garlandish, but this one is underground, sort of like Dostoevsky visits the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, if you get my drift. Climbing down a set of steep steps with my printer bag on Saturday was nothing compared to climbing up a double set of steep steps at the school stop. Normally I grab the first debatish person I can find to help me schlep, but I was so early I was on my own, wondering what the odds were that I would have a heart attack, and why I was going to have to die in Philadelphia, which just seems too W. C. Fields for words. But somehow I survived, and then things went normally, or at least normal enough. I can only run a tournament as fast as the ballots come in; if you’re ever sitting around, wondering what’s going on in tab and cursing us for not putting out the next batch of ballots, please understand that in tab we’re cursing you for not bringing in the last batch of ballots. And the answer to the question, When is the next round coming out, is, Right after the last one comes in. Although I’m pretty good at guessing results, most debaters prefer to go by their real record rather than the one I’ve imagined for them. We are not getting hot stone massages in the sauna lodge when we should be pairing rounds; we save that for after all the ballots are picked up.

I ran the LDs; Kaz and La Coin ran PF and Policy. I wasn’t particularly strapped for judges until Sunday, although I soldiered through, while PF, because it single-flighted rounds 5 and 6, was beating the bushes big time. Policy, on the other hand, just didn’t have a lot of leftovers, but somehow they managed to find someone every time. As for numbers, with PF over a hundred, you’re talking some serious juju. LD was smaller, but not tiny. It gets a little bigger every year. We’re obviously not getting people chasing LD TOC bids, since there aren’t any, but the competition isn’t a pushover either. I think that as more people get tired of paying Harvard prices (especially considering that the lower prices at Penn go to PYDF rather than Penn’s own team’s coffers), this will change a little bit, but as long as Harvard has an octas bid and Penn has none, the dreamers among us will continue to believe that they really can win an enormous national tournament even though in the past the best they’ve done at a national tournament of any sort is finding a quarter under their seat in the auditorium while others have taken all the tin. You can see it in the eyes. Everyone at a tournament thinks, in some corner of their mind, that they could win it. Look at those 6 Speecho-American finalists on the stage at any award ceremony. They all think that someone else probably won it, but they hold on to that hope that, well, it might be them. Every time a name is announced that isn’t theirs sets that little forensic heart a’ beating…

I think the biggest problem with Harvard is sheer size. It’s too big to accommodate everyone comfortably, so it accommodates them uncomfortably. There’s long breaks between rounds, and it takes three days rather than two. One of the things we’ve insisted on at the tournaments I’ve been working is that we set limits and stick to them. At the point where you run out of rooms to move a tournament along, you’re done. I always used to enjoy the two hours up, two hours down business that we did this year at Princeton (where I first encountered it years ago) and Columbia. Just enough time to get food and relax a bit, keeping things easy on the judges, but at the same time, just enough time to dump one event and make room for the next, so you can run precisely on time. Penn is nearing its size limits, but there are things that can be done, for instance, staggering the speech rounds over a longer day: they had it easy. If push came to shove, I’d eliminate the novice LD division if Varsity expanded or if PF grows. I’m dubious about maintaining policy, but it needs to have a chance to take root. Anyhow, we talked a lot about next year, and how things would improve. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a fun tournament that I like quite a bit, and when it’s over, I’m home Sunday night and I get to sleep in and relax on Monday. Perfect way to spend a holiday weekend.