Plus, the view of NYC at dawn from the top floor is spectacular

No matter how hard I try, I end up getting lost in Newark. I can find the school pretty well, once I’m downtown, but I have trouble getting downtown of the turnpike because I always think I know where I’m going, which means I inevitably get off at the wrong exit, get lost, remember being lost here before, find my way out the same way I did last time, and eventually get to the school. Getting to the airport hotel, on the other hand, is beyond me. I explored parts of Newark that even Newark doesn’t know exist on Friday night (thank God for the iPhone GPS), and Saturday morning, despite grabbing a guide with experience actually living in Newark, went every which way but toward the school on our way back. The fact that one of the shuttle buses broke down worked in our favor. Then somebody moved the Dunkin Donuts; actually, they moved the entire street with the Dunkin Donuts. Thus my early morning walk while waiting for the dead shuttle bus to show up went unrewarded. Fortunately I had my car, and once the first round of the morning got off, Abdul and I drove around for a while before finding where they had relocated said street, and all was well and large buckets of latte were secured to get us through the morning. The pair of socks that Abdul picked up in the parking lot, however, we threw back, after I assured him that I had not lost a pair of socks, and even if I had, once they hit the ground in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot, they are hors de combat. It’s sort of like the 3-second rule with dropped food, only more harmful to your health.

After pulling out all my hair over the Round Robin, where my surgically selected judges were replaced by adjudicators picked up by bulldozer, I was sort of prepared for the invitational. You have a very large pool of alums, except you’re never quite sure which alums are in the pool at any given moment. Quantity over specificity, in other words, but there’s worse things. We ran the tournament on-time, and gave O’C enough rounds that he couldn’t wander off no matter how hard he tried, and had some outstanding judges’ lounge food (and a microwave to heat it up—O’C take note). Not bad, overall.

As tournament director, Alston does an interesting thing with novice LD rounds: he has them judged by his non-forensic AP students. As members of the VCA know, when I rank judge quality by group, the ones who come out on top as the absolute worst are high school student judges. My reason for this is simple: often they have decided “right” and “wrong” on a given topic, and adjudicate accordingly. By nature, they are the least inclined to go into a round tabula rasa, because outside of the rounds, they have a metaphorical horse in the race, i.e., their own knowledge and cases. I’m not saying that all high school students are like this, but they are the most likely to be like this, i.e., non-tab-rasa. They do bring other benefits to the table, however. As debaters themselves, they know the language and practices of the moment, and can pass along their tactical wisdom to the noobs, and that’s a good thing. With the Newark construct, you probably get complete tabula rasa, and better decisions, but no tactical/strategic feedback. Theoretically non-forensic types are the lay judges so many people bemoan the loss of.

Alston has other ideas on judging too. He wants everyone who can to pick up a pen to get in there and adjudicate. He wants a broad base of experience. He wants students to adapt. And he uses his invitational as a means to support his advocacies. I like that: it’s his tournament, and he runs it the way he runs it. He doesn’t like MJP so there’s no MJP. He gives some strikes, but if somebody like Nadir shows up, there’s no supplemental strikes; you’ve already had your strikes, and if you can’t pick up Nadir’s ballot because he’s the sort of judge you want to strike, you’re a lunatic. (I’m saying that, not Jonathan, who I’ve never heard say a bad word about anybody, which is probably why he doesn’t like to tab, because we’ve never said a good word about anybody, and nuns in tab are murder, even when they’re only meta-nuns.)

Because of all of this, Newark has developed a unique personality as a tournament. Lots if not all tournaments develop personalities, but some are not so good. This one is a little nutty, at least for me, looking at it from the tabular point of view, but it’s honest and up-front and aimed at educational goals. So what if I pull a few more hairs?

(But I will point out that a couple of alum judges, the ones that are the least likely to show up on time—I put them into the PF pool…)