Forensics: Early movement on the tournament front

As I said, somewhere, the 2012-13 season is beginning behind the scenes.

First of all, we’ve brought Militza Diaz into the MHL to represent the Jersey contingent. I think we confused her originally, making her think that somehow there was work involved, but we quickly disabused her of that. The real work of the MHL is being there at the events and making them come off successfully; she’s already demonstrated mastery of that many times.

And then, tournaments are beginning to fall into place. We all know the schedule, of course, except for a few loose ends. Certainly the invitationals of 2012 are all set. But who’s running what can be a question. I’ll be back at Yale doing LD; JV will be our token grownup, working speech. I hope we’re back at the old high school, and not the one from last year, just because it worked better logistically with the campus between us and the school. I do have hotel rooms reserved, an act that always makes one realize that, yes indeed, it’s just around the corner.

O’C sent out the Bronx invitation. As I ribbed him on Twitter, the damned thing is long! There’s so much pomp and circumstance, and every action is named (The Matt Dunay Round, The Andrew Markoff Traveling Trophy, the Jim Menick Bathroom Break)—the bind moggles. Then again, come August I’ll update the Bump invite, and I should admit that I do take care with that. Given that last year we had the Sat-Sun event, there’s a bunch of changes I’ll have to add. Most importantly there’s the policing of the novii; I’ll get into that at a future date.

While all of this is going on, CP is updating Tabroom.com. Yale and Bronx are opening 8/1, so we’ll all get to see how well that works. Then again, the basic registration process can’t change all that much; it’s the debate tabbing side that I await with bated breath. I’m especially looking forward to automatic notifications during tournaments. At NDCA we used Joy’s Warm Room and people showed up right away every time, including the ones on crutches and whatnot straight from Lourdes. CP talks about eliminating ballots eventually, and online entry thereof, but that sounds way off to me, given what I expect will be generic user resistance. The seven stages of grief users give systems designers: “This is new, it must be bad; it’s definitely hard, I can’t learn it; what’s in it for me; this sucks; hey, this isn’t so bad after all; I told you we should do this, what took you so long?”

We’ve also pinned down the weekend of the MHL workshop as 9/29, the Saturday after Yale. And O’C is beavering away on a Vassar tournament, which may have hit before you read this.

So, things are getting into gear. And it’s still early July. Aaaahhh.
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