Debate: The First-Timer's MHL

So, sez you, what was the First-Timers’ like?

Oy, sez I.

First of all, we did use the DIY registrations, and that worked really well once I just gave up and rescheduled the tournament for 2018. Tabroom.com doesn’t like my keeping registration open on the day of a tournament, and I have to sneak up behind it when it is otherwise engaged or else it simply clams up and that’s the end of it. But I did mange to beat it into submission (although it seemed to wreak its vengeance later). Only two schools didn’t comply completely with the DIY, and I will deal with them separately. One was new to the game, the other a serial offender, so each in its own way.

So 9:00 crept up on the clock, and we looked out and saw a virtually packed auditorium, and we hightailed it out to the tabroom, planning on having everything paired by 9:30 and the rounds started by 10:00. As it turned out, we had about as much chance of that as Miss America simultaneously solving world hunger, ending all wars and putting an iPhone in every pot. We were met with the proverbial perfect storm, a serial attack of one damned thing after another, the likes of which none of us had ever seen before.

First of all, we couldn’t get the data to download out of tabroom. It turns out that we had a bad setting, and our immediate reaction, looking at the list of events and not seeing all of them, was to call CP and beg for mercy. Unfortunately, CP sleeps with his phone in the freezer, so by the time we heard from him, we had already gone to plan B and entered the missing data by hand. That was the first half hour we’d never get back. And then the printer went rogue on us. For a while it was pumping out so much paper we had to send an emergency call to Staples and have them rush in a few thousand reams just to keep up with the flow. JV was completely buried under it, with nothing showing but a piece of cowlick. By the time we got this stopped—we found a Dutch boy and had him stick his finger in it—we met with a complete jam, where roughly 728 pieces of paper were lodged in the printer in spaces where no paper had ever been before. This required about fifteen minutes of disassembly and re-greasing the skids, not to mention removing the Dutch boy’s finger, and then for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend, the Mac side of my machine starting sending work to my printer back home while the PC side decided that if it was set for pdfs it would print on the Brother, and if it was set for the Brother, it would create pdfs. It was about 10:30 that we got this all sorted out, as compared to 9:30, at which time the collected masses were sent off to their rounds, except apparently one whole floor of the building was locked and the custodian was nowhere to be found, and the only way out of this was to acquire the master key, kept in a jar on the principal’s office. (I may be getting some of this wrong, as I only overheard the details as I was feverishly trying to sort out a whole ‘nother issue of room double-booking.) With no other resort, O’C was forced to break into the sacred office, and the only way to do this was to break the window by tossing a Bronx novice through it, Bronx novices being in abundance and, well, if they lost a couple, they’d none of them be missed. At least, that's the story as I heard it. In any case, as a result, a hefty number of round ones didn’t happen.

Needless to say, we were running far enough behind that foregoing the fourth round was never much in doubt. Of course, four is a goal, not a promise. And to be honest, at a first-timers’ event, it’s not about the number of rounds, so much as it is about showing up, standing up and getting through the damned thing. Who knew that the same would apply both to the first-time debaters and to the tab room? In the immortal words of CP, repeated at least once at every tournament, “Are you sure you’ve ever done this before?”

What was very pleasing was not just the number of new schools but the success of those schools. I always worry that new programs will get discouraged, but not this batch. I think every single one of them had teams that took medals, and a couple managed to get first place! We’ll be seeing them again, I’m sure. And along the way, the Fordham coach came to me and pointed to the calendar and said that there’s a big bleeping hole in December and that he was willing to offer up his school to fill it. Which suggestion was immediately taken to heart by the assembled 3 out of 4 MHL directors, which means we’ll have an extra event in December for novices and JV. Excellent or what?

And now, back to Bronx again this weekend. I do hope we’ve got the bugs out of the system. (O’C: if you’re reading this, just put it out of your mind. It was all a one-off. Seriously. Maybe. I hope.)