Blowout

We did the MHL Blowout last Saturday. This has become one of my favorite tournaments of the year.

We held it at Polly Prep, Girl Detective, a remarkably old and gorgeous school in the furthest reaches of Brooklyn near the Verrazano Bridge. Some of the classrooms have fireplaces, there was a PRB tapestry of unclear provenance hanging in the dining hall, and the wireless worked better than most colleges. You get what you pay for, I guess. We had a great turnout; the Newark schools were there, which fills up the old policy slots pretty quickly, and there were enough people in even the little JV PF and LD divisions to make a go of it. And, of course, novices aplenty.

The thing about the Blowout is superpowers. Before every round, O’C pulls a card out of a hat and announces what exact havoc is going to be wreaked for every team. Sometimes you get to scratch an opponent’s argument, sometimes you get no prep, sometimes you have to extemp your case, sometimes you have to debate a new topic altogether. It’s all in fun, but it does have the effect of making folks think a little differently about what they’re doing. The results tend to be a little less than absolutely meaningful, and we only get three rounds in, but everyone seems to enjoy it.

At the end, we have awards, of course, but these too are a little different. We like to acknowledge all the novices who have stayed with us through the year, even though some of them might never have won any awards of any sort. So, we give medals to every novice. The thing is, the teams get to name the awards, so we get the most likely to do this, that or the other thing, something special for that kid that only that team really knows about, which is, of course, a strong team-building exercise in itself. It takes a while to go through them all, but attention is held throughout, so it must be working. We also had awards for the tournament per se, but since O’C had run out of medals, he supplied spare Star Wars action figures, which he apparently never runs out of. They were from the prequels, so no one had the slightest idea who they were, but they did the job. When all was said and done, there was one left over, Rex from Star Tours; I took that one. Hey, I like Rex! Because of the lack of enough trophies to go around, we also printed up IOUs, which were given to the Bronx folks. These were pictures of Jar Jar Binks. ‘Nuff said.

And so, the MHL is put to bed for another year.