I also learned that the Jersey Devils are a hockey team. They are a hockey team, right?

As always, Newark was an experience.

It started with the round robin. I set it up for them my usual way. I have a matrix that shows who debates whom when, and on what side. I entered all that into TRPC, and then just entered the judges one round at a time. Given that Newark judges are often, shall we say, evanescent, I have found that it is best to count their noses when they’re actually in the room. Unfortunately, when it came time to do those assignments, the way I did it, in the manual window, occasionally switched sides for the debaters. So by round 4, a couple of people had the sneaking suspicion that there was only one side to the argument, being that they had never gotten a chance to debate on the other side of it. Dunay, who saw this as proof that the world was about to end, pointed it out and it was easy to fix since there were still three rounds left and, obviously, there was a balance of those who were imbalanced. What was harder to figure out for me was why it had happened, since I was so careful in the setup to begin with. Well, I finally figured it out and it all ended fine. I have to admit that even I was beginning to suspect that the world was about to end, having tabbed plenty of RRs in the past exactly the same way without this problem. Live and learn, as they say. This is especially true in debate.

Alston had maybe about a million judges for the weekend, and he kept cracking the whip telling me to use these people he had paid a fortune to import. I was eventually moving them all over the place: a few discovered for the first time that there was such a thing as PF; I’m not quite sure what they made of it. We had another TRPC issue, where Bronx’s NPF judges who were reckoned by the dozens simply didn’t import from the text file generated by tabroom. I sent it all to CP, but when I looked at the import file, there they were, looking very Bronxish. A couple even had bowties. Go figure. Or more to the point, maybe CP can figure. As far as I could tell, it wasn't a tabroom issue. It took a couple of go-rounds before O’C realized that his judges were starting to annoy him into the ground because they weren’t judging, and that something might be amiss. Easy enough to fix, but this one’s a poser, I say.

It was one of those tournaments where you never seem to stop, because I was running 4 divisions. Finish one and there’s the next one. I kept porting everything over to tabroom, and that worked well until elims, where I just got worn out trying to keep up with it. I recruited O’C to assist; Randy M was set up to help, but he had his hands full just managing all the rounds. This was a pretty big event, and he had about a thousand Newark kids to oversee, including those who were judging novice LD for extra credit, which is always a feature of the tournament. I like that, myself. Instead of debating mostly in front of varsity debaters, who are my least favorite pool because they all think you should be like them and think like them and perceive of both the resolution and debate in general like them, you get adjudicators who simply will listen to how well you address the resolution. If you can’t pick up any of those rounds, you might want to think twice about improving your debate skills.

As always, there were a couple of issues. One of them, that the team was really good and shouldn’t have lost, therefore the judge was wrong and we should double-bye it, was arguably the most fatuous. Still, it’s not my issue, or more to the point, not tab’s issue. This is important for people to understand, although few do. Tab’s job at a tournament is to schedule rounds and enter results. Good tabbing mandates that the scheduling and entering is neutral. We never look at who’s hitting whom or who’s judging whom unless we happen to glance at a printed schematic. The system needs to be a hundred percent blind to the individuals. Similarly, we don’t evaluate the ballots and the judges: they’re not my judges. I have nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I like MJP or even community rankings is that I don’t even want to make a general evaluation that any particular one is an A or B or C. Who am I to make that judgment? I don’t like complete and total randomness, though, and I will rank a few people who I know are experienced as the stronger judges in the pool simply to prevent bubble rounds from being adjudicated by (according to my lights) demonstrable bubbleheads. Anyhow, almost every issue that comes to the tabroom is, in fact, not a tabroom issue but rather a tournament management issue. Complaining about a judge? Complain to the tournament director. Want to go home? Ask the tournament director, because the TD is the one who expected you to meet your entire obligation. Tab is a little gray army of mindless functionaries, if they’re doing a good job. Ubiquity (like mine) is not a sign of being in charge. It’s just a sign that I am relatively sought after as a mindless functionary. The only tournament where I make what might be called substantive decisions is the one where I am the tournament director, Bump. As for the colleges, I help one or two with more than just tab, but I let them make the important decisions. It’s their name on the door, not mine. When issues arise, those of us in tab are happy to advise, but frankly, there are times when we don’t agree. You want to run a tournament, then run it. We’ll all help, but in the end, it’s your baby. You’ve got to make the hard calls.

In the end, I think Newark went quite well. We pushed out the rounds bada boom bada boom bada boom, and I don’t think we screwed anything up to badly. I made sure that Jonathan and Randy understood that in my estimation, and this is one thing I’m pretty good at judging, the Newark team did an excellent job of their number one priority, making the rounds happen (which is all I ever really care about in tab). Good, dedicated people. But then again, you know that I’ve always loved Newark. It’s got some nuttiness (what tournament doesn’t?), but it’s a good nuttiness. There’s also a microwave in the tabroom, which is worth ten points extra credit every time. (I have to admit, though, that Randy was pretty parsimonious doling out the printer paper. What did he think I was doing with it? Surreptitiously shipping it off to the NYCUDL when he wasn’t looking?)