We still have a pretty large group of newbies, for us. I don’t think we’ve acquired any new Speecho-Americans yet, which is odd, as they usually just fall into our lap, and all our recent team successes have been on that side of the road, but so it goes. But I’m predicting that, when the dust settles, I’ll have 5 or 6 new debaters, a bumper crop indeed.
I opened Bump registration last week, and got caught in a unfortunate program bug. My goal was to make it all waitlist, but the bug let in all the TBA entries and waitlisted anyone else. This was hardly what I wanted. My reason for all-waitlist was simple management of the field, keeping out a teams that had repeatedly ignored my warnings about blowing off judging obligations and giving me time for evaluating independent entries. Also, I’m getting less and less happy with the whole the-tournament-is-to-the-swift-to-register nonsense. The idea that some school with no intentions of using up all its potential slots can deter a regular supporter of the tournament is unacceptable not only at Bump, but everywhere. I’ve begun my meditations on this, and hope to get some changes made with other tournament directors. But meanwhile, I had the silliness of getting the data sorted out, which it is now. And, of course, it was at the waitlist point for real, once I got it organized. I hope to accommodate everyone eventually (except for the evil-doers), so now we’re settling into the long wilderness period every tournament goes through. (I wonder if I just opened registration a week before the tournament if that would solve things?)
I’m getting scared about judges, though. I sent out a message today telling people not to rely on us for VLD, or even much else. Let’s face it: I’ve only graduated one occasional PFer in the last two years. And meanwhile the People’s Champion works for O’C, and the Panivore has exams that weekend. It reminds me of when I first started Bumping and I had to deal with policy. Back then I came up with a bizarre obligation pattern that did work, but meant that everyone judged just about every round. So it goes. If LD wants to become a very specialized business that can be judged only by a specialized group, it’s going to have to bring that specialized group along with it.
Can you say death spiral?
The other thing I’m thinking about is MJP. I’m seriously considering 3 levels and no strikes. No strikes!!! Are you crazy??? Well, maybe, but think about it. With three levels, you’ll get mostly 1s and occasionally 2s in the important rounds. The 3rd level is a de facto strike already. With about 40 or so judges, if we’re lucky, I can either set it up so that you can effectively strike 20 of them, or that you can effectively strike 12 of them. I’m going with the latter. You’re unlikely to get one of these in the presets, so unless you can explain to me why you should be able to strike half the field, this is what it’s probably going to be. If your debaters can’t pick up ballots from anyone other than a small select group, you might want to consider working with them a little bit on judge adaptation.
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