In which we look at NatNats from afar

One of the regular features of not going to a national tournament is watching everyone report on Facebook how they’re having trouble getting to the national tournament. They should add a Schadenfreude button next to the Like button: I mean, it’s not that I want to see people’s flights cancelled or whatever, but when it happens, I get to savor that it isn’t me, as does everyone else whom it isn’t. Given my own debate flight history lately—a couple of NDCA trips going off the tracks one way or the other, thanks to the proximity of the Bronx team—I’ve been there with them in fact, as well as in spirit, so I know the pain. But I prefer someone else to be suffering it.

For a lot of people NatNats really is a culmination, but I still see it primarily as a Midwest speech event more than anything else. After all those frustrating years of arguing with them about the inability of the northeast to put together much of an entry, there was no love lost between us. Even though there are schools around the region who manage to put together good entries, they are still hamstrung by the undeniable fact of mandated exams, proms and graduations. So it goes, of course, and given that the dates of the event are pretty much set in stone, my desire was that some accommodation be made for our conflicts, but none were forthcoming. Even the final resolution, removing the stigma of Red Light District, was restrictive, limiting the numbers of qualifiers for purposes of following inviolable albeit arbitrary rules rather than looking at situation of the students themselves. Sigh.

Oh, well. Sour grapes on my part, and old news, and since I’ll be re-upping next season, I should put a lid on it. But my main point stands, that NatNats is a tournament with little personal relevancy for me. Given that you can only get yourself worked up for just so many national events, one needs to pick among them. I tell our Speecho-Americans that they’re working toward CatNats, a very big deal that is also well within their grasp. They are as able to qualify as anyone else, and they’ll get to go because it doesn’t conflict with anything like, say, their graduation ceremony. As for debaters, I’m obviously leaning toward NDCA as being the end-all be-all, especially after this year’s TOC fiasco. Unfortunately a lot of people are still locked into the TOC route, and I would be hard-pressed not to bring kids who qualify. But I’d rather not. I think the mechanisms for determining qualifications are problematic at best, the lack of neutral judging is inexcusable, and when you get down to it, the only reason the event has the power it has is because the community deliberately invests it with that power. Interestingly, the policy community has drifted a lot to NDCA, but LD and PF haven’t. Given the quality of the competitors in elims in those divisions, it’s hard to figure out why. Anyhow, I’ll certainly be pushing Sailors to NDCA as their culmination, and billing it as such, with TOC merely a diversion. After all, the choice the next couple of years is Las Vegas vs. Lexington, then Orlando vs. Lexington. And we’re talking about me, here.

No contest.