In which Columbia is a Gem

So, sez you, how was the Gem? Splendid, sez I, exaggerating only slightly.

First of all, we had new digs over at Barnard for tab and GA and judges. Those of us who have made it through the years at Lerner Hall on the Columbia campus looked back on those days of freezing our butts off in tab (they apparently only turn on the heat for one day a month, and never the day we’re there), listening to some yabbo banging on the lounge piano nearby, standing on tiptoes to see out the window if there was any sun, and walking up and down that ramp that, if it had existed at the time, would have been Hitchcock’s first choice for most of the scenes in Vertigo, were as pleased as punch. JV was able to radiate all the speech rounds out from this hub, and things went fine for them. We did not have that luxury in debate. For LD, we had the The School, which I think is named after some guy named The. It did fit all the LDers, and we had a good major domo there, and wifi, so after a round or two we switched to e-ballots, and it worked great. I have to admit I was wary of judges wandering off, but the pool was almost entirely the usual suspects, the ones who go and do their job and everyone is happy. It was a joy. Thank you, CP, for e-Bs.

Unfortunately, we had PF in a couple of different places, and given the usual state of the PF pool, we didn’t go for e-Bs, although I think I will give it a shot next time. PF is getting better at it in general, although as always the PF pool is way less likely to know what electricity is and to be too worried about the whole debate process in the first place to want to take a stab at e-Bs. But I think in a year we’ll have evolved enough. We’ll see. The thing is, walking ballots back and forth fifteen minutes away adds half an hour to each round. Sigh.

We were hit with a small snow storm Friday night, but it had surprisingly little effect on things Saturday morning. Pretty much everybody showed up. A note for the future though: if you are planning on complaining about things on Sunday, it’s a good idea to call in your drops on Saturday rather than making us go to the rooms to see that you’re not there. Just sayin’.

There were the usual shenanigans. Speech judge call on Sunday had the folks handing Mary’s ballot to someone who looked suspiciously like Ralph more than a few times. When you assign your judges based on their abilities and they throw in a ringer, so much for all your careful planning. The LD judges were fantastic, on the other hand, and I don’t recall pushing a single ballot except on Saturday morning as we were shuffling things because of team no-shows. I don’t think there were any judge no-shows. Wow! On Sunday there were various complaints about this and that, my favorite being the coach who complained that the PF outrounds should have been earlier. My recommendation was that said coach go back in time and carry every judge to his or her rounds to speed things up. Granted it was slow, but people, tab turned the PF ballots around, from last in to next posting, in under 5 minutes every time. (Thanks again, CP.) It wasn’t us, in other words, it was just the beast that is PF. We’ve seen this pretty much at every tournament, that PF is slower than [your metaphor here]. Unless this is the first tournament you’ve ever attended, you should know that by now. Deal with it. Don’t call up the tournament director to whine.

Then there was the complaint that not enough people broke. No, we didn’t break all the down-2s in PF. Doing so would have meant breaking more than a third of the field. We talked a lot about this in tab, and of course it was Columbia’s decision in the end. A reasonable varsity tournament breaks about 25% of the field. Breaking a third of the field (in anything other than a novice event) is reminiscent of every kid in kindergarten getting a medal, even if they come in last. Varsity debate isn’t kindergarten, people. (I won’t bother to point out that if we had decided to break all the 4-2s we didn’t have the rooms to do it, because we never got to the practicality of the business. The decision was spiritual.) There is a solution to the 4-2 screw (which is obviously common enough to have a nickname): debate better. Or, if you’re the coach, coach better. Jeesh! That’s the thing about college tournaments versus high school venues. A lot of the teams seem to have just come out of the cabbage patch. Give me grizzled veterans any day.

Somewhere in all of this we managed to pull off an MHL. More about that later. Meanwhile, I've put up a new post about MJP panels in the Tabroom Adventures blog, if you're interested.