In which we contemplate human sacrifice

Registration opens Saturday for Big Bronx, Regular Sized Yale, and Newly Sized Byram Hills. The Pups will be what it always is, I’m sure, unless people are still pissed over the system failure that cost us all that time last year. If so, this year we’ll have Marty Page in LD tab with us for the first time, and I’m going to be throwing him to the angry mob at the first sign of trouble (although I think he thinks he’s there to help out). If you see him, mum’s the word. Human sacrifices have been sadly missing from debate tournaments in recent years, which is a shame. When people talk about how LD has changed, that never gets mentioned. I can’t imagine why.

I’m trusting that by now the word has gone out and that people realize that Big Bronx is going to be pretty much what it has been in recent years, and there’s no reason to expect a lesser tournament in any way. I’m figuring that we’ll fill up, so to speak, right away, although it’s all waitlist to be a little more fair, I think, than in the past. (So is the Pups, for that matter. And even BH. I’m a strong urger of starting with waitlists. If nothing else, it helps you manage the riffraff, if your tournament is putting in riffraff filters.)

The interesting one will be Byram Hills. Benkoh is seeing it at a warm-up tournament and expects that will enhance its popularity for a good varsity division. My guess is that this will certainly hold true for the Academy division, and I’m hopeful that he’s right about the older folk. We’ll find out soon enough. Benk is one of the most popular judges around here; let’s see if that popularity will extend to his tournament hosting. Come to think of it, Page will also be there, running their new Congress division. We can practice sacrificing techniques. MP is really gung-ho on Congress, and is always posting on Facebook about it. Not long ago he posted about Congress people learning to breathe. I didn’t know that was a problem with competitors. Judges, on the other hand, have been known to give up the ghost gladly, depending on the length of the session.

I don’t know why I make snide comments about Congress. I traditionally love all of forensics, and I’ve never sat for more than 10 minutes in a Congress session, so my snideness is entirely unwarranted. Then again, I have sat for about thirty years in a NYCFL moderators meeting talking about Congress and all its intricacies, and I know I stopped breathing for at least half that time. I went out and got a bagel and came back and they were still talking about Congress, and then I made a Starbucks run, and when I got back they were still talking about Congress, and then I ran a couple of marathons and invented the wheel and watched a few seasons of CSI: Podunk, and every time I came back to check up on things they were still talking about Congress, so maybe my beef is not with Congress per se, but talking about Congress. Or the NYCFL. Hard to tell.

And yes, I know that those involved with it prefer to call it Legislative Debate. That should probably make the participants Legi-Debbers, much like participants in IEs are Speecho-Americans. We here at Coachean HQ are nothing if not politically correct.