In which we update on a couple of tournaments

First of all, there’s the Gem.

After Columbia bit the dust (or, more correctly, ate the yellow snow), there was immediate discussion about rescheduling it. The thing is, there aren’t many weekends for such a thing; tournament weekends in debate are sacrosanct (as Emory recently found out). You just don’t drop yourself anywhere and start counting the money. For the Gem, in all of it was the idea of distributing their TOC bids. They have to be in by mid-March, which means that the tournament would have to be before then, and not step on anyone’s toes. There wasn’t a lot of choice, and March 4-6 stood out as the obvious one. My estimate is that we’ll hold well on the debate side of things, maybe not so well on the speech side, as the locals will be scrambling for their States quals, and they can do that for free at the CFL. We’ll see. In any case, the tournament is up and open, and I’m letting people in pretty quickly, rather than asking them to hang out on the waitlist.

Has anyone looked at the long-term weather forecast?

Second of all, there’s the NDCA tournament in Orlando, April 9-11. I always loved the idea of the NDCA, where the business is theoretically conducted by the community of coaches rather than a Star Chamber. Qualification is objective, as compared to the political decisions that guide TOC bid allotments. (Don’t tell me they’re not political. Been there, done that.) They bring in a great group of neutral judges, and, I repeat, this year they’re in Orlando. I strongly believe that the northeast is under-represented, mostly because it’s not on people’s radar, but at the same time, I don’t know why that is the case, since there are indeed plenty of northeasterners who do attend. I can’t for the life of me explain the continuing appeal of the TOC, aside from the obvious one that, if people accept that something has value, it derives its value from that acceptance. Like paper money. Whatever. Anyhow, the NDCA website is debatecoaches.org and the tournament is open on tabroom. You should go. And take an extra day to go to Diagon Alley. Isn’t it about time you replaced that knotty pine wand with something a little more…adult?

As a side note, I just plugged rooms into Bump, and did the sorting rooms for Penn. (In the latter case, you sort the rooms by putting them into the sorting hat and— Well, you get the picture.) February is just around the corner.

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