Penn is now the tournament of the moment. The Quakers have
been very good at getting rooms, and I have to admit that I enjoy what we call
the room whispering, the assigning of events to spaces that make sense. You
have the map in one window, the google doc in another window, and tabroom in a
third, and you have at it. Manna from heaven for the semi-conscious
organizational part of one’s brain, the part that can listen to Killer Mike
while working. (I mention Killer Mike because at Bump the Paginator insisted
that we listen to his song about Ronald Reagan. I sort of felt that it was a
little late to indict Reagan for much of anything, and I also felt that if we
had listened to any other Killer M songs, they would probably have sounded much the
same as this one. Not exactly a Gershwin tune, but then again, I don’t think
Mr. Mike is aiming his work at me in particular. I mean, Gershwin’s been dead
longer than Reagan. Then again, I like New York in June, a Gershwin tune, etc.,
etc.)
At this point mostly we just look at the weather forecasts
and hope for the best. In other words, please not another blizzard of the
century as we had for the Gem. Speaking of which, their resked looks fine for
PF now, and pretty good for LD. They’re hoping that speech measures up as well,
but it’s hard to tell at the moment. I want them to have the biggest tournament
possible, but lord knows it’s hard for teams to reschedule anything, especially
toward the end of the season when money starts getting tighter. Plus there’s
mindset of certain things happening on certain weekends, and if they don’t
happen, people can’t adjust. You would think that forensicians would be
adaptable and light on their feet, since that is what we insist on in our
students, but there are a lot of coaches out there for whom life is a triple
yoke of eighteen-wheelers that simply can’t be turned around once they start
down the mountainside. To be fair, wariness of change is more common than not
in the world at large, but you just sort of expect that forensicians would be above
all that. They’re not.
At Penn we’re going to do e-ballots for LD and Policy, and
p-ballots with judge calls for PF. I have to admit, as tedious as entering
results might be, getting rounds started on time is a worthy tradeoff. At the
Tiggers, we had everybody trained liked circus fleas to show up on time and
head off to their rounds. Then again, we had a schedule that worked for that.
We were planning on judge calls for the Gem, to see if it would work again, but
obviously never got there. So the Quakes will be our check of result reproducibility.
After this weekend, there’s a whole weekend off, since we no
longer have the MHL Blowout. Sigh. I always got a kick out of that one. It was
mostly a reward for novices to have stuck it out for the whole year. Of course,
while novice year can be tough, it’s the second year that’s the real killer, where
most people are tossed off into the ditches lining the forensic road. That’s
why I like Academy type divisions. I want to keep people on-board as long
as possible. That seems like one way to do it.
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