There is something to be said for working with a solid team.
At Ridge, it was me, Kaz, JV and the Paginator handling all the events. That’s
a group that knows how to do everything, and we all speak the same shorthand.
So if Kaz and I got caught in traffic, Joe and Marty would do everything that
needed to be done. And vice versa. If an emergency arose, someone was there to
fix it. If someone needed a stern talking to, we could pick the appropriate
deliverer of the lecture, from silent glaring to marvelously educational. In
other words, a sturdy, well-practiced tab room.
I wonder sometimes about tab rooms at tournaments. I know a
bunch of people who tab virtually every weekend in addition to our crew, but there’s way more
tournaments than there are experienced tabbers. It not so much that one needs
to know one’s way around tabroom. The program is clear enough if you’re paying
attention, and forgiving enough if you’re not. And if you have reasonably large
fields, relatively evenly divided, the thing works fine. It isn’t until you get
into prefs and limited obligations and the like that things start getting dicey
(and fun), and those aren’t the sorts of things most tournaments offer. Still,
making a tournament happen is more than just clicking the odd button in
tabroom. You’ve got to make people aware of what is expected of them, you’ve
got to get them into the rounds, and you have to get them out of the rounds.
You’ve got to manage them, or at least a goodly percentage of them. That’s
where it’s nice to have some experienced tabbers, who know how to make things
happen.
Still, hundreds and hundreds of tournaments are happening
every year, all on tabroom, without too much angina. I wonder sometimes where
our team stands in the overall universe. I think more of our value is in
setting things up, like a college with well over a thousand entries, more than
running things. Who to let in and how, that sort of thing. Managing rooms and
judge pools. Adjudicating offenses, not only of in-round occurrences but over
who should forfeit when, or which judges get fined versus nudged. General
advice from people who are behind the scenes week after week, in other words.
This month is the full menu for me. The Tiggers the first
weekend, well over a thousand students from all over the country in 10
different divisions, followed by Ridge, with about 500 regional students in 7
divisions, followed this coming weekend by the one-day Regis Kristmas Klassic,
with about 400 local CFL students, most of them novices. Some similarities,
some difference. From gorgeous university wifi to dicky high school wifi to
paper Catholic ballots because the wifi hasn’t been reconfigured since the Diet of Worms.
(Hmmm. First mention of the Diet of Worms in how many years
of blogging? How did it take so long, you’ve got to wonder.)
Anyhow, this is obviously a post about nothing much. I’ll
get a break for a few weeks after Regis, and then it’s Bigle X. 9 tiers (which
I hate), limited obligations (which makes sense to me for some tournaments for
very complicated reasons I will go into eventually), figuring it all out with
JV and his mathematical brain, and schmoozing with CP, who is unlikely on this particular
weekend to take off for Pago Pago. But then again, one never knows, does one?
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