In which we put three novice rounds into stalls 1 through 17

One of the great joys—okay, that’s the wrong word, unless you’re a sadomasochist and have a particularly unique view of joy, but it will do for now—of running a big tournament is divvying up the rooms. The school gives you a spreadsheet, and you try to put the right people in the right place at the right time. The Tiggers is spread out all over creation. It’s a big campus, and we use a lot of it. One of the goals is to not use any of the buildings with exactly one available room. You look for mass migration, which keeps loners from getting too lost, although some inevitably will turn up on the Yale campus at some point in the weekend. Why coaches don’t arm their students with campus maps is beyond me, but then again, in my experience, a sizeable number of students are as good with maps as they are with [insert your own humorous metaphor here; I’m fresh out, having already gone the whole S&M route]. We do try to accommodate the odd lost soul if we can, but usually it’s not possible. By the time we find out about it, we’re into the next round.

Anyhow, PF is in two buildings off in the hinterlands on Friday. Speech is in one of those buildings on Saturday. LD is on the campus on Friday. LD, PF and Congress are on the campus on Saturday. And everyone is on the campus on Sunday. Sorting all this out is called Room Whispering. I used to be terrible at it, but I've gotten pretty good over the years. Of course, with the IEs, JV handles that, since speech tabbing is above my pay grade. I just give him a building or two and tell him to have at it. The good news is that it is now done up through the prelims. Working on elims whispering will be done during the empty hours between coffee runs on Saturday.

The nice thing about high school tournaments is that someone there usually just says, here’s 50 rooms (or whatever), and tells us to divvy them up any old way, because they’re all in the one building and it doesn’t matter much. At which point, we usually just go division by division, floor by floor, with any necessary adjustments for ADA situations. For Rather Large Bronx, Kirby seemed to want to do the whispering, such as it was, and since he understands the layout, it’s better that he took that over. As far as I recall, all the rounds did take place somewhere, so I guess he did a good job of it.

The point of all of this is to report that the room pools have been created for most of the Tiggers. The next order of business is judge hires.