Ghost Debaters

This is sort of huge.

At Penn, there were two schools with changes that were reported after the tournament began. That in itself is no big deal, but then again, when it happens it’s usually because someone got sick and we’re now putting in a maverick or two. I’ve been known to create a mixed-school team when two debaters managed to get sick at the same time. In an event where the goal is getting rounds/experience, there’s little reason not to do this, and it has no affect on much of anything. 

In the case at hand, students had been subbed in before the tournament started, and it was oversight that it wasn’t corrected at the table (although, as you’ll see, that might have nevertheless created the same problem). Early on, seeing that their names were wrong, the teams went to the table and reported the problem.

And there’s the rub. As far as we can tell, instead of using the handy-dandy pulldown boxes on the bottom right of the page to switch teams, the table simply went to the top of the page and replaced the name of the missing debater with the name of the new debater. Predictably, chaos ensued. While the names of the debaters were correct on the ballots, the team codes had not been changed. More importantly, at the end of the tournament, the new debaters were not listed in the record of speaker points, presumably because they weren’t on their school’s rosters. That is, entering Joe McDoakes in the little box on the top did not connect to Joe McDoakes in the pull down menu of the team roster. They were, in some ways, invisible to the tournament. In one of these cases, with a team that went into elims, a speaker award was not noted. We also believe that these teams might now have an extra Joe McDoakes on each of their rosters, but this is just conjecture on our part. 

Obviously the solution is not to screw this up in the first place, and henceforth we’ll make sure that tables are better instructed. Whether there’s a bug in tabroom around this is arguable, but it has been brought to their attention. In any case, don’t let it happen to you. The last thing you want at your tournament is ghost debaters, which is what we ended up with. Schools that are careful about their NSDA points would not be happy about this.