In which we roam the green hills of Delbarton

The Delbarton JV tournament is a one-day affair with a bunch of speech events, congress, and PF and LD. It's on the same weekend as Harvard, and given the choice, who would pick Harvard? I mean, it does sound good saying that you're going to go to Harvard (although you're really not), and it sounds even better to say you won Harvard (although even that won't get you into the real Harvard), but actually having to endure the Harvard tournament, an exercise in capitalistic greed that no course at the university could begin to explain better, is something else. Just for starters, 386 VPF teams? Breaking to triples? After 6 rounds? According to my handy dandy pyramid program, there's 133 4-2s or better. Which means that roughly half the 4-2s don't break. At $150 per team, that's a gross of $57,900. Harvard has an endowment of $39,200,000,000.

I have always said that you have to be really good to do well at Harvard. But when fields have no limit, being really good doesn't mean you will do well. It just means you have a chance. Add to this 441 judges? This is why we used to run Penn against Harvard. (And to be honest, I never did understand why they moved to a week earlier, although it has worked out fine now a couple of times.)  Anyhow, I don't know why anyone would send teams to Harvard unless, because of the nature of the school, there is an expectation that the team compete at Ivies. I mean, if you send your spawn to a prep school that costs $50K a year, I guess that's part of the perceived package. Mostly it's just throwing away money to impress non-debate people. Who really believes that Harvard is a meaningful test of debate? Seriously now.

Getting back to Delbarton, it was a lot of work. The good news was that I didn't have to do much of it. Catholic Charlie spent a few hours placing the speech judges Friday night, and that was the real toil. I had to hit some buttons now and then on Saturday on the debate rounds, and enter speech results, and—oh, the horror—staple speech ballots before the rounds, but I managed to survive unscathed. Mostly it was a chance to hang out with the Paginator for the last time before he heads off into the land of politics. The good news is, given the nature of social media, I know we won't lose touch with him (unless he turns MAGA on us, in which case all bets are off). Unfortunately I wasn't able to convince him to join us this year at WDW, but, well, they don't give it away and he might not be employed, or he might be too employed. It depends. We'll miss having a Disney virgin with us. So it goes. Speaking of which, I just made the dinner rezzes this morning, 180 days out. I'll start packing any day now.