I, for one, do not believe half of the entries on tabroom for some of the upcoming tournaments. On the other hand, I do believe the other half, literally, which in many cases is way more than the norm. Way more. It is going to be one of a tournament’s greatest responsibilities this season to manage entries in an era when there are no travel or lodging fees.
Of course, the first option is to let everybody in and devil take the hindmost. Needless to see, I find this option odious at best.
In the case of bid tournaments, there needs to be a reasonable expectation on the part of entrants that the bids are achievable. The IRL rule of thumb has always been that the best situation is that all down-2s break. This requires a balancing of event caps and the number of prelims and elims. Quite doable. This season, sadly, it will leave a lot of entrants on the cutting room floor, but it’s probably better not to get in than to win 5 out of 7 rounds, and maybe pay a goodly fee, and not break.
When there are no bids at stake, there is still a responsibility on the part of a tournament to create a meaningful competition. 340 entrants debating 6 rounds = 117 4-2s. 240 entrants debating 6 rounds = 83 4-2s. Those are tough odds if you're breaking to a triple. Breaking to a double? Fuhgeddaboudit. I would prefer creating more events. If I have a bid division capped at 170, say, and 300 leftover registrants, maybe I’d begin by creating a new division for JV. That would alleviate a lot of the pressure on the bid division. There aren’t a lot of JV divisions in the wild around here these days. There’s Yale, which is early in the year when former novices are just cutting their teeth on sophomoring, that toughest of all debate seasons, and that makes good sense. Putting second-years into a fierce bid battle their first time out is a recipe for gloom with a side order of doom. They will sink to the bottom in the presets, and will never be heard from again. Putting them against other sophomores? That’s their peers, and it’s where they belong. There will be time enough later in the season to dash their dreams in the demolition derby of varsity debate. Then there’s Harvard’s JVing, but they’re only in it for the money and they’ll do whatever they can for whatever numbers they can reach, so I don’t really count them. There used to be other JV divisions later than Yale in the season, but as a general rule these were in lieu of novice divisions and were, in fact, lousy with novices. I always pushed to change them to literal novice. But now, when we know that there are a lot of second-years looking for rounds, and that they’re simply otherwise not going to be able to get them, I think we’ll see—and I will push for—JV events at all big tournaments. (And for that matter, novice events where they do not already exist. Why not? We’ve got the [virtual] space.)
Early in the pandemic we talked about some kind of off-bid division, and I see some tournaments taking to this idea. “Rising Stars,” say, or something like that. I think the jury has yet to deliberate on these. I was gung-ho early on for this idea, but others have been disdainful, worried that these divisions will simply become the Not Good Enough For Prime Time divisions. They do need to be in the mix of possibilities though going into the season.
The one thing virtual tournaments can do is expand to meet the demand. Expanding into new divisions has to be the way to go. But schools are going to have to come to grips with the fact that expansion will be only so big. Nobody is going to get a dozen entries in a bid event this year. Not even close.
Which brings us to the other problem. Who do you let in? Again, we’ve talked about this. Once the barriers to participation are lowered, there will probably be more potential participants. A tournament with a history will need to evaluate its past to determine its regular customers, and give them priority, while at the same time evaluating the new customers and ensuring that as many people as possible get a shot at entry at popular events. That’s going to be a killer.
If nothing else, tournament directors are going to earn their whoppingly high salaries this season sorting all of this stuff out.
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