In which we probably should point out that the bagels and noodles were not served together

The Not Regis debate last weekend was a piece of pie. Or easy as cake, if you prefer. 

The things that never fails to not amuse are A) the inability of schools to check in on time; B) the thought that these schools have that emailing my personal account will suffice while I am, in reality, putting together pairings and did, by the way, post a help email/text# for the tournament that I do look at; and C) even running late, and doing it bass ackwards, they still don’t get their info correct. Would it surprise you that it’s always the same schools? It shouldn’t. The Usual Suspects, regardless of venue and genre, are usual for a reason. 

 

Other than that, aside from a couple of flaky judges, everything ran fine. As one would expect. Most importantly, lots of novices got a chance to get rounds, many for the first time. And we were open to anyone in the region. You’ve gotta love the NYCFL. I know I do.

 

In other news, there’s lots of other tournaments. This coming weekend is the Tim Averill 

Not-Dead-Yet Memorial, or the tournament formerly known as Manchester, AKA the Home of the Albino Bagel, AKA the One Piece of Bacon Invitational. I’ve been working with them behind the scenes, which is becoming something of a thing between me and my general Mass colleagues, or my Mass General colleagues, if you prefer. The thing is, I do this every week, so at least I think I’m pretty good at it. I can bring to tournaments an easy level of expertise forged in the cauldron of endless other tournaments. (Translated into English, I know how to use tabroom.) The MSDL has its quirks, though, meaning that the Massachusetts audience has incorporated those quirks into their debate lives. So it goes. It will be fun, nonetheless.

 

Princeton has had the heat turned up. I spent Monday and Tuesday clearing waitlists. Way fewer bogus entries than at Rather Large Bronx, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. In any case, I like the way things came out. As expected, VPF is still ginormous, but everyone pretty much got a good number of starter slots. Better than IRL, to tell you the truth. 

 

Columbia is on deck, opening next week, if memory serves. We’re going to try to add some CX, plus the pandemic side salads of JV and Nov divs in LD and PF. Sadly, however, I won’t actually be on the Gem campus (or the Barnard campus, truth to tell) and will therefore not have access to the Jewish/Chinese bagel/noodle restaurant. 

 

Sigh. 

In which we may or may not have been wearing pants

Another Big Bronx is in the books. And the takeaway is simple: the tabroom.com software now has a new feature, virtual rooms. No drama. No great revelations. Tabroom works, and thanks to the powers that program for NSDA (e.g., Palmer), this particular feature also works. 

End of story.

 

I’ve done a bunch of little virtual events before this one, which was simply an arithmetic increase in things to do. More rooms to check, of course, but at least in the LD/CX universe, everybody pretty much knows the drill. We only subbed out a handful of judges, inevitably for reasons not related to tech. In fact, the tech side of things makes the tournament move all that more quickly. If a judge isn’t in a room at start time, we know it. We immediately do a replace. For all practical purposes the new judge then immediately appears in the room, and the round begins. No walking to the other end of the campus, or getting lost in the west wing of the high school. (It is a fact universally acknowledged that most large high schools designate various areas in ways unfathomable to the logical mind, presumably to scare enough of the newbies away every year to have more mystery meat in the cafeteria for everyone else. Add to this that most large high schools have annexes, addenda, Quonsets and porta-potties built after the original brutalist main building that couldn’t fit into a normal numbering scheme even if they wanted. Best advice I can give anyone trying to find their way through a high school is to bring extra breadcrumbs.) 

 

One of the good things about large, robust divisions is that MJP is a breeze. 99% come out 1-1 without touching anything. After the 3^rd round, when we start having some down-and-outs, we can start using the poor judges at the bottoms of the prefs. Happily we could say that at the end of Saturday, with 5 rounds that day and 2 the day before, every judge had at least one round (and usually more), and every judge had at least one round off. I think that becomes a must for the tab room, to keep people working but not overworking. This of course means a little loss of all those 1-1 pairings, but in the upper brackets, they ought to be able to pick up their 2s. I mean, MJP isn’t a license to strike 80% of the field. (Although try to tell that to some coaches.)

 

The other thing we did that made the prefs a little less one-ish was gender-balancing in the elims. The Paginator was always a leader in this, and we honor his not-exactly-distant memory by continuing to do it. It’s something we do as a matter of course when there’s no prefs, but something we need to remind ourselves to do with MJP panels. Gender issues are always big in debate; anything we can do to balance things out has to put us at least a little on the side of the angels.

 

The down side of virtual Bronx was manifold: no great fresh sandwiches and homemade chips from the Little Sandwich Cabin, no Thursday night dinner at the chez with Kaz, no late night pairings with a nice port on Saturday, no brown bonnets from Mr. Softee… It’s tough, being home. On the other hand, I did have time to make some pasta Bolognese, some Spanish meatballs with sweet potato fritters, ham and eggs for breakfast, etc. Into each rainstorm a little sunlight must fall.  

In which we move from the hills of Byram to the sciences of The Bronx

Last weekend we ran Byram Hills. I really wanted to see how things worked out with double flighting. The bottom line was that if you limited your room request to the correct number of rooms, entrants / 4, it was no problem. Everything paired fine. And, of course, we added plenty of time for turnover. In my mind it looks like 4 doubles a day is quite doable. Although to be honest, I don’t see us doing too many double-flighted events going forward. The thing is, 4 rounds a day isn’t very many. If you want 5 rounds and breaks, well, you can see the problem. Single flights does impose a large judging burden on a team, but at some point teams have to put up or shut up. Most teams have been around for a while and ought to have a backlog of alums and friends available to help out. If not, well, as I’ve said many times, there’s something rotten in that team’s Denmark. Adding to the issue, reliance on hireds is becoming more complicated, if not impossible, at college venues. We’re seeing the colleges demand all sorts of credentials for hires that are virtually impossible to secure, which means that the colleges have to fall back on their own usually limited resources. Certain schools have been too spoiled over the years. I have a feeling that when we go back to real life, more than a few things are going to be radically different. 

Anyhow, BHills was a breeze overall. Very few tech problems, inevitably from those who paid no attention to the warning to check their tech in advance. Yes, folks, that’s why we send out the emails, so that you’ll ignore them. If we thought you’d read them, we wouldn’t bother. Sigh. 

 

Meanwhile, things are quieting down now on the preparatory Rather Large Bronx front. Once registration shuts down, it’s all over but the shouting. A few people have been tardy with their judges, and a whole boatload of schools don’t have their students linked, but there’s still time and we’re handling things. There’s still the odd email to send out for people to ignore, but other than that, it’s on to the final fine-tuning of the tabroom setup, and there you are. Which reminds me that I probably should be doing that now. 

 

See you in the funny papers. 

In which we post a picture of why you want to flip neg in LD

 

Or, as the philosopher Fred Aristotle once said, Great Googly Moogly!

In we ask the debate community to look up the word "champion"

To champion something means to advocate for it, as for a cause. I champion equal rights for all, for instance. Other meanings of the word as a verb are similar. None of these meanings, in any reputable dictionary, champions the word as a synonym for the word "win." (See what I did there?) If I champion a tournament, I support it and push for it. I don't even have to attend it to do so. If I win a tournament, then I am the champion. Or you might say, I was the champion of the tournament, which would mean either that I won it, or that I advocated for it. If you wanted to be absolutely clear, however, you would say that I won the tournament. But in no way can you say that my championing a tournament is the equivalent of my winning the tournament. 

Given that NSD, the repeat offending culprit of this piece, is organization that, presumably, has some responsibility for education in the language arts, wouldn't it be nice if they exercised that responsibility? A neologism I might accept; a misuse, not so much. 

[I shake my head and drag myself wearily off the stage and out into the darkest night.]