After my clearing the waitlists and declaring debate closed, there was a minor bubble of dismay. Pennsylvania Jeff claimed that my so doing made Donald Trump look like George Washington, but I defended my belief that letting people register for a tournament they will never get into was worse by comparison. There's no question that I'll publicize this in advance in the invitation next year so that no one will be taken by surprise. (Which, of course, assumes that people read invitations, but that's another thing entirely. We don't publish invitations and live docs because people read them; we publish invitations and live docs because when people screw up we have somewhere to point to prove that "We told you this and you didn't listen, you muttonhead!") Because there is always one important school I know tends to sign up late-ish, I reserved a full battery of slots for my make-believe school, Southwest Central North, East Campus (formerly Happy Happy High High), and passed those along to them when the inevitable cry of misery arose. Who says I don't plan ahead?
About a month before a tournament it's time to delete the TBAs. For the most part, this means that we're telling people it's time to fish or c b. Given that Princeton is a big commitment, with most folks needing hotel rooms and in many cases complicated transportation, if you don't have your slate fairly set a month in advance, you haven't really figured out this coaching thing yet. Some people—the Pennsylvania Jeffs of life, for instance, although maybe it isn't him but I've already maligned him in this post so why not keep going—tell me that this is annoying because they may not have nailed it down 100% and sometimes they have to put in one name and change it later to another name, to which I reply that this may be the case, but I'm willing to impose that half a second of agony on their part in doing a name switch on tabroom in return for a solid feel for the tournament's final numbers.
Which we now have for Princeton. The fields in debate are almost exactly at the caps. But, of course, there's still pretty solid waitlists. As the final weeks go by, there will be movement. There will be drops, and there will be folks made active. I check this on a daily basis. By the fees-freeze date the week of the tournament, we are usually still at caps with W/Ls cleared, and everybody is marginally happy.
Other than all that, Congress and Speech have gone to their respective tabbers, with a set number of rooms equal to last year and, in the case of speech, a list of stinkers not to be accepted. (Congress was clean in that respect.) I am told that rooms are proving difficult to acquire, but I'll panic about that later, and if necessary take it out on the debate schedules.
In other news, we ran a series of 3 consecutive NYCFL one-dayers at the Bronx and a swell time was had by all. One of them was literally on Halloween, so a bit smaller than normal, but the other two were real barn-busters. Fortunately JV was on hand for the big ones to do some of the tabbing chores, otherwise we'd all still be there. These tournaments with imbalanced fields can be challenging, and one needs to be...creative. Coming up, I'm not in charge of either Scarsdale or Wee Small Lex, which have reasonably mixed fields, so it's a couple of easy gigs before Thanksgiving and a nice weekend off. This is my busy season, working pretty much every weekend until President's Day. (Not that anyone ever asked, but I wouldn't work Harvard for all the tea in Starbucks). Which is great, because the golf around here gets pretty grim when you have to putt throw a snowdrift.
