Sylvester Stallone, Bronx Science, Class of '27 (if you were wondering)

What’s going on with the travel to Blake? All these Facebook statuses complaining about canceled and postponed and generally miserable flights, at least going in from the northeast. If you ask me, they have nothing to complain about. They need to look on the bright side, i.e., the possibility of an extra trip through the TSA Underwear Grope. We get so little human contact in our internet-heavy lives these days. Having strangers put their hands down your pants makes up for this deficit. As a matter of fact, we’re going to have underwear groping tomorrow at Regis, just for the sake of parity. We don’t want to miss out on the benefits of being on the $ircuit, after all.

Menick’s Law #428: If you set the closing of registration for 9:00, at 9:02 someone (actually, multiple someones) will email you asking to register their team because they “just missed the deadline.” We’ll be selling alarm clocks at Regis, right past the underwear groping stations. Jeesh.

I haven’t broken the news to my plebes yet that, because they’ve qualified for the state tournament as novices, they will be debating at one-day events, like the one tomorrow at Regis, as JV. That’s usually a jaw-dropper for them, in that it’s almost a guarantee of lots of losses. But if you don’t debate up, you don’t get better. That’s just the way it goes. Plus there’s still plenty of normal novice divisions at invitationals at which they will remain among their peers. You might be thinking that they’ll read this, thus ruining the surprise, but they won’t. Plebes usually don’t enlist in the VCA until they realize that I’m not going to bite their heads off any time soon, usually toward the end of their first year. Some never enlist, and never have any idea what the rest of us are talking about. So it goes.

Their reward, of course, is their first round of Bean Trivia this Tuesday. I hope O’C has his phone all charged up and ready to go. “Ask Cruz” is one of the favorite lifelines. Who won the 1923 novice division of Blake will not be one of the questions, but go ahead. Ask him. He’ll know. Really. He will not, on the other hand, be able to name a sport with bases, nine innings, balls and bats. We all have our specialities.

Some debates

I can’t quite make out what was going on at Glenbrooks over the weekend. O’C sent me a text that he was playing dodgeball with Matt Dunay and the People’s Champion. Sticking with the Disney theme established at the DiDeAD in August, their name was either the Mighty Duckers or the Mighty Schmucks. Hard to tell.

It’s interesting to follow a weekend like this previous one. First, there’s the $ircuit tournament in Chicago, which garners a lot of attention and grabs a lot of bandwidth for those who think debate is like baseball, with teams they root for and for which they paint their faces and don the tee shirt. Given that these events are relatively narrowly focused, attended by the tiniest fraction of schools in the activity, and the tiniest fraction of the teams thereof, it’s rather remarkable. I’ve talked about this in the past, and just sort of given up on it. I used to charge WTF with the blame for pumping this stuff up and deifying (or at least hagiologizing) certain people and glorifying the events they attend, or vice versa, but that’s much less true these days. Still, the idea that the entire debate universe, a) wants a TOC bid, or 2) cares about TOC bids, is a curious one, considering the reality that the vast majority of people in the debate universe have absolutely no truck with TOC whatsoever. It’s not even a goal for them, much less a meaningful goal. The only analogy I can come up with is Little Leaguers who spend their free time watching the Majors, except here, there’s no objective proof that the latter is any more “grown up”—it’s only different. Oh, well.

Also on this weekend was the Villiger tournament, which is primarily an event for Northeast speech teams who bring along their LDers. I don’t mean to disparage it: the list of breakers looks like almost any Northeast event on a given weekend, give or take the odd $ircuit stalker. It’s not an easy tournament by any means, but it always strikes me as a little old-fashioned. I mean, from my perspective they operate on their own radar; I can’t recall the slightest push to get my school to attend, either via JOT or tabroom,com or the US mail or whatever. I have to admit I’ve lost touch with them: the last time I was there, easily ten years ago or more, they only had four prelims and broke to a “Big 32,” whatever the hell that is. I would imagine they’ve moved away from that kind of thing. Anyhow, you probably couldn’t be much more different from Glenbrooks with a varsity tournament than with Villiger, yet it thrives. More power to them.

And, of course, there was Wee Sma Lex, a very local business (which, of course, I traveled to for hours—go figure) for novices and, primarily, second-years, which I’ve already discussed at length.

In other words, something for everybody, from a Northeast perspective. I like that. If the goal of the activity is providing an educational opportunity different from the classroom, the job is being done. So I would advise you to take your hands out of your pockets for a minute as we head into Thanksgiving and pat yourself on the back. You’re doing a good job in all sorts of ways, les chefs de debater offering a varied menu of events from the startlingly rich and expensive to the purest of comfort foods. Good work. Definitely good work.

How dodgeball fits into this, however, is beyond me.

Turkey, Tiggers and tournaments in general

I’ll probably go offline for a few days, since there’s not much going on forensical over the coming weekend, whereas there’s plenty of real life things to attend to. I trust that you will do likewise. Go cook a turkey or something.

I’ve been adding judges to the hires pool as the Tiggers have signed them up. We’re almost where I would like to be, but not quite. Ratings/striking will take place starting on Sunday, so they have a few more days to get their ducks in a row. The only real problem with late additions is that they’re automatically Cs, even if they’re the cat’s pajamas. Oh, well. Other than that, the tournament is big again like last year, and should be fun for everyone. There’s a real attraction to the Tigger campus. It just feels like college, if you know what I mean, unlike some schools that are in the middle of somewhere else. Like NYU, for instance, which is in the middle of NYC. NYC overpowers the NYUness, whereas Princeton is Princeton, and while they might actually be the pickle packing capital of the world or somesuch, around the university everything is university, period. And what I think people go to the tournament for is the debating per se, since the bid is finals, and therefore pretty elusive given a field of 160. I like that so many people attend. As Soddy once said, he did not run his tournament (Big Bronx) as an entrance event to some other tournament, and that is the way all tournaments should be perceived, as ends in themselves. (I think Kant also wrote about this, but in his case it was sour grapes, because every year he debated he always dropped in the bid rounds.) You go to a tournament for the sake of that tournament. A lot of tournaments have definite personalities, and you want to be a part of the tournaments you like because of those personalities. Presumably some tournaments get TOC bids because the nature of the tournament personality and the people it attracts warrant those bids. As the VCA knows, I value a lot of things about forensics, and among the least of these is the whole $ircuit business. Trust me on this: if you debate now to learn things and enjoy yourself and make friends and do as well as you can, you will value the experience for life. If you debate now to get to TOC at any price and miss out on all the non-competitive aspects of the activity, debate will just be a blur in your past, another checkbox on your list of things that got you into college. Good luck with that one.

And so, it’s off to the holiday. Some early Christmas shopping tomorrow, breaking out the new Wii Resort game with the family, arguing about the Disney trip. (Disney trip? you ask. Yeah, Disney trip. Details to come. I promise you, the VCA is going to enjoy this one. Seriously.) Maybe take in a movie. Clean up this and that. Pack away the rest of the Bump crapola for the year. Play some poker Saturday night. Five whole days off. Ah, blessed peace!

And blessed peace to you, too.

Bietz continued: the snobs vs the slobs

Bietz talks about the schism between local and national circuit teams. He does not go far enough, not so much in explaining how bifurcation exists, but how people in debate, who wish to cast aspersions at someone, usually end up accusing them of being a member of the other camp. In my experience, when people have disagreed with me, they have complained that my problem is that I am too committed to the $ircuit.

Puh-leeze. I mean, I’m the one who put the dollar sign in there (only because I couldn’t find the cents sign).

Then again, I guess you could accuse me, on the basis of this semiotic, to be anti-national circuit, but loyal members of the VCA know that that is not the case either. I have enjoyed the challenges of circuit debate with my debaters at that level. I am critical of everyone, everywhere (including myself). I play no favorites. My point is, and always has been, that there are two different arenas, that the one that is right for an individual debater is the one that is right for that individual debater, that both are valuable, and that it is the responsibility of coaches to foster sensibilities that support an open attitude on their teams.

Again, I come back to the coaches. That’s where the responsibility begins.

But still, although debaters may not have reached their legal majority, then again, they are not totally blameless. Tribalistic practices among any group isolate the others who are not in the group, with all the hoo-ha that goes along with otherization, but in forensics there isn’t a lot to be gained from it in the long run. We are all competitors, but more importantly, we’re all citizens of a relatively small and rather exciting little group, and the others are not those who debate differently from us, but those who are not in a position to benefit from debate at all. Those debaters who see themselves as leaders, who actually believe in what they are arguing, need to take their own meaningful positions on this. You need to ask yourself, if you’re a hot circuit debater, how do you treat your random draws? With respect and friendship? Or with disdain and, after they are gone, scorn? In a universe of very few people interested in debate, do you really have the myopia to treat some of those people poorly? These are your spiritual compatriots. Sure, they might be your “inferior” in a particular debate sense, but I don’t think that sportsmanship somehow doesn’t apply to debate, or that the purpose of sportsmanship doesn’t apply. On the other side of the coin, debaters who do not aspire to the circuit should nonetheless welcome learning what they can from circuit styles and content. I personally look with suspicion on a lot of the popular styles that come and go over time, and I expect anyone with half a brain will do likewise, but some of the stuff always proves out to be useful in the dialectic move toward truth. For instance, maybe knowing a little theory might enlarge the brain even if you never use it yourself in a round. Say what you will about Nietzsche, you’ve got to admit that he’s important to anyone studying modern thought. And so forth and so on. Different and/or new doesn’t make it bad, it just makes it different and/or new. Study it for a while. Learn about it. If you’re going to reject it, reject it based on knowledge of what it is, not ignorance. But probably you’re going to get something out of it. Which is not a bad thing at all.

I don’t expect everybody at a tournament to start singing Kumbaya and holding hands and whatnot, but a level of respect is required from everyone. If you don’t have it, question your motivations and your actions. Did you sign up for debate only because you wanted to debate, and not because you wanted to hang out with like souls, to exist in a multicultural realm where intelligence is valued (a rarity in some high school milieus) and where increasing intelligence is the name of the game? As I say, it begins with the coaches, but students are culpable here too, if they are not treating everyone with respect. That the activity is about treating people with respect, about fairness and justice, about otherization, about ethical behavior, only underlines the need for all its citizens to act in accordance with the principles to which we are giving lip service. If it’s only lip service, well then, it’s just a lot of lip. And at the point where debate is just a lot of b.s., it has virtually no value whatsoever, and you can count me out.

You show me yours and I'll show you mine

One thing I looked at as I tried to catch up with the universe’s activities in my absence was the thread over at WTF on prepping out and case disclosure. Or at least that’s how the thread seems to have started out; over its course, it’s covered many other things as well. Interesting stuff, although the thread itself, like any long and complicated discussion, has a lot of chaff to wheat your way through. Still, some thoughts.

First of all, as an aside, isn’t there something slightly wrong with the admission that a third to a half or $ircuit rounds are so fast that most of the judges don’t understand what is being said? This is ascribed as much as anything else as bad speed, rather than speed per se, and that may be true. One of the worst aspects of LD since as far back as I can remember is its rather inept cooption of various aspects of policy, and this would seem to be another example of that. I’ve watched policy breaks at TOC that I could flow, because there’s more to it than just talking fast. At any rate, I question the value of a speaking event in which the speaking is literally removed from event’s evaluative context. If an aff is going to spew at such intolerable speeds that we have to eliminate (or, excuse me, “flex”) CX so that the judge and opponent can read the cases to find out what was said, we’ve got a problem.

But the issue is prepping out and case disclosure. One needn’t be a professional mathematician to figure that a large organization will be able to scope out cases better than a small organization. If I have four or five judges and some loose coaches and whatnot, I can pretty quickly get a bead on all the major competition at an event. If I don’t have that vast backup army, I won’t be able to collect as many flows. So the advantage goes to the already advantaged, obviously. But case disclosure eliminates that advantage (or at least lessens this particular aspect of that advantage). If the goal of a debate is to argue ideas, and not win the round at any cost, then it makes sense that we would want to know that Debater A is running an aff based on such-and-such and so-and-so, or that Debater B is running a kritik based on this-or-that. We wouldn’t need the whole song and dance, of course, but enough so that every opponent goes into the room prepared for the subject matter at hand.

Aaron T sets a simple paradigm that this sort of thing can be done or not done by any tournament that wants to do it, and he will therefore do it at his. This makes sense to me. Given the number of $ircuit folks who travel down to his venue for that Octos bid, there is a logic to their being placed on as level a playing field as possible. And I’m sure the mechanics of the thing, as he’ll do it, will make sense; it’s funny how many people seem to want to quibble about implementation, as if this hasn’t been going on one way or another in Policy for the last thousand years. At the MHL, Kurt was kicking around not only disclosure but limiting novices to a handful of case approaches, simply to train them to figure out what the hell they were doing in the round, without having to worry about prepping out on an infinite number of case possibilities. The point was education, not victory; that would come later.

Most LD venues I’m a part of, I think, wouldn’t really lend themselves to AT’s approach, because the events are informed by other interests. That is, certainly a lot of people go to Yale or Lex or Bump looking for a bid, but the vast number of people are there for something else. The judge pools are good, but they’re not mostly $ircuit. People travel from around the country to the Texas tournaments and to Emory and Glenbrooks, and the field numbers at those tournaments are limited, and it’s a pretty special situation, and it’s a major financial investment. You can send exactly 2 LDers to Emory, by plane, for about the same price as sending 5 varsity LDers to Lexington, plus a herd of your novices, by bus. We tend to be looking for a different debate experience with these events. Not that they’re better or worse, but they’re different. To expect that all tournaments must aim at the same goals would be a rather limited view of the activity, regardless of what goals you would want those to be.

So I wouldn’t suggest that all tournaments be somehow “required” to have a disclosure process, but that some tournaments might require disclosure makes sense to me, especially if they are at the top tier of national events. A more parochial tournament might wish to do this too, and more power to them, but it’s not my particular cup of tea, and I certainly can’t imagine it at a novice or JV level. It probably does make sense that all round robins set up a disclosure process, however, given the nature of those events, their competitors and their judge pools.

So as far as disclosure goes, I’m all for it, where it makes sense. The element of surprise is the only thing gained by running something for which your opponent is unprepared. That’s not debate; it’s an ambush. Even if you win the round, you haven’t done so because you’re a good debater, but because you’re a sneaky s.o.b. Where’s the glory in that? And a level playing field of disclosure makes all teams potentially equal. I can’t argue with that either.

Why digressive debate wins rounds

So here’s the deal. I have no idea how many judges in the world are prejudiced in favor of NFL-style debate (i.e., you debate the resolution, you achieve your value), but the number is not insubstantial, and at many tournaments represents the majority of the pool. Yet even at those, shall we say, conservative tournaments, digressive debaters doing anything but arguing the resolution and defending their value do very, very well. How could this be?

There are a number of possible answers, but I’m only going to present one of them.

A small but not insignificant number of debaters are intrigued by fashionable argumentation, which at the moment includes theory, kritik, off-case discussions, etc. This material, whatever its inherent value in the activity, is seen as hip—fashion is called fashion for a reason—and there is unquestionably a strategic advantage to running this sort of material in front of college student judges (who, in fact, may be responsible for much of it). As the same time, you would think that there’s a strategic disadvantage to running this sort of material in front of traditional judges. It is not unusual for major tournaments to be chockablock with those college judges, many of whom are being paid for those services, who are perceived as knowledgeable about the activity by tab (which is highly unlikely to be ranking them according to their paradigms—God knows I never have), and who are therefore in round after round, but there are plenty of those other judges in attendance as well, who are as inclined to think as poorly of digressive debate as these college judges are inclined to think positively of it. Yet the digressives are picking up the conservative ballots. How is this happening?

First of all, not all of the digressive debaters are necessarily good, and not all the digressive debaters are picking up all their ballots. The material they have chosen as the basis of their strategy is complex, and it’s easy to get lost in the intricacies of theory (debate or critical) and the like. We’ll exclude these schmegeggies.

But there is a select group of digressives who are good. The thing is, this is tough material, and some of the smartest people are attracted to it, and because they’re smart, they master it. Logical enough, regardless of your opinion of the material. (And if a debater is thinking strictly $ircuit, there’s hardly a down side to digressive strategy at all.) So, right off the bat, we have some of our smartest debaters attracted to material of a nature we’ll call Parmesan Debate, so as to skip the linguistic offensives of either pro- or di-gressive. We’ll call the kind of debate they’re not doing Romano Debate.

Switch to the tournament environment. Things are going hot and heavy. In a particular round we have a Parmesan Debater versus a Romano Debater. But here’s the thing. The Parmesan Debater is very very good and very very smart, while the Romano Debater is merely very good and very smart. The judge, despite his particular taste in cheese, will vote for the debater who wins on the grounds set by the debaters. In this contest, the Parmesan Debater has the natural advantages of skill and smarts, and wins the debate not because they are Parmesan but because they are, intrinsically, the better debater. Their cheese didn’t win, their brain won.

At many, many tournaments, it could be that the best and the brightest at that tournament are, by their own choice, Parmesan Debaters. Any tournament field will be dominated by its best and the brightest, and if that best and the brightest are Parmesan Debaters, Parmesan Debate will dominate the tournament. (Some of the best and the brightest may also be Romano Debaters, and in that case, flip a coin, but as long as they’re outnumbered as percentage of the field, they’ll be outnumbered as percentage of the elimination rounds.) My point is, obviously, not that the style of debate is winning, or even responsible for the win, so much as the people who choose to do it. They’re picking up even Romano judge ballots, not because their cheese is better, but their cheese making is better.

From here, you can look at all the various reasons/influences/whatever that are responsible for Parmesan Debate in the first place, and address them separately. But don’t address them as being responsible for more victories in the debate arena. It just may not be true, even if every single round at a given tournament is won by Parmesan Cheese. It could have been Romano. Hell, it could have been Provolone. The cheese isn’t what’s doing the job here.

Still, it’s incredible that so many of the finest would be attracted by mere fashion. Where are the iconoclasts when you really need them?

"Rising stars"

I love rising stars. We now seem to have round robins just for them, or at least pods of round robins just for them. What a concept. First of all, presumably these rising stars are, at the moment, dark unseen spots filling up the sky, gray faceless contenders in a sea of forensiciana. They are the kids that come from the sticks, from Allentown, Pennsylvania… “Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It's the lives of all these people who've worked with you. You've got to go on, and you've got to give and give and give. They've got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can't fall down. You can't because your future's in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I'm through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!”

(Odd advice to give a tap dancer, to keep you feet on the ground, but anyone who has ever seen Ruby Keeler tap dance pretty much realizes that for all practical purposes she is keeping her feet on the ground.)

So we celebrity up these unknown kids from Allentown, and we send them out on the stage, and maybe they become real stars, their names in lights on that Great White Way of debate that is the National $ircuit. Broadway rhythm’s got me—everybody dance!!! There’s flowers sent to the divas by the stage door johnnies, blazing marquees, bold-faced names in Winchell’s column, caricatures at Sardi’s. Ah, stardom. Of course, the next thing you know Eve Harrington (also known as Hockaday EH) comes along, and you fasten your seat belt because it’s going to be a bumpy night, and you're yesterday’s news, a has-been, a nobody. Show biz is tough, baby. And you’ve got to be tough to survive in it.

And what about those rising stars who don’t make it. “I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.” They start out burning oh so brightly, they are peas in the rising star pods of all the round robins, and then they’re never heard of again. What happens to these bums, anyhow? I see them out on the street, a couple of dozen pencils in their tin cups, begging for spikes off the third criterion turn. Oh, the humanity!

I probably maintain something of a minority opinion on the RR situation, that they’re coming a little too fast and a little too furiously, and that they might be concentrating on the wrong side of the debate universe. They are, after all, debate competition distilled down from everything that usually goes with a tournament. For one thing, even the poor schlimazel who comes in last is probably pretty good, unlike the poor schlimazel at an invitational who comes in last who probably doesn’t know his aff from his elbow but who is nonetheless being exposed to ideas he might otherwise never even know exist. I’m all for that invitational schlimazel. I guess that every tournament can’t and shouldn’t exist for that poor schlub, but all those that do are the reason I show up week after week. As for the others: as Homer Simpson says (in The Day of the Locust—now there’s a trivia question for you), Oh, Lord, forgive me for harboring such unworthy thoughts, but sometimes I wish I could tear it all down!

Thus ends today’s sermon. Please join me for tea and popcorn at the local revival house. We need to catch up on some classics.
 

Independence, Part Two

So in a world where people are paying attention to such things, no tournament director in his or her right mind will accept unchaperoned entries, for the simple reason that by doing so responsibility for those entries defaults to the tournament director, and the hassles that might arise can be anything from a suddenly sick child who needs to be sent home, somehow, to a seriously sick child who needs to be sent to the hospital, representing a continuum of situations most TDs do not wish to spend time adjudicating during their tournaments. There are enough problems as it is. Why take on these problems as well? Add to that the admittedly minor possibility that an unaffiliated entry could be attending your tournament in direct violation of school regulations, and you have an untenable position. (One could argue that because some TDs do accept such entries, others should as well. But that is a bad argument. The handful of tournaments I know of that do not pay attention to who’s showing up and what happens to them are demonstrating bad judgment, not setting a precedent of good behavior for others. The fact that some people do a thing, no matter who those people are, is no warrant for others doing it. If that were the case, we could have all easily refuted our mothers when they asked, if all our friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would we do so too.)

But the curious thing is, the essay in Rostrum misses all the obvious issues I’ve talked about, which are real and preemptive. The writers instead attack the Legion of Doom on the question of liability, and claim that the legion’s position, being specious, is therefore discriminatory. And you know something? On these they may be right.

First, liability. Liability for what? Challenged by whom? I mean, I’m certainly willing to accept that if something were to happen to an unchaperoned child at my tournament, someone might hold me legally accountable, but that is an extreme possibility. What would be the basis of the liability, aside from proximity? And realistically, would that ever really come to pass? Has it ever? The argument in the article here is reasonable. The writers go on to say that this claim of liability in the Legion’s policy statement (which has the legal weight of a tuna melt) is in fact an attempt to discriminate against independent entries.

Yeah. They're right.

The goal of the Legion is to mold, or limit, or contain—however you want to refer to it—LD according to certain standards which are claimed as educational. But the Legion very much believes that one of the gravest threats to those standards is students without coaches, who are therefore unrestricted by, not merely adult supervision at a tournament, but adult supervision in forming their approach to debate. Another perceived threat is the college student judge/coach with a so-called progressive agenda, pressuring debaters to adapt to their agendas of speed, source literature and digressive theories of debate structure. While these unaffiliated debaters are not always linked with these digressive judges, they often are, for the simple reason that when you have no coach, you hire whom you can. Of course, the Legion also takes TDs to task for hiring these digressive judges, but the connection remains. If you’re accepting a debater or team without an adult but with a judge, the likelihood is you’re accepting a digressive judge (I like that term) into your judging pool.

So as it turns out, the good reason for barring the unchaperoned/unaffiliated—all of my examples of the sick debater—is bypassed by the Legion in favor of an obscurant policy claiming liability issues. And, probably, there are liability issues at stake, but the real issue is keeping out bad influences. So, all right, this is not really discriminatory, but it is weighted. Is it wrong?

You’d have to make your own decision on that. I’ve spoken to the issue of the digressive judges in the past, at great length, and while I don’t ban them, I don’t seek them out (and they know who I am, and when they or their wards have the opportunity to strike me, they do, so we’re even there). And do I love the unaffiliated/independent/unchaperoned children out there? Let’s see. I think the term I use is National $ircuit, given that these independents all seem to turn up quite far away from home despite the Rostrum article's claims that they have no funds. If you say so... The idea put forth in the article regarding behavior or unchaperoned independents being modified by the community at large, by the way, is simply silly: it's non-unique (all behavior in groups is group-modified to some extent) and it's no guarantee of correct behavior (unless the group we're talking about is akin to Nazi Storm Troopers).

Still, there is the issue of what is a student to do if there is no debate in their area? Shouldn’t they be able to find it elsewhere? Aren't they entitled to Lincoln-Douglas by virtue of birth? OF COURSE THEY ARE!!! IT’S PLANK #328 OF THE UN DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS!!!

(That, in case you missed it, was irony. In caps.)

I mean, jeesh, I love debate (obviously) and value it highly enough to devote, shall we say, some spare time to it, but there are probably other ways of learning things in high school. I support finding funding for debate where it doesn’t exist: not funding for the handful of top debaters to travel seven states away to bid tournaments, but funding for schools to augment the salaries of their underpaid teachers to create and coach in local events, to urge them to seek help from the NFL, all that sort of thing. Aside from getting to TOCs (if that is a real benefit of debate, and that is arguable), all the benefits of debate would pretty much be available if it were no more than bi-weekly scrimmages between the theoretical East Side HS and the West Side HS for a couple of hours after school. There are people out there, productive members of society—doctors, lawyers, truant officers, circus acrobats, CEOs—none of whom debated in high school. They have survived. There is no right to debate. There is no right to specific extracurricular activities. We are privileged to have debate, or to have the wherewithal to seek it out. We love it. And we should be thankful for it. Demand it as our due? No. It just doesn’t work like that.

Anyhow, I’m surprised the NFL would print an article that is so counter to their own rules. Have you ever tried to send a kid to NatNats without their coach along? Look that one up some time. If there’s any real hypocrisy here, it’s on the part of NFL, not the independents or the Legion, whose points of view are at least single-minded. Unless NatNats is going to start letting people in without 38 separate letters notarized by every household saint within an 80-mile radius of the local school board, they shouldn’t even pretend to support such a position.

No wonder I run a Red Light District.

Independence, Part One

I’m still reading that old Rostrum. In addition to Smilin’ J’s pack of lies, there’s an article on independent entry in tournaments. Very amusing issue, I think.

The hoo-ha begins with the Legion of Doom’s platform plank advising that tournaments accept no independent or unchaperoned entries, warranted essentially by liability issues. The Rostrum article contends that these liability issues are chimerical, and that the banning of independent unchaperoned entries is discriminatory.

My oh my oh my… Fortunately for the VCA, there’s a backstory to all of this. Aren’t you glad you’re one of us?

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). I annually run one invitational as tournament director, plus half a dozen or so Mid-Hudson League one-day tournaments. These all ban independent, unchaperoned entries. Additionally I am an officer in the NYCFL, which holds virtually weekly tournaments, and which likewise bans the unchaperoned.

Why? Good question. I will offer reasons only from personal experience. Twice I have participated at tournaments where students were removed from the premises on gurneys, headed for the local hospital, because of serious medical ailments. On too many occasions to count I have participated at tournaments where students have, for one reason or another, found themselves in the appropriate rest room (if we’ve been lucky) vomiting, bleeding, or generally having a rough go of it, again for medical reasons. And I’m going to share something with you. When I am running a tournament, I tend to be a little, shall we say, busy. Distracted, you might suggest. And I know from experience that there can be a medical emergency at any time, totally unforeseen, requiring instant action. When I am supervising my own team, I take on that responsibility for them myself. That’s part of the deal. But when I am running a tournament, I need to have someone else carry that responsibility for all the other teams that are in attendance. I can’t take on that responsibility. I’m too busy. I’ve got other things to do. But if there is no responsible adult on hand with a team, then it would become my responsibility.

What part of no way, Jose, don’t you understand? Do you think there is any argument under the sun that will convince me to take on the responsibility for unchaperoned minors when I have other responsibilities that I must concentrate on? I mean, in the middle of a tournament I should stop whatever I'm doing to find out why little Johnny Independent is having at the porcelain in the boy’s room? I don’t think so. But if there were no adult there with little Johnny, I would have no choice. Mandated adult supervision is, therefore, a no-brainer.

But why does an adult have to be 21? Wonderful question. And I'm not going to bother to answer it. We all have blocks about measuring maturity with birth certificates on both sides of the question, but at the point where society makes that determination on the far side of 21, so do I. If I don't know you, using the normative age of maturity as a gauge that you are mature in a situation that may call for maturity is a pretty straightforward decision on my part. I won't even bother to offer evidence that college students may, as a group, not be mature. Maybe where you come from they do all spend their free time in prayer and meditation. That would be nice.

Why else don't I accept unaffiliated entries at my tournaments? The article further claims that these entries are the result of finances, or bureaucracy, or policy, and not indicative of a lack of support for the traveling students. This is true. Most of the time. It does not, however, cover situations where students in probationary/disciplinary situations have lied to their schools, to their parents, and to the tournaments they are attending, in order to attend those tournaments. How many of these incidents would I have to itemize to make my case?

And while I don't consider this a voting issue, the article actually pleads that forcing a parent to accompany a child may put that parent in the unfortunate position of having to judge rounds! Oh, the abomination. The horror. I am appalled at the thought.

One thing I do agree with is that I see no reason why students can't travel under the aegis of other schools. I have transported students from other schools, and other coaches have transported my students. Full chaperone responsibilities have been taken in these situations, which have been approved in advance by the tournaments to which they've gone. And I do allow students to come to my tournaments chaperoned by adults other than their parents or their own (perhaps non-existent) coaches. I am willing to deal. Still, in the cases where I might have questions of legitimacy of a team, I have asked for confirmation from the school. On the other hand, in cases where I know the individual chaperone who may be under 21, and it is someone who has proven their maturity to me in the past, I waive that qualification. I have even allowed students who have come with a parent to hire a judge, when they've claimed that their parent was unable to judge (because of language). I'm not an ogre. Or at least I'm not an ogre on this issue, when I have no reason to be.

But come on. Would any adult seriously accept the responsibility for unchaperoned children at a tournament? Or accept the possibility that a student might be attending against a school's specific wishes for that student or its general policies? These are not negotiable or arguable in any way, shape or form. Argue that tournament directors work with legitimate independent entries to enable participation? Any day of the week. Argue that tournament directors should put themselves in a position that could undermine their careers? Not on my watch.

But there is another side to this particular coin. I know you want me to flip the old nickel and tell you.

Next time.