In which we address an unbreakable rule

So here’s the deal. I refuse to accept independent entries, and I refuse to even consider unchaperoned entries. If you do not have an adult on the scene, presumably with the appropriate medical and contact information and the commitment of your school to your attendance, you are not going to my tournament.

I have seen over the years more nonsense attacking this stance than [insert Donald Trump metaphor here]. Not letting in anyone who wants to come somehow violates their right to debate, they say, or as it often seems to be considered, their Right to Debate, with all the capital letters.

Balderdash.

I have now worked two tournaments this season. At both of these tournaments, students were taken ill, emergency medical services were notified, and the students were taken to local hospitals. This is not the first time I’ve seen this happen, but it’s the first time it’s happened back-to-back.

When there is a medical emergency, you want a few things. First, you want someone on hand who has some emergency training. Fortunately, a lot of teachers do indeed have this training as part of their own education. Second, you want the appropriate adult to take responsibility for the student as quickly as possible. You might have to pull them out of rounds, maybe even from a different building, but they need to be as immediately available as a tournament can allow. Obviously, tending to the needs of a sick student overrides any other responsibility at a tournament.

The people running a tournament are not the ones who should decide what steps to take when there is an incident, except insofar as they must act until the appropriate responsible adult arrives. The people running a tournament do not somehow take responsibility for the well-being of the attendees, aside from the obvious maintenance of a safe venue. Many tournaments clearly post a disclaimer about this sort of thing, thinking that it somehow absolves them from legal responsibilities.

But this is not about legality. It is about the well-being of the individuals at a tournament. High school students are minors. When they attend school they require adult supervision; when they travel for their schools, they require adult supervision then as well, if not more so, provided by and/or supported by their schools. If a student shows up at a tournament unchaperoned, or unbeknownst to their school, the trail of responsibility is broken. The worst case scenarios are absolutely terrifying. Many of the lesser scenarios aren’t exactly heartwarming either.

You can’t argue with this. Really. You can’t. Don’t even bother to try.

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In which we debrief on Monticello

I really like the idea of getting a warm-up tournament or two under my belt before the main events start happening. Having laid off of tabroom since March, all I’d had before Monti was Byram Hills, working there with Kaz and the Paginator, where there were two divisions and nothing particularly complicated and everything worked out fine. Monti had three divisions, and had a couple of complications. I admit that it took me a while to reorient myself on the back alleys of the software.

First of all, with small divisions and few schools, we needed to maximize judge use. While people were signed up to judge this or that, I knew that a goodly number of them could also judge these and those, so I needed to set up pools or judges across the divisions. This is not hard to do, unless you’ve totally parked your brain in the auxiliary lot and you’ve hit every button known to science and decided that the software has gone south before the light bulb suddenly illuminates and you remember how to do the obvious. Admittedly I’ve never actually done this before, but that’s no excuse, especially since the process is self-evidently obvious. Oh, well. Live and learn. And, no doubt, forget it by the time I have to do it again.

We also had to manage some same-time contests. Surprisingly, tabroom paired them, albeit with warnings, so that worked out well. Then in one division, for round 5 I threw exclusions to the winds and paired all sorts of same schools, and the only problem there is remembering to turn it off for breaks, otherwise coachovers won’t happen. Then there was assigning the judging normally as long as possible, then switching to judging again on the opposite side, and then switching to threatening the lives of Montwegian grads with a railway share if they don’t get into that policy round ASAP and look like they know what they are doing.

Anyhow, it all came out fine. I was doing it alone, and no doubt would have saved a little aggro if I’d had a partner, but there were no terrible blunders, and there we were.

Of course, there was also another story from the event, which will provide us with content for the morrow.

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In which we reorient

Tabroom is a labyrinthine construct. I’m one of its biggest users, and I find that it takes me quite a while to get back into it for a new season. This isn’t so much in the pairings, as in all the little details of how the data is organized for registration and general information. If you don’t poke around a program for a while, you forget where to poke. Normally I find it a process of annual reorientation. I dive into the Pups and it all becomes clear again. This year, though, I was not Pupping, and little Byram Hills hardly counts as a full immersion. So that means the season’s high gear is hit with Rather Large Bronx. But, alas, I’m certainly not running it. I mean, I’m running LD, and marginally helping with the other debate tabbers, but the TDs are Bronxwegian. So they’re the ones banging around in tabroom, and it’s interesting to watch, because they’re banging around in places I never go. The thing is, I really do trust that the program is doing things right. And I certainly trust the registration side of things, since that’s the oldest part of the system. On top of that, the registration side of things is just fields of data with various points of access, as compared to pairings, which juggle data. The juggling is something we always keep an eye on, and probably always will, because you need a little of the human touch in almost any program, even if it’s only to confirm that everything is okey-dokey. Storage is one thing; algorithms are something else entirely. Anyhow, when I’m pulling the levers behind the scenes during the registration phase, I know how to quickly scope out legit entries, how to track judge requests and obligations, how to make things work for everyone, all that sort of thing that the person who does it once a year is a little less at home with. Given that most people probably only do it once a year—I mean, how many dedicated practically-every-week tabbers are there out there? Ten? Twenty?—it’s even more labyrinthine than it is to practiced hands.

So I try to help out the B-wegians, but occasionally they stump me because they’re going at it in a way that wouldn’t occur to me. Fortunately Prime Numbers Palmer has been readily available to point things out and help me get my bearings again, so I can help them out. Considering that in a couple of weeks we open the Tiggers, and with that one I will be pulling all the levers, I would like to feel confident that I am back in the saddle again, as compared to being in the situation CP always comments on with, “Are you sure you’ve done this before?”

And it’s up to Monticello tomorrow. Regional debate struggles along, while the $ircuit keeps on getting more bizarre. Don’t look at me. You only have yourselves to blame.

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In which we mostly ponder benefits and bugs

I spent all of yesterday in a DJ meeting going over a new replacement for an old system. It is a classic conundrum in that it while it offers benefits to the company, it doesn’t offer any benefits to the users. Everyone will have to learn something new to do exactly what they’re already doing. There are no work or time savings, no great new ease of use, nothing. Those benefits to the company, on the other hand, are major in terms of asset management. I kind of dread rolling it out, because I can’t promise anyone any particular personal benefits. Asking everyone to be an altruist is not necessarily an easy business. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, as Spock would say, but in the business world, most people tend to favor the individual (themselves) over the group. There are no utilitarians in the subjective reality of the office cubicle.

While I was going through all of this, I occasionally popped off to watch the tournament world. Monticello closed, and we have three runnable divisions, mostly. PF will be a little dicey, with too many of one school, but the rest are quite workable, mainly because there’s a nice fluid pool of judges I can move from event to event to keep everyone on their toes. I’m waiting to hear about e-ballots. With a small tournament like this it’s not terribly onerous to do paper, but why would you if you don’t have to? If nothing else, I wouldn’t have to lug my printer up the stairs. I can live with that.

Rather Large Bronx is going through its late conniptions. Tabroom isn’t tallying partial judging correctly, which is giving them a headache. I passed it along to the King of All Prime Numbers, but I’m already guessing that he’ll tell us that we’re thinking incorrectly and that we need to debug our brains and not the program. I’ve got to get a message out, meanwhile, to a handful of very promising first-year-outs who will be judging 0-5 rounds if they don’t post a paradigm immediately. Overall, though, the judging numbers look good, with lots of leeway for the late outrounds, which I always really worry about.

Onward.

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In which we look at the new resolutions

I saw a little bit of sturm und drang online over the new LD topic, although I’m not quite sure why. I mean, whenever a new topic is released there’s always an immediate flow of WORST TOPIC EVER with a little side trickle of, Hmmm, I Can Debate This, ultimately followed by people accepting reality and actually doing some research and finding that it is, in the end, just another debate topic. I can’t say I know much about qualified immunity per se, as in, how it plays out in real life. But if there’s a topic area more important than this one today, I’m hard pressed to imagine what it is. The racial side of the story is hard to argue. I wouldn’t want to be in a position of denying inherent racism, but by the same token, I wouldn’t want to be in a position to have to present a solution. But what looks like a fairly deep lack of appropriate training of police forces is something else altogether. When there’s a news story virtually every day of another inexplicable act of violence against a civilian, you have to start believing that whatever role racism plays in them (and it certainly plays a starring role), there’s more to it than that. Racial violence has a long and varied history, of course, but this particular brand of it is isolatable and, in its way, unique (although hardly new). In the research that students will be doing, and in the thinking that students will be doing, I think they will learn quite a bit. At least I hope so. As for the debates themselves, as I’ve often said, what do I know? I’m out of the LD business, which has gone way beyond my own coaching and judging experience. I’m not qualified to comment. Then again, I never cared much about debating as an educational opportunity in and of itself. It’s the researching and thinking where the education mostly takes place. (Certain cases may extend that education into the rounds, and in a dynamic, meaningful way, but not every round, no matter how dramatic and well-informed.) If this topic moves the needle just a little bit, in that hundreds of students learn something important about one of the biggest problems facing our communities today, it will be a good thing. I want the smart citizens of tomorrow to have this information in their brain cells.

On the other hand, while I’m happy that the PF universe chose the right topic, I’m rather astounded that it was a close call. Maybe it’s been ever thus, and that people who were born after the wheel was invented were ignorant of trying to drive BMWs before the wheel came along. Whatever. Curiously, the student vote was way in favor of arguing the negatives of smartphones but the school vote outweighed. That, children, is known as dodging a bullet that you didn’t even know was being aimed in your direction. The superficiality of those potential debates versus the true importance of the subject that you will actually be debating, if you really get into it, is quite a chasm. Trust me. You’re on the right side of it.

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