In which we wax rhapsodic

If you send out a whole bunch of emails telling people it’s too late, baby, they usually respond by asking you to do something that you have explicitly announced that it is too late to do. It has ever been thus. My assumption is that most high school forensics coaches are also teachers. It is remarkable, therefore, how many of them never quite got the hang of reading comprehension.

Sigh.

I do not like the policing side of running tournaments. Although I’m fairly capable of reaming people out, and I can out-argue all but the very best, it is not my choice to do so. I am a quiet, contemplative sort, happy with a good book, maybe written by Jane Austen, and a cup of tea, with some Renaissance lute music playing gently in the background. I can work out complex formulas in Excel until the cows come home, although there I prefer music a little more hard-driving. I like to sit in my rocking chair and watch the butterflies twitter from bloom to bloom, perhaps with a cold drink and a little piano jazz in the background. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (And yes, there are times when I like to listen to the score of The King and I, if you caught the reference.)

But tournaments usually don’t offer comparable pleasures. The lead up is primarily people asking you for things you don’t want to give them, but here it breaks down into two categories: people who ask nice, and people who don’t. I should probably add a third category: people who ask whom I wouldn’t give the time of day to if they were standing under Big Ben while it was chiming. I assume these people know who they are. Anyhow, the lead up is annoying at best. Then there’s registration, the immediate prologue, for which some people spend days polishing their excuses for, A) changing everything at the last minute, and/or B) not having a check for the correct amount of money. There are also people who will try to sneak in changes to save a $10 fine. Kids who say that their chaperone is parking the car, but fail to mention that they’re parking it in Hoboken in front of the saloon in which they intend to spend the rest of the day watching ESPN running interviews with the families of the Chicago Cubs starting lineup. Parents, God love ‘em, who have never done this before and, to be honest, really aren’t doing it now either. And that old guy who thinks I really like to hear him tell dirty jokes. Why would he think that? I assume it’s because he thinks everybody likes to hear him tell dirty jokes, since he doesn't know me from a hole in the wall. To be honest, it’s not a question of dirty or clean, although the former do tend to have a certain repellence, but the intrinsic idea of telling jokes in the first place. If I want jokes, I’ll pick up a copy of a certain magazine that, as the VCA well knows, I have instant access to, and chortle away. Mostly I don’t do jokes. And I would appreciate if you wouldn’t do them either. (The one exception to this was my first poker game when I started working in publishing. The guys in that game were encyclopedic in their joke knowledge, and actually funny. But that was a unique situation. Remind me to tell you about how jokes work, or at least used to work, some day when we have nothing better to do.)

Then there’s the tournament itself, with the ebb and flow of pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing Start, relaxing for a while, pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing Start, explaining to the team who stayed in the cafeteria when everyone else rushed out en masse that, if both their phones aren’t working, the stampede to the exits of everyone else might have provided some sort of hint that something was happening, and they might want to have inquired of the authorities, relaxing for a while, pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing Start—Rinse. Repeat.

There will be rules questions. Accusations. Raised voices. An odd glitch in tabroom that no one has ever seen before and will never see again. The Paginator will insist that we listen to Killer Mike during the Red Sox Patriots game. I’ll try to get a personal best on the Saturday crossword. There will be ukuleles.

It will be Rather Large Bronx. Again.

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In which warmth emanates from the outer borough

I feel the heat rising as we near Rather Large Bronx.

There’s the Round Robin on Thursday (or Friday, for Congress people), and that looks set. The Bronxwegians seemed to be under the impression that rounds would happen quickly and folks would move on lickety split from one round to the next, and that the whole thing would be over in time for tea. I stuck the proverbial pin in that balloon, and I think the sked now is pretty workable. Plus everyone is debating everyone else, and there’s judges in the back of the room at all time. It looks good. I won’t be there for that, although I have attended in the past and even grabbed the odd PF ballot, just for old time’s sake. But RRs sort of run themselves, once they’re set up, provided all the judges are in place. And they usually are, given the nature of the beast. Once upon a time, RLB had its very own LD topic, usually based on the Policy topic, and the RR would precede it, using that topic, giving the Round Robinskis a leg up for the tournament, which always sort of annoyed me. The last thing the elite needed was a distinct and palpable advantage. (I wrote about this in Nostrum TOS, come to think about it.) But that was then and this is now.

There have been plenty of last minute school adjustments. Once you start sending out emails to the teeming masses, they start corresponding with you, rather than the Bronxwegians. I’m fine with that, as long as it doesn’t revolve around kale (which used to be a not terribly unusual slang word closely related, of course, to lettuce, but which now usually only means, well, kale, which I hope Bronx is not offering as one of the Foods of the World Unite this year). The money is Bronx’s business, not mine. Telling people to be there or else? I can do that.

Meanwhile, the Gem of Harlem is beginning to kick into gear. All the usual suspects have been rounded up for tab. That’s one of my favorite venues, for a variety of reasons, one of them being that we always have a lot of fun, and speech and debate tab together in perfect harmony. If only the democrats and the republicans were more like us…

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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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