tournaments – Page 10

My Yale

So my Yale begins next week. Not the 2008 edition, but the 2009 one. We start at the Yale Debate Team’s attendance at the APDA Harvard tournament this coming Saturday. We’ll have dinner, and start tossing around ideas about what went well, what went poorly, and where room lies for improvement. I take notes and start the process of forming the next tournament invitation and make changes to policy and tabulation that I want to, while the Yalies start securing campus rooms and hotel blocks and transit contracts.

In January, usually on the way down to the Columbia tournament, I’ll stop in at Yale. By then the YDA Board has been selected, but not the tournament staff. So I’ll talk to the sitting President of the YDA and the person on the Board who oversees their own tournaments, and we’ll kibbitz about who was effective at last year’s tournament, who might best be left off the tournament senior staff this year, and everything in between. Here, I rely on them a lot; I see these people for maybe a week’s worth of days throughout the whole year, even though it’s an intense few days we do spend together. But they also rely on me a lot; I’m the one who knows what needs to be done, and what type of person is generally good at each job. Between the two bits of info, we usually hammer out a pretty good staff.

They then match names to roles, and the games begin. We go back and forth about ten times on the new invitation, hammering out the details of things we’ve changed, and things that have changed under us. The Yale campus and administration are a golem to the process; powerful, deadly and neutral, capable of great good and great harm at once, but ultimately uncaring, and unable to be reasoned with. Things will happen with vast implications to the tournament, and we can neither control or influence them — a one weekend debate event has no implications on whether Yale decides to renovate a building or throw a competing event. We simply can strive to find out about these obstacles early, and work around them.

We’ll go through a process familiar to most tournament directors. Orders start streaming out of New Haven for trophies, ballots, food. Instructions stream out of New Haven — how to travel to the tournament, when, and how to register. There are the usual suspects who do not understand, for the twelfth year in a row, that indeed they must bring judges or pay money to not have to. There is the usual confusion about deadlines, which usually manifests strongest just after the deadline as a series of outraged emails which I do nothing about. Yada yada yada.

But Yale is unique in a number of ways. The YDA has a lot of handicaps that should mean it runs a horrible tournament. First, it’s at a college. The college teams that run high school tournaments as fundraisers suffer from being outside the high school forensics community; they don’t see their customers, as it were, every week. That means two things. Several colleges, therefore, cut corners and don’t care how pleasant the experience of their tournament weekend is, as long as you write them a check. The paltry leavings of the Harvard judging lounge, and their permanently inadequate ballot table staff, pay testimony to that. The second is that the high school coaches don’t give the college staffs much benefit of the doubt; there’s no pre-built trust that there is a good logic and good intent behind each action, so we get coaches yelling and carrying on that the college kids are just money grubbing jerks.

The second handicap is a symptom of the shocking lack of concern that the large research university has for its’ students most important undertaking. The Yale Debate Association is, as far as I can tell, the pre-eminent parlimentary debating team in the United States. They’ve had excellent success within their league, APDA, and have a large and successful team abroad, including the only Americans to make the World Debating final round this decade. It’s a signature program for the University and for the students who participate in it. They travel every weekend, often crossing international boundaries to do so. They also run three tournaments a year, the high school invitational, another for New Haven schools, and a tournament for their own league. YDA members have also founded and fostered an urban debate league in New Haven. The YDA, in short, is a huge undertaking. And yet, it has no full time coach. It has no permanent staff, no one who holds the reins year after year, and thinks long term. The students have to do that on their own.

The fact that they can pull that off even on their own right is remarkable. College student organizations are evanescent. They don’t have much time to build up much experience or institutional memory before they move on to graduation and beyond. They’re also handicapped by being smart and young. That’s often a good thing, but sometimes a bad one; Yale students have been told all their lives that they can do anything and pull anything off if they try, and the poor fools believe it. They come up with crazy ideas that have doom written all over them, and they don’t always see why it can’t be done until they try it. And find out.

But the YDA has done what is probably the hardest thing for a group of young, intelligent people to do; they admitted to themselves they can’t do it alone. There’s a lot of character to that. They brought me in a decade ago to be a permanent tab director. I remember 10 Yale tournaments, good and bad. I can say if an idea has been tried before, and I have a long term vision of the tournament’s future. When I say something is a bad idea, they usually don’t do it. When I recommend something as important, they usually make sure it happens. Their track record isn’t perfect, but mine isn’t either: at first I was wary of using off campus New Haven schools for Saturday competition; the high schools turned out to be a huge benefit.

They also do another thing right; they’re willing to invest in the future of the tournament and the pleasantness of the experience. Last year people complained that the food at the remote high schools was priced too high; so this year prices were slashed. They paid for buses and transit to a couple of outer hotels to get cheaper rates for the attending schools. They heard that the coffee for judges was insufficient last year, so this year you couldn’t turn around without bumping into a coffee urn. The trophies got upgraded. And above all, they hire a padding of extra hired judges over and beyond the hiring obligation; the LD and Speech pool had A judges with rounds off for want of rounds to judge. Each year it gets a little better, and a little smoother; I’m genuinely proud of what they do.

I don’t think the YDA truly understands the magnitude of what it achieves. It grew a national tournament out of a trainwreck in a very short time with huge odds stacked against it. It creates an educational opportunity that simply wasn’t there before, and it makes it civilized and pleasant. Yale is a good time; we have a good tournament with people from every corner of the country, all seeing each other for the first time since the previous school year, in a shining time of year in a New England September. 1,500 people came this year, and most left happy, and hopefully smarter and better for it. It’s eminently worth doing; I’m proud of my role in it, and proud of the YDA for making it possible.

The tournament remains somewhat expensive. People complain about the cost of hired judges, but the Yale students charge $250 for a hired judge, and pay out $200 for each one. The commission they get on each is entirely fair; they track down, arrange housing and transit, and deal with the flaky judges; if you don’t think that’s worth $50, then bring your own judges. Their entry fees are in line with other tournaments of their caliber, not nearly approaching the Harvard stratosphere, and they’re definitely in line with the expenses they go through. The YDA ends up with a profit, but they work very hard for that profit; I suspect they could make more just working the same hours they put into the tournament at McDonald’s. And that money goes to a good debate team, and a New Haven Urban Debate League, and so on.

In short, they want to do the right thing, and it’s my job to help them figure out what the right thing is. My job is not unique except in that I’m willing to do that; I come back year after year. I claim no special genius at tournament administration, but it’s a learned process and I’ve spent a lot of time learning. It certainly helps a lot that I can bring in Admiral Menick and JV and Kaz and Chavez and Jenny and Mike V and everyone else; but these people also all know each other, so they could do that too. Mostly what I do is be there, year after year, helping them by just being such.

They wonder why I do it, I think. I do it because it’s worthwhile to have a national tournament in easy driving distance for my team. I do it because it’s a lovely weekend and being at the center of it makes it lovelier still, even as it makes it harder and more stressful. I love the tournament and am proud of how it’s been built over the years. But also, and this may surprise them a little since I cultivate the Crusty Cynical Bastard persona a bit, I genuinely like the YDA. I cherish the chance to get to know them and hang out with them a few times a year. I like what they do, and have great respect for the fact that they’re willing to make the tournament better year after year. I even did a dreaded sake bomb this year at the staff’s behest at the terrible sushi restaurant where we do our post-tournament celebration; I’m loyal if nothing else. The irony of a Harvard grad being a honorary member of the Yale Debate Association certainly appeals, but the opportunity to be a part of this group is not one to be passed up. It’s worth the blood, sweat, and tears; it’s worth the trouble I go to, for this group of people.

This year’s was the easiest one so far, even though it was also the largest and most complex. Pam did a wonderful job corralling judges, Austin did miracles with rooms because I didn’t hear of a single problem with lockouts; Kristin put more miles on a car than is possible and made sure everyone was housed. I never lacked for a ballot or a trophy or judge food, and the trains ran exactly on time, thanks to James. Need transit? Find a right-wing Italian. And Shaina managed to make the YDA into a productive, focused force all weekend, which has never been done before; we even had a ballot table person at last. The Freshmen were made productive by attaching them to tab staff directly; Zucker, Max, Nate; the silent helper who made Policy work behind the scenes, and the girl whose face I remember but whose name I don’t who helped over in PF land. And finally the Yalies hit upon the idea of giving me a myrmidon, an extremely thoughtful and helpful guy from Minnesota named Tommy, who thinks he doesn’t do much and work hard. However, everything he does to run around and look and find and fix is something I don’t have to do; my sanity and energy levels have been much much better with him around and I’m hugely grateful to him for it. I’ve threatened to take him home and have him help me run the rest of my life several times.

So my 2009 Yale begins this coming weekend, and to a large degree it will end on the Friday night of the tournament, when registration closes. At that point I hand off tab to the tabbers, get rooms and things sorted, and spend the rest of my time making sure everyone is OK and looking for things to improve for the following year. I build my list, and bring it to our dinner afterwards with them again, two weeks after the tournament ends again.

NFL Finals

So I was thinking a little about the experience of NFL Finals. I saw three main finals (US Extemp, HI, and LD) and two supplemental finals (Storytelling and Editorial Commentary). I was officially present for the Oratory final, but Oratory tends to bore me to tears, so I opened up the laptop and discreetly caught up with my email during that one. I won’t apologize for this; until the event becomes something other than 70 minutes of pop philosophy, moral exhortations and poignant stories from a bunch of 17 year olds, I have little reason to listen if I’m not judging.

Anyhoo, the supplemental events are more or less usual final rounds that you could find at any regional tournament: they feature an appropriate but not overwhelming amount of ceremony, with a fair but not huge number of spectators, who are likely mostly drawn from the local leagues who have a student in the round. The students performed well, together with the vague sense of disjoint oddness that comes from supplemental events — no one does these things full time, and so no one really knows what they’re doing, or even what they’re supposed to be doing. But that’s fine, and they entertain, so we survive.

However, main event finals are an entirely different kettle of fish. The main final hall can hold around 3,000-5,000 people typically, and it’ll go from completely packed for the interp finals, to nearly a third full for the early morning Extemp finals. It becomes clear from the start that the NFL treats them as a Big Friggin’ Deal; they opened the day with an Elvis, they pack the judging panels with all sorts of people they want to impress and suck up to, and so on.

The effect, however, is distinctly harmful to the competition itself. In the US extemp final, the first three kids were able to handle it decently well; Becca, who was second speaker, was there last year, so she certainly didn’t have nearly the same epic tower of nerves going; this was familiar turf. The last three speakers, however, all looked like they were being led to their own executions, and they had to pull the trigger. Poor kids; nothing really sets you up for the experience of NFL finals except for making NFL finals, and since I imagine that most NFL finalists are first-timers in their senior year, there’s not much opportunity to gain experience. The last three kids basically forced their way through their final speeches, which were not very good. I imagine that for them to qualify for the final in the first place, each of them was a far better speaker than they demonstrated in the round; I bet their semifinal speeches were a great deal better.

The main event semis all happen at roughly the same time as one another, and they’re in normal classrooms with about 50 spectators at the most. Going from 50 spectators in a classroom to 1,000 in an auditorium in the course of one jump, and add to that the pressure of it being The National Final, and one grows surprised that more kids don’t wet themselves as soon as they set foot on stage. In some events, like Dramatic Interp, the effect is catastrophic; these pieces are designed to be performed in small, intimate settings and lose much of their punch when flung onto the stage. In Extemp, the kids don’t have their script and their memorized moves to cling to; they still have to make it up. The semis I’ve watched were better rounds by far than the finals I’ve watched, for exactly that reason.

It’s a shame in a way. The NFL is set up to be this big culminating event, and I understand their impulse to make the finals a Big Deal. They want to reward and congratulate the students with a huge experience, and they certainly do that. Their stage manager, too, is a wonderful guy, who very carefully guides the students through the process and tells them over and over, using different phrasing, to neither panic nor worry; he’s set up the process so the students don’t have to concentrate or remember any logistics or schedules, since they always have someone right next to them telling them what to do next. But, the spectacle itself degrades the quality of the round; it doesn’t permit each student to give it their best shot. I could wish the ramp up to a final wouldn’t be so suddenly vast, or that we could tone it down a little bit, so that I could have seen the best shot from the final three speakers, and not simply the best they could do when the stakes were at the absolute highest.

Viva Las Vegas

A few words about Las Vegas:

It’s a strange town. There’s the sudden and overwhelming artificiality of The Strip, but if you go more than a quarter mile beyond it in any direction, you find yourself in the most banal and faceless suburb known to man. It’s a rather strange contrast between the aggressively over the top, and the aggressively normal.

The tournament itself is the standard NFL fare. It’s easy, drawn out schedule conceals the fact that the tournament is pretty poorly run. I think it might be that they obsessively quadruple check everything, but somehow my tournament director’s mind rebels at any tournament that takes 3 hours to break from 30 students to 14. That really shouldn’t be that difficult. And I gather supplementals and consolations ran even more poorly; my student described EdComm quite colorfully as “a slowly moving pile of f#@%!!”; I hear the second round of Impromptu launched a good three hours late.

The awards ceremony was ridiculous on two fronts. The first was the ridiculousness inherent in the thing; the first student to actually haul in a trophy for talking got it a good 75 minutes into the show. We were treated to an, ahem, inspirational speech complete with movie music straight out of Dances with Wolves. For unintentional comedy, that rivaled the infamous blessing by Sister Someone-or-other in Chicago CFLs 2006 and Ted Turner’s amazing drunken ramble at NFLs in 2002. Both my own team and the Scarsdale contingent were doubled over. I thought Vaughan was going to have an aneurysm.

I had proclaimed earlier in the week that Joe and I should maintain the life goal to someday get kicked out of an event for bad behavior. We certainly did our best right then, but no one shushed us or asked us to leave. They were probably cracking up too much.

I suppose a responsible coach might have shushed the kids up and made them struggle to compose themselves out of respect for the event and the sponsors thereof, but I actually won’t have anything to do with that. The NFL disrespected its own event enough to let an hour and change go by patting itself on the back before recognizing actual students. The NFL lets their sponsors and celebrities cross that magic line from supporting to dominating the actual event — I noticed, for example, that the humorous final panel didn’t have a single actual forensics coach on it. It was mostly celebrities and sponsors. Were I a coach of a HI finalist, I would have been ripshit. As it was, I was still rather offended. So as far as I was concerned, the NFL had the guy babbling up there, and so the NFL could take the consequences.

Then my team went on to clean up. We had a semifinalist and three finalists, and the finalists each went on to win their events outright. Apparently it’s some record to win three national championships — Storytelling, Editorial Commentary, and US Extemp — so that’s something. It certainly meant a lot of effort shipping things home the day after the tournament. A good problem to have, that. And it was nice, in a way, since all four students were talented and deserving sorts who’d worked hard all year, and were smart and eager kids. But still, it was a little surreal.

The story of the Storytelling is itself a story, which will be told later. Charlie called me after he had heard the news — he was judging the Ed Comm final and was very offended I hadn’t told him which student was mine so he could automatically give him the worst rank. He’d asked me to tell him results since he was wisely skipping awards, but in the hoopla and picture taking I had neglected to do so. He found out anyway and called to issue congratulations. He told me to play some money on #3 that weekend since the luck was apparently good. I did, and it hit, which is a $1,050 payout.

I should listen to Charlie more often.

The kids shipped home I spent time doing Adult Things in Vegas, which translates into spending a ridiculous amount of money on food and laying by the pool and such. Yesterday and today I’ve been feeling a little upset of the stomach, which is unfortunate, but it’s also slowed me down some. I slept alot and now I’m waiting quietly in a Panera for my flight time. I think I prefer the aggressively normal bits, banality and all, to the over the top bits. I never did get the Camp gay merit badge.

I do this too much

I had a sure sign today that I have too many responsibilities in forensics. The Nassau Inn emailed me asking me after the standard details for the Princeton tournament; when were the tournament dates, how many rooms in the block, etc. These are all issues that I do provide advice on for any of my tournaments.

The trouble is, Princeton is not my tournament. They did ask me last year, but I had to say no, because I was already bringing kids to GMU. Then, at Columbia, Admiral Menick tries to talk me into adding Princeton, mostly because he likes the restaurants there. And now I’m running the tournament by acclamation of the bloody hotels; how they knew who I am is beyond me. I’m not sure exactly how I got appointed the chairman of the northeastern collective tab room. I suppose, in a volunteer-driven world, you just need to start doing a job, and sooner or later it acquires official weight.

But thankfully, it’s not much of a problem to foist that one off on actual Princetonians. The summer is a nice time; I don’t do much tournament management, apart from calming down an occasional Yalish panic attack. The Yalies sometimes fail to understand that the likelihood no one is coming to their tournament is lessened with every immediately sold out hotel block we acquire. But anyway, during the summer, I actually get to build curriculum for my camp, which then also informs the curriculum for the coming year at South. I’m also chairing the NCFL Extemp committee, trying to tackle issues there about moving the questions themselves forward, along with the Computers in Prep Question. I still think computers in prep is a huge Pandora’s box, but for now the power requirements of 210 separate laptops in prep put the idea out of practical reach anyhow. But it’s nice to think sometimes about this actual activity, and the reasons why I do it. I like nicely run tournaments so I run them, but at the end of the day, it’s the coaching that keeps me doing this.

And I try as much as possible not to touch much code, apart from a few weekends here and there when the mood strikes me. I do want to pre-empt the Admiral’s inevitable bitching about how housing requests work in my software, to save my poor bug tracking system from being overwhelmed by his love notes in early November. I’m sure he’ll come up with lots of….suggestions, anyway. But I want to at least make him work for it.

But beyond the summer, I’m also trying to build the tournaments in such a way that I’m not needed. There’s a common method to them, and the only thing I provide is a veto threat that sticks. The average college tournament is a collection of people who want to do the right thing — run a good solid tournament that the kids enjoy and learn from — and others. There’s the Profiteer, who spends a lot of time dreaming up concessions schemes that never pan out; the Lazy, who just wants the thing to go away; the Self Important Twit, who wants titles and recognition for being a marvelous forensics oracle despite not actually contributing to the success of the tournament.

My real role is to be outside of their internal team politics. As such, I can mercilessly crush the bad ideas from the Useless People, and be sure as much as I can that the Good People stick around in the tournament management. I’ve whittled down the other jobs I do as much as I can, and mostly focus on that. After all, if the principle motivations behind a tournament are sound, the rest falls into place with minimal, fact-based guidance. And if I finally do have that much-delayed nervous breakdown, at least then the details won’t all get lost.

The trick will be when I can “run” a tournament according to this regular method without actually going to it. Once I get that right, maybe I’ll run Princeton. However, I also hear tell of a Florida invitational tournament in need of a tabber that weekend, and if that proves true, it’ll be hard to convince me that the first weekend of December shouldn’t be spent in southern Florida. And gosh, the preparation is bound to be so intensive I’ll just have to come down a good week before….I’m easily bribed by beaches.

Intervention

So I decided I don’t like debating economics, for the same reason I don’t like extemp speeches about science and technology. You need a master’s degree at least to talk about these issues directly in a way that can be debated.

In an ordinary comfortable LD debate, at issue are ethical issues which have voices of authority behind them, but at root there are no correct or incorrect answers once one has passed a relatively low bar of understanding the resolution at hand. Once you understand, say, that a question about security in a terrorist-threatened society is about protection versus liberty, you’re off to the races.

But what we faced this weekend in PF at the Just Another Tournament was a debate over economic issues; will Bush’s little checks and their related goodies actually dig us out of this economic hole? The trouble with this topic is that your average high school student, and average person, can argue effectively in terms of ethics and philosophy, but in the world of the economic, there are clear cut correct and incorrect answers in some fields. What do you do as a judge when a team flings a case of unmitigated falsity up there, and you know it? You can wait for the other team to tear it down, if they can, but it still leaves one unsatisfied. In extempland, I’d just write a ballot explaining the errors and move on, but that’s intervention in debate, and not fair ground.

Furthermore, what should a team do when their opponent starts flinging out (warranted!) things that are flatly untrue, based on misunderstandings of basic economic principles? Stuff becomes a push in debater terminology when really one team was absolutely correct and the other was not, and sometimes the judges know it and sometimes they don’t, depending on their own background.

Result? Lots of really awful debates. The resolution ultimately wasn’t about a question of thought and ambiguity. It’s a technical prediction. The question of whether Bush’s economic package will work does have an answer. It’s ambiguous not by nature, but by complexity; the model is too vast to know, but if we did comprehend it, we could have a clean cut binary answer. At root then, the only debates on this topic are debates as to interpretations of known facts trying to fill in unknown facts. That got messy, to say the least, especially given that the high schoolers in question somehow are not fluent in a field where PhDs still can’t make accurate predictions. Go figure.

This is not true of ethical questions that make the usual stuff of debate. We’ll never have an answer as to whether hate crimes are just or not; exploring that issue is exploring thought, not fact. That’s better ground for debate, and I hope the mysterious back room topic writers stay there in the future. There is room for economic debate of course, but it should redirect towards the social questions of economics; how much assistance should a society grant its poor? How should goods be allocated? Stick to that and we’re OK; but for now, watching high school kids trying to do the work of dissertation writers is nobody’s idea of fun.