The Last Harvard: Friday

My last Harvard tournament began with a relatively gentle Friday evening.   Harvard does not have competition on Friday night, so it’s simply registration.

For those who fly to Boston and stay in hotels and thus who knew their numbers and entries months ago, registration involves sending in a check and getting an email the week of the tournament with your students’ speaker codes and information all nicely lined up.   However, when you’re a local shlub like me, who registered my kids on Sunday and asked last week who’s going, you go to the hotel and register the old fashioned way.

Therefore, registering the old fashioned way is something of a Massachusetts reunion; there are several hundred high schools at the tournament, and yet I sat and lent pens to Sara S, Marc R, Jim M, and saw Dan S hanging around too.

Registration day also sets expectations.   Why?   Because I wrote a check for $770 to the Harvard Debate team.   This represents the sum total of my kids’ outlay for the tournament, apart from a bit of gas going back and forth, meals we would have eaten anyway, and quite a bit of lost sleep.   Some schools spend upwards of $30,000 to attend this tournament, once you roll in hotels, airfares, and many more students than we brought.   But still, $770 is a large figure indeed for 4 extempers, 3 public forum teams, and a lonely DI.

Our expectations for the tournament are already low.   I purposefully lower them due to the arbitrary nature of any large national tournament; judges have wildly different ideas of what’s good and what isn’t, especially across regions, and so you can never set any store by expectations.   We also don’t have the thrill of the travel-hotel-team experience; we could just as easily not pay $770 and still hang out the weekend in Boston if we wanted to.   I had a good group of talented kids there; but we also had a good group of talented kids go on vacation instead.

However, the forensics world would rather like something in return for the largest check it writes all year, both individually and collectively.   The fees at Harvard are a frequent item of discussion, especially when you add in the sheer size of the tournament.   You can do the math and get an idea of the floor of their revenues from the entry fees; note that these figures do not include entries who dropped after paying, or hired judging; even if they were to hire a judge for every hiring fee they took in, which is good practice, they still have their own students judge some rounds, so judging fees do not necessarily net zero profit for them.   Here’s the table:

Harvard Tournament Revenue
Event Numbers Fee Subtotal
DI 319 $60 $19,140.00
HI 238 $60 $14,280.00
EX 192 $60 $11,520.00
OO 213 $60 $12,780.00
DUO 187 $75 $14,025.00
PF 185 $140 $25,900.00
JVPF 116 $140 $16,240.00
LD 281 $120 $33,720.00
JVLD 297 $120 $35,640.00
CX 115 $160 $18,400.00
JVCX 84 $140 $11,760.00
CON 365 $75 $27,375.00
School 307 $50 $15,350.00
Totals $256,130.00

Now, that is revenue, mind, not profit; they do outlay quite a bit of that money on food, trophies, staffing, paper, shuttles, and above all rooms. I can attest how difficult and expensive room rentals can be at a college campus. However, that is also a staggering sum of money, and it informs nearly every other discussion of, and criticism of, the Harvard tournament. If the forensics world is collectively laying out a princely sum, it’s not unfair to expect a princely tournament in return.

So is that what we get? That brings us to Saturday.

Dipshits & domains, this weekend

So a domain reseller has decided to spam me daily offering me the “preferred” azuen.com domain name to complement my azuen.net domain, because it’s better for marketing.   This all for the low low early buyer’s price of $560, which could go higher, because “he expects strong interest in this domain auction.”

Cha, right.   As if a word carved into a board by a drunk in Fitchburg is really going to set the marketing world afire.   The word doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me, and even to me it doesn’t truly have a meaning.   It was just something I found once, in a forest that’s no longer there, in this little shack with some empty vodka bottles that had been slapped together on an impossibly beautiful spot in the New England woods.   So this guy’s persistent efforts to turn his $10 registration into a $600 profit are really funny.   If I cared about marketing the name, I would have bought the .com version 9 years ago when I registered the .net version too.

This weekend is the Debacle on the Charles Invitational.   The schedule looks as unpleasant and unnecessarily difficult, as usual.   Why they can’t just cluster the IE events and give people half-days off, instead of these awkward four hour breaks is beyond me.   This year I only have extempers, a DI, and three PF teams going; the rest of the interp crew for the most part found better things to do than to pay $75 to lose a lot of sleep this weekend.   Can’t say as I blame them.   It does mean I don’t have to stay for the late round Saturday in IE.   That helps a lot.

The Monday schedule has changed a lot too; Extemp finals are now at 9:00 AM, which I’m sure will lead to sharp, clear analysis and great speeches, especially given that the semis will have been at 8:00 PM the night before.   I hope this also means they’re no longer going to wedge Extemp into the half-again too small room in the Science Center like usual, but I have my doubts.   It looks like all the other finals are in Sanders Theater, so I have to wonder why the Extemp final can’t be at a gentle noon hour in the Science Center rooms, which will by then be empty?

Between this kind of scheduling and the fees, it’s almost like they don’t want people to come to their tournament.   I can say they’re doing a damn fine job of it with me.   I find myself hoping the extemp kids tank and don’t make it to the final just to avoid that.   We are bringing a finalist from last year along (though not last year’s champion) so we’ll see how that works out.

The other odd thing about Harvard is the campus and the area is a huge part of my daily life.   I’m an alum, and I worked there for about six years or so.   I pass through there regularly today; it is a definite part of my non-forensics life.   For the most part, forensics lives in forensics-specific worlds; I will never be able to walk around Yale’s campus without thinking about Yale’s tournament; when someone mentions “Yale” to me, I take it to mean the tournament, not the college.   The same goes for the area high schools, Columbia, UPenn, etc.   Even my own Newton South’s building means “speech” to me, since I go there for no other reason.   But Harvard is my home territory; I know how it lives the other 362 days of the year, so the annual invasion of the forensics world makes this weekend stand out and jarringly so.   Coaches I know from the forensics world simply don’t “belong” in Harvard Square in my mind; that’s not their setting, it’s for other folks, my fabled private life.   So this weekend tends to be jarring, though being a native has its privileges: I know where to park, I know good places to eat that the kids won’t find, I sleep in my own bed each night.   If the weather changes, I have the clothes to adapt.

If you tried to contact me…

…for the past two weeks, I’m sorry.   I was taking something of a sabbatical from everything except the most pressing things in my email inbox.   I used a very very conservative definition of “most pressing.”   I’m catching up to the backlog now.

What’s amazing is how much just having to do my day job every day feels so much like a vacation.   Forensics tends to expand to fill every available space, if you let it, to say nothing of the other varied interests and problems that I’m juggling all at once.

I’ll be putting some of those balls down later today, however.

Smooth moves

In a brilliant counterstroke to the prevailing times, I apparently set up Columbia to require paradigms and allow strikes for the Novice field, but not the Varsity.   Might as well start early, I suppose.

Sheesh

It’s been a while since I’ve written; dancing on the edge of burnout will do that to you.   In the last six weeks I’ve helped run tab at four tournaments: Princeton, University School, our own at Newton South, and then Big Lex this last weekend.   Now I’m prepping out Columbia, where we have a great pool of judges and our room situation gets less bad by the minute.

We had the Holly cancelled — surely more stressful for JA, SD and AP than me — and rescheduled.   I got two awards — one for coaching, one for mentorship, which isn’t quite the same thing — which are the first awards I’ve gotten in this activity since, well, I was a student.   I wrote 18 rounds worth of extemp questions for the Crestian.   I somehow managed — haphazardly, I’ll admit — to get the camp applications for Summit up and running.

And at work I moved the machine room and offices and phones to our nice new digs four blocks from the original office, with all the fun that entails.   That also meant giving up most of the break the company gives between Christmas and New Year’s.   Whenever you move, everything gets slower; I can’t find anything, there’s lots of stuff that needs doing, and I can only have one top priority at a time.   It’s a pain, that.   But I’ve been coming home from work these days more tired than usual.   It happens.

There have been highlights.   The Florida trip was a good time; it was good to see Steve and Jenny and Dave and Dario and Jon, and meet some new folks — I never really hung out with Ernie Rose before, and never met the personality-filled Jen Kwasman or the folks who worked with me in Tab (Dean Brooks, Travis Kiger, Carol Cecil) at all.   I got to hover at the edges of the SEC Championship Game.   I couldn’t help but mutter “Roll Tide” just to see the looks on their faces, but I was happy to see them happy when the Gators won.   Since I come from a school whose football team would have trouble with some high school programs, and a part of the country dominated by its professional teams, I’m out of my depth with big college games.   I did cheer for the Gators in the championship game, which they won.

The tournament itself suffered a little from neglect, though not what you think; the coaches and hosts did a marvelous job, to say the least.   The food, the awards, everything was planned to the hilt.   No, the neglect was on the part of the attendees — a lot of coaches went elsewhere for the weekend, so we had the assistant coaches or volunteer parents running the show for a lot of schools, and man does that show.   Judges wandered in and out of the tournament as they felt like, leading to all kinds of fun in subbing them.   The U School kids were very helpful, if a little clueless on how to do things at a big tournament; that takes some time to learn, and experience.   I’ll be bringing in the concept of the majordomo next time around; it works too well in the Northeast not to be exported.

In Florida, they also post speech schematics round by round, which I find doesn’t work well; if you tell the judges up front what their weekend is, they tend to appear more often; plus, you also tend to find out if someone has a conflict with a round enough in advance to do something about it.   We’ll fix that next year.   Debate cannot work that way; powermatching means things have to be done as we go through.   But for the first year of a tournament I was very happy; we ended nearly on time.   I think it’s a good start.

The other neglect it suffered from was on my part.   They gave me a mentorship award they started in Jenny’s name this year, an inaugural event, and I found myself blushing and not knowing what to say at that.   Then, this past weekend, a wide ranging conspiracy gave me the longer standing Lexington Coaching Award, which I gather is named for Michael Bacon now, for a coach in the debate community who is not a classroom teacher, as I am not.   Again, words failed me.   I’m not good at accepting compliments, never mind honors.   And as Jim said, the Lexington honor was probably one of things he’s proudest of, for good reason. I’m friends with a lot of the folks who are past recipients and it’s humbling to join them.

The Jenny Cook award means a lot to me, too, in a different way; to start out a tradition, and one with such a personal connection — it’s not something I can get used to easily.   It feels like moving around a bunch of bits on a screen at tournaments, and yelling at a few adolescents in a hopefully constructive manner, is insufficient to merit that kind of recognition, even as everyone keeps telling me it is.

Surely a lot of this sudden acclaim rests on the service I give to the community.   Certainly I’ve served the debate world in particular far more in service than in coaching; I coached LD sporadically at Milton, and our PF program at Newton South is only a year and a half old.   In speech I have a much deeper coaching experience, granted.   But at the same time, on the service side, I’m finding that I’m not doing any of the jobs I currently hold down all that well.   I did a competent job at U School, but not a super job, and a new tournament deserves a super job out of its tab director.   In particular, I neglected the planning stages; I can get away with less obsessive planning at the college tournaments, since I know the lay of the land there, but I really should have put more time into this one.   If I had planned things out a little more carefully, I wouldn’t have had to be the crazed idiot in the tab during the tournament.   The book for EXL remains unwritten.   I have no idea when the MFL 501c3 app will be completed.   And I need a true vacation, that doesn’t involve catching up on anything, or running anything.

So I begin the process of shaving off responsibilities that can be handed to others.   I think I have a couple candidates in mind of jobs I can pawn off on others.   The ones remaining will benefit for it, and the ones I give up will benefit too, since someone with more energy can spend some attention on them.

The last six weeks contain a silver lining too.   I did take an extended weekend to visit Josh in DC, which I had a good time at.   I saw the National Gallery, the Botanical Gardens, and the American Indian museum, all for the first time.   We had a series of very good meals, and one raucous night getting double-servings of good scotch from a cute bartender.   I came back better than I left, and Josh for once got to play host, not guest.   I’d not be friends with Josh if it weren’t for this crazy world of forensics; I’d not be friends with Jenny, or Chavez, or the Honeymans, or Sarah & Amanda, or Jim Menick or Joe Vaughan or any of the dozens of people I’ve raised a glass to or a ballot with in Lexington MA or Lexington KY or wherever else this little world takes me.   There are new folks, like Sara at Lexington, whom I’d like to know more — and old friends, like Caitlin who came to judge at Lex, who I’m glad to see more of.

So no, even though everyone is giving me awards these days, I’m not retiring.