Stanford Invitational Statement by Matt Fraser & Rich Boltizar
Intro (Mike Bietz): I know that tournament directors take criticisms of their tournaments very seriously and very personally. Debate, after all, is a labor of love for most of us. The time we put into running tournaments, serving on committees, planning, coaching, judging, etc are all done because we care. As such, when folks are taking aim at you or your tournament, it is difficult to not take it to heart.
Over the years Victory Briefs Daily has become a soapbox for many to air their grievances both constructively and not-so constructively. Oftentimes, these discussions lead to a great deal of piling-on, name-calling, posturing and a whole lot of misunderstanding. Those who have to defend themselves are rarely given fair time, as many raders have moved on to other threads or the discussion itself has moved into a line-by-line minutia.
As such, this afternoon I called Matt Fraser and suggested that we put his response in its own thread so he can have fair time to explain/defend/clarify anything about the happenings at the Stanford Invitational. Here is the response Matt Fraser and Rich Boltizar.
I would encourage everyone who was concerned about this weekend’s happenings, or would just like to know more about the challenges nearly all tournaments face, to read the entire article.
Matt Fraser has asked that responses be sent to him at mfraserATeducationunlimitedDOTcom
Dear Friends, Colleagues and Participants of the LD Community,
Thank you for being candid with your concerns about the Stanford Invitational as regards Varsity LD debate over the last couple of days on this forum. We have constructed our response in collaboration with some of our tab staff and student leadership, in the effort to address the issues of LD scheduling, tabbing, and logistics with full candor and disclosure, but as the tournament Directors, we (Matthew Fraser and Rich Boltizar) take full responsibility for the content of this post, and any errors or omissions. It is our sincere hope that our response below will be read in its entirety by the LD community approaching it with an open mind, and we ask for your confidence that we are making our best efforts to address these concerns in good faith. Given the importance for a prompt response, some of the dates on evolutions for us from several years ago (and more) are somewhat hazy at this point, but the essence of what we are laying out is to our best recollection at the moment correct and accurate.
We apologize for inconveniences in our Sunday schedule adherence, and for problems and difficulties that caused people. For the few students who had to miss their bid rounds because we were running late, we will extend full refunds for those students to their school. The tournament should never have been allowed to become as late as it did, and the responsibility lies with us. As far as suspension of strikes in elim rounds, that has thus far been our policy for the few years we have been offering strikes in LD. Regardless, it was our original intention to honor strikes throughout, seeking to exceed what we feel was promised, but we have had problems with being able to honor strikes in elim rounds in recent previous years, and that is why we only formally agreed to honor strikes up to the beginning of elimination rounds. Once our program had a ‘meltdown,’ and given how late we were, adding another hour to the tournament to honor strikes seemed a poor choice particularly in that it had not been promised and also was not our standard policy. Nonetheless, the truth is that suspending strikes in elims isn’t really what we wanted or planned, it was obviously the result of running late, and again, the fault is ultimately ours and ours alone.
As a clarification, we mentioned in our first post that we would encourage readers to be aware of folks with ‘agendas,’ – to be clear, we do not know most of the folks on this board, and we presumptively accept all concerns raised about the tournament as legitimate. We were both very surprised by the number of responses to what we viewed as a request to simply set aside prior conceptions. Our only point was that if the readers (or writers) of these posts themselves do know of implicit or explicit agendas from some posters, to bear that in mind, seek to set those issues aside, and to give us a fair hearing. For ourselves, we are accepting all posts as well intended, sincere and without any particular agenda, and we will respond as such. There was no intent to offend, only an attempt to ask others to set aside any prejudices they may hold, and if anyone was offended we offer our apology. Given how much discussion there was of this ‘issue’ we do hope that everyone will hold others to similar standards, such as when implications about our motives for running the tournament are ascribed, when on this end we know those pejorative assessments to be wholly and upsettingly wrong.
While in this letter we detail many specifics about how we plan to improve the tournament going forward, there are three particular items we want to highlight: We want to be clear that just on the basis of conversations with coaches at the tournament, and some of the posts here, we are definite in declaring that as previously intimated we will go to 7 rounds in varsity LD for next year for the Stanford Invitational (with all 5-2’s clearing, of course). We further agree that we will honor strikes through elimination rounds for next year’s tournament, or at least offer a separate strike sheet for elimination rounds. Finally, we do accept the clear need to have input from one or moreadditional strong members of the LD community in the tournament tab room. We accept that more concrete arrangements need to be made on this front.
Please do not read anything in this statement as equivocation on our part. This year’s tournament did have substantial problem with schedule adherence in Varsity LD, particularly on Sunday, and while we hope and believe the judges for doubles were still credible, there were irregularities in our paneling of judges for the doubles that we wish had not happened. Many other concerns have been raised, and we wish to address those as best we can, and do what can be done to avoid as many problems as possible, particularly going forward. We focused on issues that were systemic rather than individual concerns of a single student or school. On some issues, such as where the priorities should be for placing judges in later rounds, we do feel that our position is correct, and that we did the best we could with the judges we had in our pool. Our hope is that people who read this post will see our evolution of the tournament over the years, understand our explanation (but not an excuse as we do accept responsibility) for why these three substantial problem areas existed this year, and that many who read this will feel that the tournament is worthy of another chance, if they have thus far had reservations or misgivings. Other than that, we can only say that we value the tournament and its participants, and that we regret the mistakes that happened this last weekend in the Varsity LD division, but must look forward and can at this point only strive to do better.
Tournament history:
First, we wish to outline a brief history of the LD division at the Stanford Invitational, and how the tournament has evolved as we have tried our best to respond to community concerns over the last 10 years. Hopefully this will illustrate what we mean when we say we are constantly trying to improve the tournament and meet our audience’s changing needs.
Ten years ago, we had maybe 150 or so kids in LD, and we were a local / regional tournament which was basically growing organically. Our local audience preferred to bring their own judges (often parents) to fulfill their entry requirements, and this worked well for several years for most of our client schools. On its own, the tournament began to attract a national audience, and about 6-7 years ago this audience began to lobby for changes in the invitational to move towards a more national character. While the national community generally indicated to us they agreed with most of our policies, the main issue that was expressed was a desire for more non-parent judges and a judging pool which better conformed to a national standard.
To respond to these concerns, roughly 5 years ago, we began to bring in new tab staff and a number of consultants to advise us on the needs of the national LD community and judging pool. Our main consultant was Jon Gegenheimer, who spearheaded the effort to improve the LD judging pool in the years after 2000. In the early years, Jon did the bulk of the LD tabbing at the tournament with assistants such as John Lynch, followed by Cherian Koshy and Seth Halvorson after a couple of years. Last year, both Cherian and Seth were invited back to the invitational, and both initially accepted but were in the end unable to attend the weekend of the invitational. Our LD consultants for last year were Ranjeet Sidhu and Jon Gegenheimer—Ranjeet being the main on-site director providing advisory support on the judging pool, and Jon being our consultant on the needs of the LD community. For this year, it was our belief and hope that Ranjeet would return, and Jon Gegenheimer, the person who was the original architect behind the national reorientation of our tab room, had indicated that he was likely able to return. We felt going into the tournament that we would have more direct input from our high level LD consultant staff that we even did the year before. Unfortunately, Jon was gone over the weekend to
We came to the realization that our tournament needed to have a dedicated LD tab director or at least program operator, and this search led us to Brent Hinkle, who runs the Joy of Tournaments website and comes strongly recommended by coaches from the
Most exciting to us as we explored over the last 2 years the possibility of having him involved was the idea of customizing a number of pairing options not currently available (to our knowledge) on TRPC that have long interested us. There are several features that we were interested in developing, and Brent Hinkle details some of these in his post. I will detail one improvement here that Brent was able to accomplish for us, that we believe was of substantial value in improving our presets over TRPC. TRPC seeding, as far as we have been able to tell and as we understand it, does not allow for symmetrical seeding. This is no small point, for it meant in policy at this tournament that a couple of instances of very high seeded teams hitting each other occurred in the two presets. In LD, however, on JOT, there were for example 37 students who were ranked a 1, and 37 ranked a 6, and all of those students hit each other in the presets. Similarly, the 2’s hit the 5’s, and the 4’s hit the 3’s, with no slippage. This is quite a dramatic difference from TRPC, where 1’s can hit 2’s or 4’s or 5’s, and the system instead of prioritizing protection of the 1’s and 2’s seems to simply average the power protection over all of the teams. In our experience working with TRPC for the policy division we have found that the power protection/seeding function for the preset debates offers less customization than we prefer. We have occasionally had debates in which highly-seeded teams have met each other in preset rounds due to the interaction between seeding and side/region constraints. As a result, though the overall power-protection of the tournament may be maximized, we have not always been able to give as much power-protection as we would prefer to the highest-rated debaters. Using Joy of Tournaments gives us the benefit of having the person that controls the behavior of the software on-site and programming specific solutions for us. This allows us to have a much better understanding of how the seeding works and we are better able to control it for that reason.
If the program were satisfactory in all other ways, we believe that a number of improvements to scheduling options can be made, such as H/L judge variance instead of just (total) judge variance; improvements to the paneling of flights and optimal utilization of judges in flighted debates, which can be cumbersome in TRPC; and improvements in the general scheduling of judges, such as automation of ‘splitting’ a bracket so that a portion can receive prioritized judging, and the other portion can be returned to later (such as down 2 rounds, prioritizing the high point teams). While some of these things can be done manually in TRPC, it seems to us that the automation of these features would significantly enhance usability; others cannot be done at all.
We think the quality of the JOT site itself, and how much difference that alone has made for so many tournaments, underscores why some long-term confidence that this program can ultimately work very smoothly is justified. This is not to say that we should attempt more than a ‘shadowing’ of this tournament in the near future given our difficulties this year and the importance of the tournament running well to so many, or perhaps using the program in JV LD until it is much more tested, just that the benefits to the community of further development and refinement of the program could be substantial.
A brief history of the ‘outround bracket’ for the Stanford Invitational – As best we can recall, through the mid-90’s, we broke to Octafinals at our LD tournament. Sometime in the mid-90’s, we switched to partial-double Octafinals (24 teams) with the thinking that as the tournament grew, it was a good quality measure to keep the additional elim round the same size as the Octafinals round so as to best balance allowing more teams to clear, but still try to preserve judge quality as best we could (using the same number of judges as we would use in the Octas). Within a couple of years, the tournament continued to grow, and by the late 1990’s we were at a full double-octafinals. From that time up until 2004, we only guaranteed to clear 5-1s and only broke to double-octafinals. The tournament for practical purposes only cleared 5-1s, and almost no 4-2s would clear in those years (sometimes just one or two). Again, as we listened to the community, coaches strongly requested that we add more competitors to the break. After consulting with a number of coaches, the consensus from their feedback was that the number to clear which made most sense was 48 (an additional 16 from doubles, which is an exact half-triples). The reasoning was the same as the move from 16 to 24 teams had been (which had worked well for a few years, and we generally well received), that exactly half the bracket was the best way to keep the elim round being added the same size as the elim round to follow, and thus to preserve judge quality and avoid extreme upsets in the first outrounds. We would thus ‘bye’ the top portion of the bracket through the first elim round, rewarding those teams who had placed to highly in prelims. In our mind the most rational choices were clearly for expanding the break to either exact half-triples, or full triples, as we could see no non-arbitrary way to select any other number (as even at full triples a few 4-2’s might not clear. Adding to our concern about judging issues, when we have observed other tournaments who tried to expand to full triples, they ultimately faced some outcry and great concern because the LD community felt the quality of the judging pool was not acceptable for outrounds, and many upsets occurred. Some of those tournaments, such as
History of Scheduling:
With regard to our schedule, we maintain that the changes we have made to it over the years are an improvement to the invitational overall and have increased the quality of our tournament. We are trying to run a national level, large tournament on a relatively small campus (classroom wise), a situation that is always challenging for us. Around 2000, we made a major adjustment to the schedule to create the alternating rounds between LD and Policy. The reasoning was that once we reach the rounds which are be power-matched, it takes the tab staff 1.5-2 hours to do a truly high-quality job from collecting the ballots to entering the tab results, matching the rounds, adhering to strikes, allocating judges, and sending out the ballots. Running LD rounds back to back without this built-in break between rounds would add another half-day to the length of the prelim rounds anyway, with breaks of 1 ½ hours between rounds regardless, perhaps even a bit more. These alternating rounds were thus intended to maximize time-efficiency and move both Policy and LD along as quickly as possible and giving the tab staff the time to do a quality job of paneling the round and assigning judges.
The new schedule also helped dramatically with our room constraints. In years prior to 2000 where we did not overlap Policy and LD in the usage of campus rooms, we had far-flung rooms all across campus (some might remember the Acacia modules, which were basically wooden trailers 0.5 miles or more from the central posting area). Coaches rightly pointed out it made things very hard and placed quite a physical strain on the kids and judges, particularly policy kids with tubs, but really for everyone, including LD kids. We used to run with 130 rooms but 30 were far-flung, so the new schedule of overlapping rounds with 100 closer rooms made it much less demanding and overall a more pleasant experience for all involved. Many coaches thanked us, saying the new schedule was a dramatic improvement and worked well.
One remaining schedule issue is the distribution of rounds over the three days of the weekend. This recalls a historical debate about CX vs. LD starting on Friday. In the years leading up to this change two years ago, Jon Gegenheimer spoke to an increasing number of coaches who requested that we start LD on Friday. We also spoke to CX coaches who didn’t object, and the community seemed to accept that LD wanting the switch and the CX crowd having no objection. 3 years ago we made the change to a more relaxed LD schedule distributed over three days, and coaches told us they found it to be a more comfortable schedule. Coaches and students generally preferred to debate later on Friday, and appreciated the late start on Saturday morning, so that they were able to get close to 8 hours of sleep and felt more equipped do the rest of their preliminary rounds. A number of coaches felt that because of this, even the kids who made it to finals were prepared to make it through at least one long day of rounds at the very end of the tournament. Over last few years, we’ve generally been finishing finals of LD around
Major Problems This Year: Software Difficulties:
We agree with many of the comments in previous posts that the delays for LD outrounds were unacceptable in lack of adherence to our schedule, and would like to identify 2 major points of failure on Sunday just for everyone’s information: the first being our transition to LD outrounds, and the second being the delay between half-triples and doubles.
Our biggest problem, and really the root of the bulk of our scheduling and tabbing issues, was a program meltdown on Sunday from
Ultimately, we want to reiterate that we believe Brent can tab this event with his software as well or better than anyone else out there, given the chance to modify and test the software so that the program is fully debugged and ‘ready for prime time.’ Some may recall that ten, twelve, or fifteen, years ago a number of tournaments had software meltdowns at various points as the software was being newly generated, which resulted on occasion in tournaments coming to a halt for several hours at a time. In this day and age, the expectations are higher for the software it to be fully tested, and our confidence was high going into this weekend that it was in fact reliable given that it has existed for several years, and has been tested at a number of tournaments with good results (albeit smaller and perhaps less complicated in their tabbing protocols).
In retrospect, and most important of all, it would have been faster to go to a solely paper tab at that point, but given that Brent was confident in his ability to quickly resolve the issues and that we left him to set the pace on this, adherence to the schedule very stupidly (on our part) got away from us. In short, we do praise Brent and the ways in which he responded to the problems that cropped up while tabbing LD over the course of the tournament, and accept our share of responsibility in not deciding earlier to go to cards once the software began to fail our needs. Had we done that things may not have been perfect, but could have been better and much more timely than they were. Ultimately, a dictate from us on this issue as early as possible could have and would have prevented most of the grief that we all experienced on Sunday.
Scheduling and Compounding Factors:
By
Unfortunately, our judge coordinator Ranjeet had only planned on staying until
At about
From that point on, the rounds took ~1 hr 30 minutes each (3 rounds Q, S, F) to culmination. As we entered semis, and finals, given the pressure we’d put on earlier rounds, we eased the urgency back some. Again, given the imperative of minimizing further delays and inconveniences to the students, judges, and coaches, we put on a lot of pressure for octas and quarters, which basically meant walking around to rooms and waiting until the debaters started each round. No students were threatened with forfeit. We were basically in a double bind here—if we didn’t push it along, people would complain that we froze the tournament, and if we did then people might say we pushed too hard. We tried hard to strike a balance, and our motivations were purely to finish as quickly as possible for the kids, coaches, and judges involved.
Judge Allocations/Protections:
When it comes to assigning judges to rounds during prelims, we feel that it is very important to use a well thought out and measured process for prioritization, especially considering that only about a fifth to a quarter of the judge pool ends up rated as an “A” judge after the tabulation of the community rating system. As you know, our first two rounds are preset off of the tournament seeding process (1-6 seeding is created from the submission of record/year to date performance of teams–this year we had 37 teams assigned to each seed). During these two preset rounds, we prioritize judge assignment first to the 1-6 rounds, then the 2-5 rounds, and finally the 3-4 rounds. We believe that this policy provides two positives. First and foremost, every attempt is made to place our top-caliber judges in the 1-6 rounds. In almost every case, it is possible to put an “A” judge in these rounds (exceptions only being due to debaters who have struck nearly 10 unique “A” judges each, and the possibility of region constraints). Second, in the event that a ballot must be pushed to a judge that the community has rated lower than the judge listed in the pairings, the disparity between teams should be great enough to provide an additional level of protection for the teams that are in contention for the break. This is discussed above as well in regards to unique features of JOT software.
In round 3, our philosophy is essentially the same. Priority goes to the 2-0 teams, because as many as one quarter of the teams can be 2-0, it is early in the tournament, and these teams can easily lose two debates. We then protect the top of the 1-1 bracket on down.
At round 4 our philosophy changes for judge placement for the remainder of the prelim rounds to the prioritization of down-1 teams, followed by down-2 teams at the top of the bracket, followed by the undefeateds, then finally the remainder of the down 2 bracket (what we call ‘splitting the bracket,’). There are several reasons for this:
First, many of the teams of break caliber will have debated one another in round 3 (or later on), with one emerging from the matchup down a round, so we feel that should give the down 1 teams priority in judge placement. Second, we feel that lower seeded teams that upped their performance throughout the presets and maintained it in round 3 deserve protection, as they have earned the chance at the break against a hard draw and with good judges. Finally, we believe that as a whole bracket, the down-one teams are in the greatest danger of not breaking should they lose again (as being a 4-2 tournament that is over 200 teams as many as half of 4-2’s won’t clear), and wish to ensure as best we can that these decisions, which will likely end someone’s chance at breaking, are made by the best possible adjudicators. Some people have questioned why we don’t provide protection to down-two teams since some of those teams have a shot at clearing. The truth is that we do protect them as best we can, but only after taking care of the down 1 bracket first (for the top portion, and only after taking care of the undefeated teams before allotting judges to the lower portion of the down 2 bracket). It is clear from historical data and simple calculations of the draw that it is impossible for more than a few of those teams that are down-two rounds this early in the tournament to clear, while we know that all down-one teams WILL clear. As an overarching philosophy, we believe it is better to protect the greatest number of teams with a chance at the break while also protecting teams early, rather than trying to fix damage that is incurred by prioritizing teams that finished presets down rounds, despite the protections of the seeding procedure.
We also ‘split the bracket’ as described above to protect down 2 teams for round 4 and on, taking roughly the top quarter of the teams (thus the one’s most in the running to clear) to prioritize. We then go to the undefeated bracket for priority, and finally, back to the remainder of the down 2 bracket. In round 4 the undefeated bracket still has three more rounds of competition, and we have had many cases where some of those undefeateds lost two of their next three rounds, ultimately failing to clear, so we do think some priority for the undefeated bracket at that point in the tournament is justified.
Judge Strikes:
Much concern has been registered about judge strikes and the practice of not honoring them throughout the tournament. This year’s tournament allowed for 10 strikes to be entered from each competitor, strikes that we agreed to honor through the first outround, one more round than in prior years, according to Jon Gegenheimer. In general, we as tournament directors believe that this system is in the middle ground of tournaments on the national circuit–for instance, until recently even the Glenbrooks offered no strikes at all. If all other major tournaments are now offering strikes throughout the tournament, we have heard the concerns and are willing to offer that going forward. We are not opposed to offering strikes that are valid throughout the entire tournament, up to and including finals, but in order to accommodate this shift in policy, we would need to reduce the number of strikes given out to each team, and want the community to understand what the tradeoffs are before any policy changes are made. We have not previously guaranteed that strikes will be honored in late outrounds and the TOC committee has not communicated to us that something like that is required in our tab policy. This year, as in some previous years, the tournament ran into issues retaining enough judges in outrounds to honor strikes, as most of the judges who remained in the pool had been heavily struck by competitors, not to mention other conflicts that existed for some judges and participants.
Fees:
We recognize that several people have expressed concern about the judge fees that we charge, and more broadly the fees charged by our tournament in general. We have had several internal discussions over the past few years starting from the premise that money is not our priority in running this tournament and we ask the community in good faith to take the following points under consideration. For the past few years, we have paid out more money to our hired judges than we have collected in judge fees from schools who have uncovered entries. In effect this means that we are subsidizing quality judges, whom we pay $300 to $350 to judge throughout the tournament, along with hotel accommodations and food throughout the tournament. We had 7 rooms of judges for the tournament, not to mention that we hired many more from the campus. Some has been made of the posters saying that ‘experience is preferred,’ and of course that sort of limited requirement is for your JV judges. Our varsity judges are expected to have real competitive experience at a fairly high level. As our fees have risen to support better judge quality, we have invested that money in the tournament. We have not carefully reviewed the distribution between events, and realize that we need to do that, so that LD is not subsidizing policy, and vice versa, and this is another matter that needs to be concretely addressed for the future. At the end of the day, we hope it is clear to those who know us well that we are focused on providing a community service event rather than maximizing our “profits” as some people seem to believe. For some we may not be able to say anything that will convince you, but it is nonetheless true.
Staffing levels for tab:
Regarding the concern that the LD tab is understaffed, we would like to point out that the years in which previous posts have said the tab room has run wonderfully were run on the exact same number of tab room staff. Erik Holland and Ranjeet Sidhu were 2/3 of the tab staff last year as well as this year. Moreover, we hoped and expected, as previously explained, that Jon Gegenheimer would be on site this year, leaving us with more high level presence from our LD consultant staff than we had the year before. Ultimately, three or four quality people have been sufficient to run our tab to our (high) standard. This issue is if these people are available for the entirety of the tournament and if the tab software can be relied upon or not. Given the problems we had this last year, we will make every effort to add at least one additional person to the LD tab consultant staff. We share the view with those on the posts who recall that the tournament has run well in LD for the past 5 years, and wish to reiterate that this year’s troubles can be primarily traced to a one-time miscalculation while transitioning into a new computer program which simply was not ready to handle the magnitude of the tournament and our various tabbing protocols and constraints.
Some of the sentiment on this board seems to think that we need a serious revamping of the tab staff and the way in which we run the tournament. We really don’t believe this to be the case, as our tab room structure has proven successful over several years, with the exception of this year which both Brent and the rest of the tab staff feel largely related to the software juggling constraints for which it was not in the end adequately programmed. Furthermore, extra tab room staff wouldn’t have alleviated the problems that plagued the LD division this year, as at its core the issue was software related and was only fully understood by Brent.
Lateness and forfeits:
We were deeply upset at the news that a few debaters who had advanced in outrounds were forced to forfeit their bid rounds in order to catch flights back home. We owe a full apology to those teams, and as mentioned in the opening, are willing to provide a refund of fees for those teams to the schools of those participants. These forfeits were unexpected news to us, since our original schedule laid out that we don’t end until
Other Matters:
Concern has been manifested in the issue of the incentives created by the fee structure at the Stanford Invitational. The conception on this board that the Stanford Invitational “penalizes” teams who bring less than 10 debaters with a $50 fee is simply untrue. Our school fees fall into two categories, small schools of less than eight competitors ($50), and large schools with eight or more competitors ($80). The fee structure for independent entries follows the same pattern with slightly higher amounts to cover the administrative costs of processing and following up on the letters of permission that are required to meet the restrictions on liability that are imposed by Stanford University. In reality this fee structure’s only incentive is encourage schools to bring somewhat smaller entries, if providing an incentive at all. The marginal cost of increasing from seven debaters to eight is $30, which is a clear incentive to bring a smaller squad if the numbers are near the break line, rather than a push to force schools to bring large entries. Schools that bring very large entries encounter no greater incentive to increase the size of their entries than do schools that bring very small entries. In fact, the incentives for increasing the size of the entry are greater for a very small school, seeing as how the per-student cost drops much more drastically with the addition of each additional debater to a small squad than to a large squad.
Seven-round tournament:
This year, we were approached by a number of coaches, who for the first time in any organized or systematic way expressed interest in moving the LD division of the tournament to seven prelim rounds with a guarantee of all 5-2 teams breaking. A few coaches have mentioned the idea over the last couple of years, but there was not strong demand or consensus for the move. We mentioned to those coaches that this would actually result in fewer, perhaps many fewer teams clearing, and that seemed to give pause to the folks we’ve previously talked with. We have indicated interest in exploring the option and have in fact never been fundamentally/philosophically opposed to 7 rounds. Some coaches have preferred 6 rounds in the past, simply feeling that 6 rounds are enough and wanting the prelims to end as soon as feasible, and others taking note of the likely reduction in the number of teams clearing.
At this juncture we’re hearing a strong majority of coaches saying they want to move to 7 rounds. Again, we feel we’re listening to the community and responding as quickly as time will allow, which in this case will be next year’s Stanford Invitational. A couple of coaches wanted us to do 7 rounds during the tournament this year, but we made the decision that it would not be wise to change our policy on the fly, particularly given that we had new (to us) software and new (to us) tab staff in LD, much less other schedule and room constraints.
In conclusion:
We believe that if you look at the overall evolution of the Stanford Invitational over the years, you will see a number of changes that have been made to our policies as we naturally evolved to a more national-level tournament, often at the request of attending schools, and that while we are far from perfect we do have a history of listening and adjusting the tournament to meet attending schools’ expectations. We do listen to feedback carefully and we have made many changes, ranging from bringing in a more national tab staff for LD, to hiring more judges, to changing the schedule in major ways to accommodate student needs. We have had 5-7 years of positive feedback about our increasing quality and ask for your trust in our good faith intentions to run the best tournament we possibly can.
This was a one-time transitionary meltdown in one event out of fifteen (even though we give full credit to the point that our successes in running other events are not an excuse for our failures in LD), and we do ask the community to consider our longer, recent history when judging us. We are committed to restoring the LD division of the Stanford Invitational to its former quality, if not better than ever before, at least in quality of how we conduct the event, if not who attends, which the marketplace must ultimately decide. While many have said Stanford Debate would never respond or take concerns seriously, hopefully this detailed post answers that pejorative assessment of our attitude, and demonstrates our willingness to confront these issues and make firm plans for improvement into the future.
We believe that the problems in LD this year were large enough that if they recur 2 years in a row, as has often been the standard when a tournament has several years of solid performance with one problem year, then repercussions are both fair and appropriate. If we have the same problems next year, we feel it’s fair and justified for people to do whatever they feel is best, including reducing rank for TOC and voting with their feet to express dissatisfaction by not registering in the subsequent year. On the 10 years I was on the TOC committee for policy (Fraser), we confronted a number of tournaments that had been doing well for several years but for one reason or another, including software meltdowns, had a challenged year, and in most of these cases one additional year was granted for the tournament to ‘redeem’ itself. In many cases the tournaments in question did successfully avoid repeating the problems of one difficult year.
We do feel the efforts and improvements we’ve made over the past decade, often at the requests from the local and national community, our attempts to be responsive on a number of issues over the course of many years as the attending community changed and requested adjustments in the tournament, and the fact that those changes have successfully been implemented to improve the tournament in the minds of many, justify people giving us at least one chance to win back their trust. Should we be judged exclusively on our single most problematic and difficult year? Is that a standard that is imposed on other tournaments? Many posts here have said the tournament has been strong for five years or more running, and that this particular year is the issue. If you feel we have been providing a quality experience for most of these past several years, we merely ask that you give us a chance to show that what happened this year is in fact a temporary, albeit most unfortunate, lapse. If some feel that they will not extend that courtesy to us this coming year, we at least hope that as the years unfold, and the tournament promptly returns to the quality of the last few years, and then some, that you will consider returning, as you will most certainly be welcome.
Most sincerely,
Matthew Fraser
Executive Director, Stanford Invitational
Program Director, Stanford Debate Society
Rich Boltizar
Site Director, Stanford Campus, Stanford Invitational
Popularity: 8%
test
Posted from: 64.91.217.43
February 14th, 2008 00:53
after reading a good sum of the earlier thread, and in light of this one (which i do, as a coach and attendee of the tournament, appreciate), i’d like to maybe bring up some structural ideas that ought be considered that were discussed on the earlier thread, or haven’t been discussed yet ( i haven’t read the novel of a thread that moerner’s win has become. congrats, by the way, kid).
first: i think the preset ranking for the tournament is awesome, mostly because it is nice for my student to not have to hit joan gass in rd 1 (anyone with knowledge about joan and rachel’s round counts this year, feel free to laugh). if coaches neglect to enter tournament results, then that is where coach apathy is to blame
second: +1 to christian on mpj. mpj, i believe, ought be a necessary requirement for octa-bid caliber tournaments. while only a few of the octa bids sport the concept, i think it would benefit tournaments in a way much more than damage them (granted, i’ve never tabbed a tournament before so my thoughts can be rendered as totally arbitrary). i mean, tfa state even offers it, and state here has been a huge tournament over the last 3 years.
third: i’d like to echo one of babb’s concerns earlier: CAP ENTRIES. capping entries, i think a. would make mpj easier to manage (if implemented), b. incentivize entering earlier season records for the presets, c. make hotel reservations a lot easier, and d. establish better competition.
fourth: that ballot DEFINITELY needs to be changed. also, i think it ought not be written on the dry-erase board in the judging room, ‘SPEAKS USUALLY FALL BETWEEN 24 AND 30, DON’T GIVE BELOW A 16′, seeing as how a lot of unexperienced judges whom no one had heard of were in the pool, and figure 27 speaks are generous. while some find my thought-out distribution of speaks to be really arbitrary, i have (at least) put some thought into speaker point distribution; some of these people have no clue what they’re doing. besides, what is the American Forensics League, anyway? ( a VALID ‘ask cruz’ question, i might add)
fifth: don’t put stanford students without debate experience in vld rounds, especially outrounds. originally, stephen hess’ frat brother was on my kid’s BID ROUND panel. that’s where i think it’s fair of us to just ask, ’seriously?’
but all in all, thank you, stanford debate society, for at least having a plan for next year, and a detailed explanation of what happened this weekend.
Posted from: 24.4.205.201
February 14th, 2008 02:21
since i was the one who started the “stanford sucked this year” charge, I should probably post here, as well. I’ll forward this on to Mr. Fraser, but if I’m willing to criticize publicly, fairness dictates a public response…
I am very heartened to see that Messrs. Fraser and Boltizar are willing to take criticism, and incorporate it in a constructive way to improve their tournament. It’s nice to see that they already are incorporating serious changes (7 prelims, strikes, etc) that should significantly alleviate a lot of the troubles that made this tournament problematic. I was contemplating sitting this tournament out next year; seeing the directors act this quickly makes it nearly certain I’ll be back. I also really like the unprecedented level of transparency shown here regarding judge placement procedures and pairings and whatnot…
That said, I think there are a few concerns this doesn’t really address:
(1) lateness of the tournament: Sure, it was a result of tab software melting down this time around…what steps will be taken to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future? How will data processing occur to alleviate random, unnecessary delays? If the comments on the previous thread are accurate, the only reason I’m not still waiting for doubles postings to come out is because Dan Meyers happened to walk into tab…that seems like a bit of a problem, no?
(2) Judge positioning - how will the tournament ensure that strikes are honored throughout prelims, at least? While my students were fortunate in that they didn’t get a stricken judge in the first two rounds, I sympathize very strongly with those who were not so lucky - one round matters so much when it comes to clearing at a competitive national tournament like Stanford, and some kids’ chance at elimination rounds ended due to factors entirely outside of their control. I also would say that MJP should be strongly considered, simply because it solves back the “we don’t have enough A judges!” problem by rendering fluid the categorization of judges. Regardless of its other criticisms, therefore, it may allow for a smoother tabbing of the tournament…something worth considering, I guess, if nothing else.
(3) Pressuring kids when the tournament is late: I understand the frustrations and various pressures the TDs probably felt late on Sunday, and can appreciate the levels of stress that may lead to later-regretted action. That said, the “you’re late, so you lost the flip” incident is a big problem. I don’t mind hurrying things along a bit, but the primary concern of any tournament ought to be the physical and mental well-being of the competitors. I hardly doubt this is a long-term problem - Mr. Fraser’s seemed like a really nice, hardworking and ethical guy whenever I’ve spoken with him - but simply pointing out that there were no threats of forfeiting rounds isn’t particularly responsive.
I want to echo the thanks that many have expressed regarding the performance of many of the staff - Ranjeet, Erik and Ben in the judges’ room were all really easy to work with and did all they could to ease a situation fraught with stress, and the rest of the tournament staff were helpful, cheerful and made the experience a lot of fun. I look forward to the VBD thread about stanford next year, which I hope is filled with comments about how well-run the tournament was. That said, the above issues are the kind that can derail an otherwise excellent tournament, and I really hope the tournament directors can deal with them as effectively as they have other concerns that arose this year.
Posted from: 128.36.76.42
February 14th, 2008 08:26
Two quick things on the breaking procedure section:
1. Now that the tournament is going to 7 rounds clearing at 5-2 (thank goodness), I hope the procedure adjusts to protect *down 2* rounds.
2. The ballot pushing system MUST change–a lot of the travesties which students I’ve coached faced are ones where critical rounds are pushed to whatever random cali judge is in the room.
That was a further slap in the face when we’d bring, at great expense, a lot of “A quality” judges for the pool and not see that reciprocated when we had people who needed
someone who could at least flow…in their break rounds.
One system I remember berkeley did one year is to perhaps star super critical rounds and for the judging table to know that those ballots cannot be pushed to random judges, but instead specifically assigned to people the tab room *knows and trusts* in that level round.
That hasn’t happened at the Stanford tournament (via all the comments) this year, and if it doesn’t happen again, would mitigate all of the ‘improvements’ suggested in this response.
3-2 or 4-2 rounds must not be pushed to whatever random /high/un-qualified person the judging table can find, and it would significantly help the tournament’s cause if LD coaches saw this kind of proactive effort taken for the sake of protecting students.
Posted from: 128.36.76.42
February 14th, 2008 08:28
Also a top-top pairing (like Adam) discussed in the previous thread should never ever ever happen again…
Posted from: 65.112.165.162
February 14th, 2008 11:38
First, many thanks to Fraser and Boltizar for hearing everyone out and taking this seriously. At the very least, as Ankur pointed out, the quickness and thoroughness of this statement dramatically improves chances that we (and I would guess others) will return next year. I have no problem in principle extending the tournament an additional year to demonstrate that this was an anomaly, especially given the certainty that next year’s event will be under a fair amount of scrutiny.
.
Second, it is worth acknowledging and appreciating the efforts the tournament directors have taken to improve the tournament. During the opening assembly, I was impressed with the tabbing developments Fraser described, and I hope that works out. Certainly, the willingess to think out of the box should be admired. Also, whereas other tournaments of a similar size fail to offer much or anything in the way of judge/coach hospitality, Stanford’s was solid. And, as I previously mentioned, the members of the Debate Society with whom I interacted were always quite nice.
.
Finally, I think an open question remains whether or not the size of the competitive field is either necessary or advantageous. I think one reason some (including myself) have speculated about financial motives is the enormity of the tournament. This manifests itself specifically in at least three ways: lack of a cap for LD entries, the inclusion of IE events, and the inclusion of a JV division.
.
Tournament size tends to have an inverse relationship with quality throughout the country. While some have made the point that large tournaments like Harvard and/or Berkeley are consistently able to run on time, they are absolutely atrocious in terms of judging. Having attended Berkeley twice (though having avoided Harvard 100%), I can say the judging we got at Stanford was many, many, many times better than the judging we’ve ever gotten at Berkeley. Though a few folks have expressed some concern about judging at Stanford, worst case scenarios at Stanford equate to best case scenarios at Berkeley. Needless to say, we will not be attending Berk this year, and are doubtful to attend at any time in the future.
.
While size has not impacted the judging at Stanford as much, it has impacted the schedule, due to room constraints. The strongest LD tournaments (Greenhill, Apple Valley, St. Mark’s, Glenbrooks) all cap and, if they have IEs, accomodate them at alternative locations. Greenhill, the standard bearer in my opinion, caps school entries, doesn’t have a JV division, and doesn’t have IEs. I can’t remember the last time I heard a complaint about this tournament. I can remember many years when popular opinion considered it the best octas bid tournament in the country. Frankly, California needs itself a “Greenhill tournament”, and Stanford may be best positioned to take on that role if it were willing to contract a bit.
.
Suggesting that the schedule is dictated by space limitations seems to foreclose the most obvious solution: not taking up as much space. Does Stanford really need a JV division? Does it really need 220 in VLD? What would the schedule look like in a world with no JV and 150 in LD? Might this also alleviate the need for a 7th round?
.
Thanks again for the helpful response.
.
b
Posted from: 128.54.63.109
February 14th, 2008 11:47
just as a quick response to anthony, while I think that a top-top paring can go badly, berkeley does do a high-high round. This allows the bracket to be broken up a little and weed out certain debaters who might have had point fairy judges in earlier rounds (btw, spkr points in LD now days just doesn’t make any sense… way to many 30s and 29.5s, but that’s an issue for another thread, one which i dearly hope JCruz will bring up.) On the other hand, not having prior knowledge of there being a high-high round does prevent the tournament from having a safely transparent system. However, it seems like the computing errors sufficiently explains this problem.
Also, A general problem I had with the tournament was the schedule for day 2 where there were only 3 LD rounds over the course of 1 day. now, 5 rounds in one day is a bit strenuous, but 4 rounds can be done at a fairly relaxing pace (as the berkeley tournament shows). This addition of an extra round or two on saturday seems like it would make the tournament run smoother and I would hope that the TDs take this in mind. I’m not sure how that would jive with policy and IEs, but the scheduling does seem to be a problem that has to be reevaluated.
Posted from: 128.54.63.109
February 14th, 2008 11:50
oh, babb posted while i was writing my comment… anyway, plus one to his first two points. Its great of the TDs to answer us in this prompt and decisive manner.
I really like that we’re able to discuss the problems of a tournament in an open forum. these kinds of discussions should be more prevalent in dealing with other current issues in the activity.
Posted from: 207.80.127.240
February 14th, 2008 12:35
I also appreciate the response by Mr. Fraser and Boltizar. I have never gone to Berkeley but have heard many negative things and as a result have avoided the tournament. I have taken the SJ squad to Harvard on four separate occasions but vow never to return because of the poor quality of the judging. The Strake squad has attended Stanford for each of the previous three years and have came away with a positive experience for two of the three. These are my requests for next year. First, use mpj and utilize it throughout the tournament including out rounds. Second, cap entries per school at four in LD. Finally, save quality hired judges for out rounds. These are my thoughts, thank you for the response.
Posted from: 207.207.127.254
February 14th, 2008 12:43
huge props to the TDs for their response. timely, organized, respectful, and most importantly, constructive.
I’d like to comment on a couple minor things that have been brought up… first, capping entries: While I think that capping entries causes much more competitive tournaments with better judging (the spectacular tournament Greenhill was mentioned), I just don’t foresee this happening with Stanford. I think that the TDs are dedicated to providing an open tournament for all comers who want to try to debate at a national level. Also, the inclusion of many divisions and IEs emphasize this goal. I think that these types of tournaments are a valuable asset to the debate community, and especially the bay area debate community, where the vast majority of schools cater to lay-style debate (since we have lots of “league” tournaments with almost exclusively parent judges). Since I attended one of these schools that “train” debaters in lay-style debate first and generally ignore the national scene, Stanford was an important tournament in terms of my development as a debater. It was instrumental in helping me realize that I wanted to become involved in national debate, which was a much better experience (in my opinion) than exclusively debating at parent-judged tournaments. So, I’d like to express the opinion that Harker is most likely to become the “Greenhill” tournament for the Bay Area, due to its smaller size, excellent judging, and lack of IEs (or at least prioritization of debate… I don’t remember it having IEs from the two times I’ve attended). But that speculation is beside the point.
Now for the discussion of scheduling:
Now that there will be 7 prelims, it makes even more sense to have the 7th prelim on Sunday, and adding the 6th to Saturday. I may be completely off here, but I think the 6th prelim has been on Sunday instead of Saturday partly because of the fear that the first few outrounds on Sunday would not have nearly enough judges, since teams that don’t break will leave early and judges won’t honor their commitments. I think that it is clear that the tournament needs every good judge it has for the first outround or two, and not providing an incentive for some of those judges to be there on Sunday almost certainly ensures that the trips round would have terrible judging. I don’t know if this schedule would be hotly contested now that there are 7 prelims, but I think that 2 prelims on Friday, 4 prelims on Saturday, and 1 prelim on Sunday is a perfectly reasonable schedule.
Once again, I’d like to thank the TDs for their impressively helpful and timely response, and I am also immensely thankful for a website like VBD where all of this discourse can happen, despite the bit of exaggeration and uninformed responses that often occurs. In general, this has been a very productive discussion.
Posted from: 69.181.125.125
February 14th, 2008 12:43
babb–
i understand your concerns about stanford and other tournaments of a similar size, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) college tournaments exist so that college teams can debate. period. i know that most people in the hs ld community don’t go on to debate in college and don’t really care about anything outside of their own insular bubble, but college debate is both one of the most valuable educational experiences for undergraduates and one of the most vulnerable in an age of budget cuts and “fiscal discipline”. tournaments like greenhill, CPS, etc. can afford to be very small, tournaments like berkeley, harvard, and stanford can’t, because if those teams don’t get enough entries the team doesn’t get to debate.
2) for a lot of schools, big regional tournaments like stanford, harvard, and berkeley are the only chance they have of bringing their entire team to something remotely resembling a national circuit competition. i understand that, from the perspective of rich private schools looking for toc bids, this isn’t really a concern, but for kids who can’t really afford to jet-set or teams with more than 3 debaters, tournaments with looser caps on entries are a really valuable experience.
3) having JV is about the best thing that can happen to a big tournament, at least as far as judging is concerned. a big open division dilutes not only the quality of the competition, but the judging as well. separating the pools allows better judges to be used in varsity while keeping the frat brothers and parents judging jv. this doesn’t even begin to cover the
again, maybe it would be ideal if every tournament only allowed 2 debaters and capped entries at 100, but in the real world, where there are serious issues of inclusion involved, i hope everyone can be selfless enough to realize that college tournaments serve a real purpose not only for college teams, but for many high school teams as well.
Posted from: 69.181.125.125
February 14th, 2008 12:45
ack sorry to double post, but the last sentence in 3) should read:
“this doesn’t even begin to cover the other benefits of jv, not least of which is keeping many newer debaters in an environment where they’re not intimidated by older, much better, and often notoriously meaner varsity debaters and laid into by insensitive, tired college circuit judges who are pissed off they have to judge jv.”
Posted from: 209.98.146.245
February 14th, 2008 13:08
“(btw, spkr points in LD now days just doesn’t make any sense… way to many 30s and 29.5s, but that’s an issue for another thread, one which i dearly hope JCruz will bring up.)”
.
I’m sure this is an issue Jon would just love to bring up, given his historically harsh stance on point fairies. I hear Big Bronx will be doing its part to rectify the problem next year by converting its ballots to a 28.5-30 scale. :-)
Posted from: 207.80.127.240
February 14th, 2008 14:57
Running a smaller tournament and making money are not mutually exclusive of one another. Emory caps entries at two per school and seems to be doing just fine.
Posted from: 65.112.165.162
February 14th, 2008 15:12
Dealing briefly with Alex’s sentiments:
.
“1) college tournaments exist so that college teams can debate. period… college debate is both one of the most valuable educational experiences for undergraduates and one of the most vulnerable in an age of budget cuts and “fiscal discipline”.”
.
Then hold a bake sale. No one is contending that the tournament shouldn’t be big or that it shouldn’t make money. But, as long as TOC gives the tournament an Octas bid, it should be held to higher standards. I’ve never complained about the UT tournament, which is always total insanity. The UT tournament only has a semis bid, though, so I’m not sure it would be fair to hold it to the expectations we’d hold other octas bid tournaments to. For tournaments like Stanford and Berk, though, I think it’s totally reasonable for schools attempting to build TOC caliber programs to expect better opportunities for their students. To the extent a college’s motives interfere with providing that service, the TOC should provide scrutiny and, if needs be, consequences. As Fraser said, Stanford started off as a regional tournament. If it wants to make money as a massive regional tournament (a la UT), then I have absolutely no problem with that. As long as it has that bid, however, I think it’s reasonable to ask for a more accomodating schedule and perhaps, as a result, a smaller field. Certainly, the judging at Berkeley demonstrates that it DEFINITELY needs cap and cap big time. I just looked over the list of judges online and remembered how thankful I am to have this weekend off. Yikes. But again, if Berk had a semis bid, I’d be totally fine with it also have 400 debaters and lots of events.
.
“for a lot of schools, big regional tournaments like stanford, harvard, and berkeley are the only chance they have of bringing their entire team to something remotely resembling a national circuit competition.”
.
Great. And sense most of the people on “entire teams” aren’t going to be in line for a bid anyway, they shouldn’t mind those tournaments having fewer bids.
.
“i understand that, from the perspective of rich private schools looking for toc bids, this isn’t really a concern, but for kids who can’t really afford to jet-set or teams with more than 3 debaters, tournaments with looser caps on entries are a really valuable experience.”
.
Why? Why does your team need to experience the “national circuit” if it isn’t in it for the bids? By the time massive squads are entered, and by the time those massive squads provide under-qualified judges, it doesn’t feel much like a national tournament anyway. If we wanted our debaters to be judged by someone’s parent, we could always take them to a WBFL League tournament. Part of what “national circuit” programs are paying for when they attend elite tournaments is elite judging. Again, I was actually pretty satisfied with the judging at Stanford. But, this is a big part of why we don’t do Harvard/Berk. Most of my kids aren’t in line for bids anyway, but I would like them to get some constructive and useful feedback. (And to be fair, even a lot of students at “rich, private schools” are on financial aid and/or don’t have parents who can/do invest endlessly on debate. But my guess is that was just a cheap shot with no intention of furthering an argument.) In any case, my position remains that your school and schools like it should have every opportunity in the world to attend un-capped, disorganized, poorly judged, or poorly scheduled tournaments–those tournaments just should have the same bids as more elite tournaments (which typically cap, ensure excellent judging, run on time, etc.) My sense is that Stanford could very easily be one of those elite tournaments. I think, given much of the judging I saw, and given Fraser’s commitment to improvement, Stanford is much closer to being that elite tournament than is Berk. Perhaps in an ideal world, Stanford capped and kept its bid while Berk invited entire teams, their parents, perhaps a few pets… and ended up with a semis bid.
.
“3) having JV is about the best thing that can happen to a big tournament, at least as far as judging is concerned. a big open division dilutes not only the quality of the competition, but the judging as well.”
.
You pose a false dychotomy. Why is the choice between having JV or having a “huge open division”? My argument is have small varsity division and no JV. I’m obviously not advocating that 220 VLDers have a JV pool added to the mix.
.
As for the quaint allusions to inclusion, selflessness, world peace, and all that stuff… beside the point. There are and could be many opportunities for students on large teams or modestly wealthy teams to compete. No reason those should be octas bid tournaments though. And the “selflessness” thing is infinitely regressive. Sure, it would be selfless of me to not care about tournaments being made worse by huge entries. It would also be more selfless of you not to make those tournaments worse with your huge entries. Not sure why it’s OK for only some of us to be self-interested with respect to our students.
b
Posted from: 65.112.165.162
February 14th, 2008 15:15
Good point with Jerry’s comment.
.
And for that matter, I think a lot of programs might pay higher fees for octas bid tourneys that stayed under control.
Posted from: 205.167.47.158
February 14th, 2008 15:22
Mr. Fraser brings up some good points, but I think a couple of other serious issues should be made known to the community.
1) I find it intriguing that Mr. Fraser attributes the delays on Sunday to a software error. This is NOT what the Help Desk told me when I asked them. When doubles pairings came out, I went up to them and the conversation went like this:
Me: “Why is your tournament running three hours late and refusing to honor strikes in Doubles?”
Them: “We actually have an answer for that. About 10 college students took their ballots and left campus without turning them in to tab and it took hours to track them down.”
Excuse me? This is a totally different explanation for what has occurred. I know the judging pool, particularly the college students, fairly well at Stanford, and I did not hear of this incident from anyone I knew. I am tremendously curious if the help desk just lied to me, or if Mr. Fraser forgot to mention this incident, or if the help desk forgot to offer the simple explanation that their tournament software crashed. In any case, such miscommunication between the tab room and the help desk should be unacceptable.
2) In round 3, my ballot was pushed to someone I struck. In the end, this was alright, because I realized I made a mistake in striking the guy (I thought he was a random hire, but he actually had experience in judging). This brings up two more serious problems:
a. If ballots can be pushed to strikes, this could disadvantage debaters. The tournament explicitly says that it is the obligation of the debaters to speak out if they have strikes in the round. But: 1) ballots could be pushed to personal conflicts, which an unscrupulous debate could use to his advantage, and 2) some students do not know exactly who their coaches strike.
b. There were 9 hired judges in the pool. None of them had a paradigm. We were forced to waste 8/10 strikes on them. These are not judges that you can defensibly pay $300 for.
3) On the night of registration, I pointed out that a judge I wanted to strike was on the strike sheet THREE times. I was told it would be fixed. It wasn’t fixed on the supplmenetal. It wasn’t fixed on the second supplemental they released on Friday night either. And I told this directly to both Matt Fraser and Erik Holland.
4) Strikes should be in doubles or not at all. It makes no sense to claim that you are “generous” to decide to honor strikes in outrounds. That should be where strikes are most important. There is a reason that I wrote a certain comment on the doubles pairing that is not fit for a family website.
I certainly appreciate my iPod and the championship, but at times it felt like the competitors were just fighting the organizers to get anything done at this tournament. I don’t mean to just go on a rant of problems without solutions, since I think solutions have already been found (7 prelims, etc.) but I believe that all the issues should be made known first.
Posted from: 76.30.71.86
February 14th, 2008 16:01
what is the point in nominally offering “strikes” when the strikes don’t go in effect until round 3 and don’t apply for outrounds? that is my only remaining concern. community preferencing at a tournament that is largely cali doesn’t help texas when texas wants to strike the cali judge that all of cali thinks is hella legit.
thanks for taking the time to write the response.
Posted from: 24.4.205.201
February 14th, 2008 17:09
babb,
you know me well enough to know that i don’t like tossing claims of elitism around without cause. I also don’t really want to turn this into a inclusion good/bad thread, but it may be too late for that…
that said, did you read your last set of comments before you posted them? as someone who had national circuit aspirations, but lacked the infrastructure around me to make extensive travel possible, I take extreme umbrage at the idea that regional programs don’t “deserve” or “need” to experience nat-circuit tournaments.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that kids learn something unique at nat-circuit tournaments that they don’t learn at local tournaments. Shouldn’t those who lack the ability to travel have a chance to access those experiences? In many cases, those are the exact kids whose ability to get a bid at berkeley or stanford you’re so willing to dismiss by saying that “sense [sic] most of the people on ‘entire teams’ aren’t going to be in line for a bid anyway, they shouldn’t mind those tournaments having fewer bids.”
Berkeley and Stanford may have their flaws (and they have many, don’t get me wrong), but they’re quite literally the only reason I went to the TOC my senior year…and speaking more generally, there’s many debaters who lack the ability to compete outside their region who’ve used such tournaments to get to the national scene. Take away their chance to compete at national tournaments IN THEIR BACKYARD (via capping), and you’re telling nearly everyone in the bay area (minus the 2-3 programs that regularly travel, of course…) that you don’t think they deserve a shot at the TOC. The point, then, isn’t inclusion at stanford, berkeley, or harvard. The point is that these tournaments represent the only way that the TOC in particular, and the national circuit in general, can include regional debaters at all. That’s why those tournaments being at the octas/quarters level is so key…and why I’m actually irritated enough to involve myself in the discussion.
I guess it must suck if you’re used to top-notch competition and judging to have to hear some non-circuit RFDs and see some non-circuit debates for a weekend, but for those who see such RFDs as the norm, a chance to have an experienced judge like you in the back of the room is a pretty big deal, as is the chance to compete against some of the best debaters in the nation. Take the octas status away from Stanford and Berkeley, and such judges and competition won’t show up anymore.
Am I really the only one who sees this as a problem? I mean…really, we think it’s okay to say there are people whose exclusion from our activity is not only acceptable, but preferable? I may sound hyperbolic, but really…read your post again, and tell me that message isn’t made abundantly, repeatedly clear.
I could go on, but there’s really no point. I just don’t see how your post is in any fashion consistent with the idea of an inclusive, non-elitist national circuit. Assuming that inclusion and national circuit debate are both good, that’s an inconsistency I find really troubling, and I sincerely hope I’m just misreading you on this point. I don’t mean to belittle the frustration you and your students must have felt this weekend, but if your solution is seriously what I’m reading it as…well, that’s one cure definitely worse than the disease.
Posted from: 24.12.189.96
February 14th, 2008 17:13
[Stanford admin]…what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Posted from: 71.90.27.171
February 14th, 2008 17:25
I didn’t read the whole post. But why on earth are high school tournaments seeding debaters? The only tournament that I know of that does this at the college level is the NDT… Do we really want high school debate to be the NDT?
Posted from: 71.90.27.171
February 14th, 2008 17:25
(i should clarify that I mean for pre-sets. It’s perfectly natural to seed in elims).
Posted from: 69.154.176.194
February 14th, 2008 17:30
Part of the reason that I am being critical of Stanford is that I don’t want to see it become another Harvard or Berkeley. If the tournament directors keep letting it grow without a cap, that is exactly what will happen. Also, I don’t see how a cap would effect whether or not decent local circuit competitors were allowed to compete. Certainly if you are capable of earning a bid and qualifying for the TOC then you are capable of being the A,B,C, or D debater on your team and thus getting one of the LD spots at a capped tournament.
Posted from: 71.90.27.171
February 14th, 2008 17:33
I’m curious too what program melted down? Was it TRPC or JOT or something else?
Posted from: 67.165.106.132
February 14th, 2008 17:50
re: nick bubb’s seeding question. that practice is not really unusual at college tournaments, only it usually takes place over several prelims (often the first 4). teams are assigned to ‘pods’ that debate each other in presets. i believe other high school tournaments may also seed (i have always heard that emory does it, which would explain why they get records from chair schools as well as non-chairs)
Posted from: 67.165.106.132
February 14th, 2008 17:51
oh, and the software in question is JOT
Posted from: 169.229.81.189
February 14th, 2008 17:55
I’d like to add to Ankur’s post. I think that Stanford and Cal should not limit at 2,3,4 whatever.
Several programs in California have great “C, D, E, etc.” debaters, but aren’t able to travel to 10 tournaments a year and cycle people in. It would suck if Cal and Stanford limited entries severely, and the awesome “C” debater at James Logan, Monte Vista, Monta Vista, etc. was left with just CPS and Harker for the year.
Texas proves this point even better, I think. The C debater at Marcus, Westlake, [insert other excellent schools] barely gets 2-3 in-state opportunities, which is sad. Colleyville, UT, etc. Schools like Hockaday and Strake which travel a ton are the exception, not the rule, I think. Without the UT, Berkeley, Stanford, etc., excellent C debaters would remain obscure. As the last example, I would guess debaters like Byron Ruby, Sophie Asher, Bilal Malik, Bonan Zhou, Monte Vista’s many good debaters, etc, did the majority of their early development at Cal/Stanford. That list isn’t even 2% of the size it should be, but it seems representative.
Babb’s solution of making egalitarian tournaments have less bids, while having uber-efficient high-entry fee tournaments be Octas bids is unfair.
Posted from: 69.150.59.172
February 14th, 2008 18:01
Hey Ankur,
I don’t want to speak for Babb (normally I let him be my message board mouthpiece) but I think maybe you’ve misinterpreted what he was saying. I don’t think Babb’s concern is with having regional competitors or even necessarily with having experienced regional judges. The concern is more with having an octas bid tournament where schools bring their A through Z debaters to compete. Capping entries doesn’t necessitate excluding local debaters in favor of national circuit debaters, it means limiting school entries to 2 or 3 and then having an overall cap. That means that as long as you’re in the top two or three of your school, (regional or national) you still attend these tournaments. As for providing the “national circuit experience,” capping would actually help regional programs because it drastically increases the chance of getting someone like Babb or Conrad in the back of the round as opposed to a parent or someone recruited from a frat. As for Babb’s comment regarding “entire teams” not being in line for the bid, I don’t think he meant that there wasn’t anyone on the team who had a shot, rather that all eleven debaters certainly didn’t have a shot–a much more reasonable claim. Anyways, there might be some arguments for why capping entries is bad but I don’t think that the regional argument as currently presented makes a ton of sense. Lowering the cap doesn’t change Stanford’s location; it’ll always be the Bay Area’s backyard.
Tommy
Posted from: 71.90.27.171
February 14th, 2008 18:16
I’ve had problems using JOT. The one year I helped out at Alverno, most of our tab problems were related to the program. I’ve found TRPC fits most of my needs as a tournament director. However, none of twenty or so tournaments that I’ve been a member of the tab room have had anything larger than 100 entries in a division.
Glenbrooks, I think, uses TRPC and operates fine. Perhaps talking to Tara Tate about how they manage the large set of entries and tabulate the divisions would be helpful. I don’t know…
I’m not involved in the activity as I used to be, but I’m just trying to be helpful.
Posted from: 24.4.205.201
February 14th, 2008 18:38
tommy,
as you said, it’s possible i misinterpreted what babb was trying to say. certainly, i don’t think he’s some sort of elitist evil villain type; i just think his comments run the risk of ignoring what i think are some real concerns.
let me clarify my arguent, since you’re confused as to how the regional argument links to the proposal of a cap.
i think the current culture of circuit debate makes it so that the bid is the only thing of value at a circuit tournament; witness your point that “all eleven debaters don’t have a shot.” My argument operates outside that culture. I’m saying that there is a unique value in having circuit rounds that those 11 kids (or at least 8-9 of them) can’t otherwise access. In a world where they don’t get to travel, the risk of having a circuit judge or opponent is nonexistent…going to stanford or berkeley in the SQ at least makes that possible.
the reply that caps increase the chance of having a good judge/opponent for every student at the tournament ignores the consequences for those students who no longer can attend. Look, a Leland (I’ll use my former HS, just so I’m talking about something I know) kid who gets a bunch of parent judges at Stanford is no better or worse off than she would have been at any other tournament in the area. If she’s lucky enough to get babb or you as her judge in one round, though, she’s gained something she’ll otherwise never obtain - the chance to hear and learn from an experienced, highly respected national critic. That seems valuable on face, but as Jay points out, such gains have translated into major building blocks for a lot of really strong national competitors. that is a unique reason to prefer not capping, and a reason that the focus on bids cannot capture.
I certainly don’t think the issue is as open-and-shut as anyone’s making it sound; there’s a good argument, for instance, that the impact to travelling teams ought to outweigh the impacts to local teams that i’m talking about. I’m pretty sure that’s the argument babb was intending to make…most probably, a compromise of some sort will be necessary (like…a hard cap, but a fairly generous one…or a “soft cap” that just makes you pay more for every extra debater after the Xth entry, or…something else entirely?), which I’m sure the stanford tournament directors will look into. i just think that ignoring the reasons for why it might be a good idea to maintain a strong tie to the region itself is a problem.
Posted from: 70.116.31.157
February 14th, 2008 18:53
This post is less of an argument and more of a request. Having never been to a tournament which used it, I wondered if someone could give me a summary of how Stanford “seeds presets”, specifically, how records are assessed. Also, I have never heard anyone make a case for why debaters who have done well before the tournament deserve easy preset draws (although I think it could be a good idea for the TOC), so if someone could fill me in, that would be great.
Posted from: 128.54.165.135
February 14th, 2008 19:03
I’m just replying to all these posts about the berkeley tournament and its ‘awful judging.’ honestly, I had two rounds out of 8 where i didn’t get an A or B judge, and those two rounds had very intelligent individuals in the back. And the year before that I was pretty well set in judging as well (not as many As, but very few Cs). Cal protects the higher power-matched rounds really well. Further, its definitely the most fun tournament of the year with good competition.
Posted from: 71.139.10.115
February 14th, 2008 19:14
i agree with kamil. berkeley is a great tournament. i have no idea what everyone is talking about.
Posted from: 12.215.129.141
February 14th, 2008 19:19
Berkeley presets have the potential to suck, but I’ve also, on the whole, been very happy with the judging I’ve seen in my two experiences with Berkeley.
Posted from: 128.36.76.42
February 14th, 2008 19:36
I think people misunderstood my reference to Berkeley as an endorsement of it over Stanford—that’s problematic–anyone who knows me knows my reference about what last week and this upcoming weekend are like in debate (no need to repeat here). There are plenty of critiques of the Berk LD tournament that can be levied, but it would be irrelevant to point them out here.
However, the one good idea I brought up of specifically designating high priority rounds in a way that the judging table knows not to push it badly… (which I will email to Frazier personally) is one that I think would help make Stanford more fair, bearable, and would ensure that some of the stories of disaster that have plagued the Stanford tournament are minimized.
Posted from: 64.35.135.146
February 14th, 2008 21:50
my last experience at berkeley was a mixed bag. until outrounds, i didn’t get very many (if any.. i cant fully remember every judge) national circuit/nationally celebrated judges. most of them were coaches at random regional schools that few people have heard of. they were generally good judges, as most of them could flow well and vote somewhat competently… i couldn’t go full speed and intensely line-by-line, but it was still an educational round with decent decisions (mostly… i did have a couple poor judges). however, once outrounds came around, the judging was excellent in terms of national critics. so, the judging was decent but not by full national circuit standards.
i’d also like to reiterate (see my earlier post for a full discussion) that capping entries is essential to developing debaters in the Bay Area, since our local tournaments give us no experience on the circuit. Stanford and Berkeley were my circuit experiences for a large part of high school and I think that that exposure was instrumental in my eventual transition to national circuit debate. capping entries would bar huge amounts of potentially great circuit debaters from being exposed to the circuit until their junior or senior years, which I think would be a travesty.
Posted from: 128.135.190.125
February 14th, 2008 22:09
this is irrelevant to most stuff
but i loved my berk judging jr/sr years
i got a bunch of A’s and B’s then in presets both years had a parent and a random student… which is fine thats part of debate
Posted from: 66.245.11.222
February 14th, 2008 22:17
The one thing that I would have liked to have seen this weekend that has not been addressed either in the posts or the statement was more information. I understand that there were problems in Tab and elsewhere, and I think that if that happens, it happens. Having heard both sides of the story, it was obviously not perfect, but was in my opinion pretty good. However, I’m pretty sure these problems were known fairly quickly. Once the program crashed and Tab knew it was going to be a little while, trouble desk should have made some kind of announcement and/or posting just saying that it would be a couple hours. As it was, we couldn’t really even go get a bite to eat because we had to be constantly checking to see if things were being posted. If the information had just been out there, I think the wait would have been just that much more bearable.
I also want to really thank the TDs for their willingness to make such great changes and be so responsive to the feedback.
Posted from: 204.210.136.12
February 14th, 2008 23:06
Let me preface what I’m about to say by noting that I have never attended Stanford (as competitor nor judge). That said, I have been reading all the posts about the tournament’s problems and I find it utterly ridiculous that the tournament is receiving this level of criticism. I do not have a problem with criticizing a tournament for problems it may have encountered but I think it is only fair that we consider what actually happened and tailor our criticisms with a context in mind.
.
I’ve been involved in tab at a few smaller high school tournaments (very minor role), and have been the tab director at a few college tournaments. While the style of debate might be different the logistics are similar. Running tab can be a very frustrating job even at smaller tournaments; I can only imagine that this frustration is compounded by the addition of hundreds of more teams at a tournament of Stanford’s stature. Even though every tournament director tries their best to stick to the plan they have laid out for their tournament there will inevitably be variations from it for one reason or another.
.
Apparently in the case of Stanford, they had to deviate from their schedule because of a computer meltdown. While the implications of the meltdown are unfortunate it is not something that deserves this amount of attention. It seems that a lot of the other criticisms about strikes, number of prelims, and whatnot are being magnified by the delay in outround pairings. I would bet that we would not be hearing this level of criticism had their tournament run on time.
.
I know of several tournaments (of which I will not name) that disregarded strikes in the preset rounds and in outrounds. And I do not fault them. They didn’t break the strikes because the tournament director was feeling rebellious or because they were out to get someone. Instead, certain conditions forced them to not honor strikes in certain instances. For instance, at one tournament I was judging at this year the tournament had to break a strike because too many teams didn’t fulfill their judging requirement. At another tournament some of the judges just never showed up on Saturday morning. As much as we like to lay blame on tournament directors we sometimes have to face the facts that the debate community is also responsible for the quality of a tournament (in terms of bringing quality judges and showing up for our rounds on time).
.
I am not trying to make excuses for the Stanford tournament; I have no relationship to any of them. All I am saying is that the criticisms about judge strikes and other logistical anomalies are not things that we should be blowing up because if we scrutinize any tournament we will find similar anomalies. So at the end of the day, the cause for concern was a computer crash. Sure, they could have resorted to cards, but I don’t think a slight lapse in judgment is reason enough to discredit the entire tournament and all the effort they put into it. I remember a few years ago when Emory was literally shut down for a day because of a freak ice storm. They ended up having only four rounds (correct me if I’m wrong). The bid rounds and whatnot got incredibly screwed up but we don’t lay blame on the Emory tab. The reason is simple: something happened that was out of their control. Arguably, a computer glitch is something out of our control unless we’re prepared to revert to hand tabbing (and consequently accept the fact that parings will not be done as fast).
.
Given the fact that the tournament directors have responded so promptly and transparently to all of these concerns it is evidence enough that they did not intend for this to happen and did take precautionary steps to try and prevent these sorts of things from happening (such as having the tab software programmer on site - not many tournaments can say the same). If this happens again next year, then I think the community has every right to criticize as much as they did this time around.
Posted from: