We had a handful of “Blue Ribbon” judges at Newark. To wit,
these were judges that the tournament had gone out of its way to bring in (with
the exception of one judge who was accompanying a registered team). The idea
was that, for whatever reason, these judges represented something that the
tournament stood for, and that all the entrants ought to be prepared to debate
in front of them.
I hedge on explaining the precise nature of these judges
because, for one thing, they weren’t all the same. For another thing, a similar
situation was discussed by the NDCA. In their case, the tournament had gone out
of its way to bring in hired judges adding good diversity to the pool, and the
problem was, after all that, should entrants be allowed to strike those judges?
If I recollect correctly, it was determined that in the future they must be
ranked either a 1 or a 2, but I could be wrong about whether this was actually
agreed to.
The problem of forcing a ranking, i.e., forcing people to
rank certain judges, is that if you have, say, 60 judges, with 10 for each
category, and five of those judges are Blue Ribbon enforced 1s, that leaves you
with only five 1s of your own choosing. I guess I could have set the
percentages to reflect the five mandated 1s—it’s only one less of all the other
categories—but I thought about it differently. I just marked the BRs as
inactive during the ranking period. People got to rank all the judges except
these.
The next thing was that I didn’t want to burn these folks
out. Newark was single-flighted, and did we really want our Blue Ribbon judges
in every single round (especially the ones who had just come off two
back-to-back final rounds, one for the Round Robin and the other for the
postponed Ridge tournament)? Kaz was also one of the BRs, and she still hasn’t
stopped mumbling about judging every round at Apple Valley. I can sympathize
with the desire for a round off, and if I have the luxury of enough judges to
do so, I try to insure at least one for everybody in normal double-flighted
tournaments (which was, admittedly, a lot easier in TRPC where you just click a
judge on or off for a given round). Our BR judges deserved the same treatment.
My solution was to keep the Blue Ribbons as inactive when I
paired the rounds and made the initial judge assignments. Then I went in and
turned them on (if I wasn’t giving them the round off). Then I went back to the
pairing and looked for bad assignments, starting at the bubble. The logic
(which Alston agreed with) of putting BR judges on the bubble seemed intuitive:
if these are the mandated judges, it presumes that the tournament respects
their decisions without qualification, and who best should be handling your
toughest rounds? If a pairing already had a good mutuality, I left it alone. I wasn't there to make a statement, just to use the BRs most wisely.
Doing it this way had a side benefit for tab. Instead of
each person having ten 1s, they had fifteen, and five of those were guaranteed
mutual. I mean, there are plenty of times when there isn’t a single mutual
agreement on a judge between two debaters in the entire pool (and usually this happens to the same
schools over and over, who have unique opinions on the pool from the norm as
well as unique opinions from a handful of others, whom they always seem to
hit). Having a mandated-1 wild card to pop into a down-two round to replace a
1-3 pairing (!!!) was a godsend.
Granted, this sort of Blue Ribbon or mandated ranking of any
sort is a rarity, and I’m not offering an opinion on whether it’s a good thing
or a bad thing (I haven’t given it much thought), but it is interesting, and it’s
something to think about as a general practice, and certainly something that
you might have to hack out if you’re the one in the tabroom.
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