Well, the largest forensics tournament in the world began yesterday, Monday, and as Tuesday begins I wanted to jot down some notes about day one.

When Martin arrived at the Derby Middle School at 7:20 AM he found students banging on the door trying to get in, the alarms going off and the police arriving. He put that fire out and was glad he had his bow tie on as he explained things to the police.

Some students were confused about their code numbers. In fact, they were trying to use the same one. One of them actually got lost and did not speak, but the other person spoke in his place (using the wrong number). Both ended up getting ranks of 9.

The little Las Vegas pins that were given out that blinked lights on and off ran down as the day went on, and once they stopped blinking fewer and fewer people were wearing them.

Someone who was supposed to set up computers fell down on the job. When the day started there were no computers for judge replacement rooms at Derby high school and Derby middle school. We promptly found some and set them up with the proper data sets, and it did not cause a delay, but it did cause some morning frustration.

Dalvin Yager, our host at Derby, was ill on Monday, but his wife Becky filled in fantastically.

The poster work in the speech tab rooms began. Those advancing after round six are usually announced by the hanging of a huge poster that lists them for each event. The artistic effort and work that goes into them is impressive and the tab committees take great pride in them.

I foresaw several problems and reallocated my personnel on Sunday night so that Monday would run smooth. They were not all happy about it but they went. Those in the know agree that this was a good move and problems were averted.

We had a problem with the judge replacement computer at Derby high school. When it was asked to print out judge histories for judges, we would get a strange list that was not necessarily an accurate reflection of who they had judged. That computer also showed one judge judging two different rounds, when in reality they had judged neither. Obviously, the data was corrupted but we did not know how it happened. We managed to work around it. Rich Edwards and Brent Hinkle swung into action, but as Rich explained to me, “I am not sure how I can work to solve a problem when I don’t know how or why it happened.” Good point. Fortunately, this problem was limited to only that computer, and we wiped it overnight and it seems to run fine today.

We had our fair share of weak requests and excuses, but managed to fend them off. “But I don’t want to judge,” “I’m having a bad day,” “I didn’t sign up to judge this event” (the entry form they signed says differently), “But I want to judge now, not later, because my students will be eliminated early” (nice confidence), “I can’t find the room because I am directionally challenged,” “All these halls look the same, so I don’t know where I am” (map provided), and on and on. But, the vast majority of the judges are doing a great job and show up quite promptly for their assignments.

More tomorrow.