Despite the connotation of the title, nothing went wrong! Yesterday, I had the honor and immense responsibility of co-directing a quizbowl tournament held at Livingston High School. For the second year in a row, the tournament had over fifty teams from forty schools in attendance, meaning it was one of the biggest in the nation, with mainly only the national tournaments being larger. It was quite an interesting experience, and by that I mean that every moment was either incredibly fun or annoyingly stressful.
Of course I decided to wake up two hours before I had to be at the school for setup duties, because my body can never decide on a good time to wake up, so I was stuck doing nothing for the entire day (one hour) after I got ready. I decided to spend some time checking through the software (we used TJ Sheets, an automated scorekeeping system that took a combined five hours to load after 30 minutes of setup in the weeks before the tournament and then ended up saving us seven hours of manual labor) to ensure that everything was synced up prior to tournament usage. Most things went smoothly during the tournament aside from a few teams not showing up, but I think the real incredible part of this tournament was how fast it was able to run.
For a majority of tournaments, 5:30 is the ideal endpoint, with games maybe running until 5:45 or 6:00 in most cases. This, however, is for tournaments with 10 rounds (or 11 maximum), and often does not include the cleanup part. Maybe due to the large number of young LHS students (individuals who could do manual labor as I directed them), we were able to run 12 rounds, fully clean up the school, and have everyone who wasn’t a Livingston High School student who staffed the tournament out of the building before 6:00, meaning that despite being one of the largest ever tournaments and having more rounds than usual, we were still on the faster end. A lovely celebration involving a bottle of apple cider was then held, and I subsequently walked home for forty minutes with four full pizza boxes because we ordered too many for all the teams and staff.
Not much happened during the tournament though, with most of my work being to clean up any errors when it came to the data report and score entry. It was much easier than previous years, whereas we might have had to spend several hours manually going through each scoresheet and putting all the numbers into an online software program, this year we were able to just watch all the sheets for errors (that got automatically reported) and I was able to watch a full hour of a Minecraft Tool-Assisted Speedrun thanks to the work I put in earlier in the week. Next year, when I’m in charge of this tournament again, I am definitely going to be using most of the same format if possible. This tournament was 100% a success, and I enjoyed the time quite a bit.
Also, shoutout Livingston’s house team of four freshmen for winning the whole thing, did not expect that at all when going into the tournament. It was a great time in the control room when we watched the finals scoresheet and we found out you guys get the winning tossup by seeing the number change on the sheet. I think my ears still hurt from the amount of people who started shouting in celebration.