Wisconsin Forensics Daily

Monday Meditation: Stop Reading Codes at Awards

A Call to Action for Tournament Directors

When I first started coaching  13 years ago, students were never known by more than their codes at forensics tournaments.  The awards announcer would proclaim, “and in first place, Solo Acting Serious,  from Anyville school, 42R3!”  In the meanwhile, awards ceremonies have become a classier affair, with standing ovations for the first place champion, and standards for tact enumerated in the WFCA Code of Conduct.

In the early part of the new millennium, I experimented at some tournaments with running PowerPoint presentations during awards, sliding names and schools behind the contestants.  I was actually inspired by the spectacle that is the NFL National Tournament Awards program, and wanted to bring some of that celebration of students to our local competitions.  In order to make this work, we needed to collect students’ names during the finals (power) rounds.  The second set of typing in PowerPoint added a few extra minutes of waiting before awards, and whomever would operate the PowerPoint slides might advance a name a few seconds too early, ruining the suspense of announcement.  So, the practice was dropped in favor of more efficient, shorter awards ceremonies — about the same time the “One-Clap” method of recognizing finalists took wing.

By then, however, the practice of collecting names and announcing them during the awards ceremonies became a norm, and a form was even added to the WFCA Handbook, tournament forms section to facilitate collection of this information.  As Mike Traas began more freely distributing his amazing Microsoft Access file for tabulating tournaments, that feature was built-in to allow reading of names and inclusion of them in the results packets — and subsequent posting online here at Wisconsin Forensics Daily.  When I piloted TabRoom.com at the Alverno tournament this year, I was pleased to see that it preserved ink/toner for the reading script generated, only showing students’ names — with phonetic key based on pronunciation guides coaches typed during online registration — and schools.  The only exception was Group Interp. and Play Acting script pages printed by title (so I’ll have to ask the developer of that software if he can incorporate an option for names instead).

So, with all this technology and desire for fast and efficient awards assemblies, why do we perpetuate the practice of gratuitously reading codes during awards ceremonies?  The tournament is over; let’s celebrate the students and the schools they hail from, not the temporary system used to mask their identities up to that point!

Respectfully,
Adam Jacobi
Former Coach, Rufus King HS & Director, Alverno College Tournament

Posted in Columns, Monday Meditation |