Thank you, Mr. Goss (2/2)

jpahk · Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:04:02 -0800

1. I was not the TD of the NE SCT. However, in
terms of staffing considerations, I can tell you that
we were expecting 16 teams in each division. (2 of
MIT's teams in div 2 were no-shows, but we didn't find
out until the morning of.) Now, I don't know about
Duke, but Harvard's club, although large, does not
exactly have enough people to staff a 16-room timed
tournament. We did have enough for a moderator in each room,
and then some, but not nearly enough for a moderator
and scorekeeper in every room. So I recruited some of
my friends and roommates. I trained them.
We
still did not have enough people. It was concluded that
we would have to ask teams to scorekeep during their
bye rounds.

You may not have noticed, but
Harvard's 3 teams consisted of 5 members of the club, of
whom 3 are capable game moderators. (Vik Vaz is a
freshman, and David Farris is completely unintelligible.)
Perhaps it would have made a huge difference to have all
of us staffing instead of playing. But I think
not.

2. Andy Goss probably doesn't know this, but we as
an organization *thoroughly* investigated all of our
options with NAQT. (R Hentzel can verify this.) Andy Goss
considers Harvard's bids to be "artificial," as if we did
not in fact actually them. But it seems to me that
the strength of our club is sufficient to warrant 3
bids to the ICT. (I think the teams' performance at
SCT--despite the fact that all were undermanned, two of them
seriously so--will support this claim. I also think that
the B team and the div 2 team at ICT will play well
enough to at least justify their presence there.)
Unfortunately, NAQT policy for awarding bids in some sense
"penalizes" host schools with the potential to qualify
multiple teams for the ICT--we have discussed this with
them and made some suggestions. I hope they will be
considered.

Which of these alternate courses of action would have
been "better"?

A) Harvard hosts but does not
play any house teams. Harvard gets 1 bid in division I
and that's it. Other schools with good B teams
realize that if they want to send their B teams to the
ICT, they should not host the SCT. NAQT kicks
themselves for alienating the programs which, by virtue of
their depth, are almost certainly better equipped to
actually run their tournaments. On top of that, the 2000
ICT field is weaker and thus loses some legitimacy as
a championship.

B) Harvard does not host the
SCT at all, but instead asks some other school to
host. A club with about 7 regular members is then asked
to host a tournament requiring 32 staff members.
Seriously, is there any other school in the Northeast that
could have hosted this tournament? Yale, certainly--but
they, too, have a strong B team and a strong div 2 team
who would have been denied a chance to qualify for
the ICT had they been required to host.

C)
Harvard runs the tournament untimed, thus lightening the
staff load. (This was actually what I thought was the
best option, but NAQT would not allow it--as is
certainly their right, they insisted that the tournament be
timed.)

D) Harvard hosts, but in order to keep the
tournament more manageable, turns away all teams after the
first 20.

Well?

I hope this is an
adequate (albeit incomplete) explanation of Harvard's
decisions regarding the SCT. Again, I was not the TD, nor
do I speak for the club as a whole--this is merely
my perspective on the situation. At any rate, the
partial details I have provided are at least something to
consider before making any rash accusations.

Joon