So, it has been alluded to that the recent collegiate academic event at Brown had to be hastily rescheduled, resulting in the loss of most of its potential field, because someone decided to host a "guerilla trash" tournament seven miles away on the same date that Brown had claimed. Not only was the academic tournament announced well in advance, but, giving the people hosting the "guerilla trash" tournament the benefit of the doubt, it was assumed that they had simply failed to check all of the myriad places for quizbowl communication and their error was politely pointed out by private e-mail. However, it seems that the people running the "guerilla trash" event outright refused to reschedule even at that point. As a result, the Brown event lost a lot of people who had already made commitments for Sunday and the reduced travel options on that day affected all the teams. I have some stake in this as I'm playing the mirror of Brown's tournament at UNC this weekend, and I can only imagine that the lack of attendance and consequent lack of packets at the source event may impact the quality or quantity of the rounds I am investing some time and money to play on. I am sure Jerry and his co-editors at UCLA did their absolute best with what they had and I still look forward to playing the questions on Saturday, but, logically, the tournament is not as good as it could have been had they been given more material to work with--more material that they had every right to expect based on the field size of previous events in the area, which was unarguably reduced due to the actions of the "guerilla trash" organizers. Now, it's beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior to try to run a second tournament in the same immediate region as an already-announced event to begin with. Even if these were both stellar events, the people behind the tournament that announced second would have not the faintest silhouette of a leg on which to stand. However, this situation is even worse than that. We do not have two stellar events here. We have one event which was an academic tournament for college teams, for which the editors had set aside significant chunks of their own time to write and polish good questions. The other was not only a trash tournament, not only an open trash tournament, but a "guerilla trash" open tournament where I am told some of the worst packets in recent memory made their wholly-unedited appearance. I am also told that, despite the entirely nonexistent amount of time which he had to spend on pre-tournament preparation due to the "guerilla" nature of the event, the apparently overtaxed tournament director still could not be bothered to compile statistics, or to hold the final scheduled playoff round before leaving to attend a hockey game. So, my question here is severalfold: -Where do the people behind this "guerilla trash" tournament get off with such behavior? How do you plan to rectify the enormous slight you have done to, specifically, the Brown team, and in general, people interested in real quizbowl tournaments in the Boston, southern California, and lower Mid-Atlantic regions? -Do the architects and players of trash tournaments plan to continue undermining the attempts of real quizbowl teams to hold real quizbowl tournaments? If this malice is just the aberrant behavior of one individual and not reflective of the way that trash organizers in general operate, then what do we, the organizers of real tournaments, need to do in order to help the mainstream of trash tournament directors avoid analogous honest mistakes in the future? Do you guys need someone to tell you which academic events have been announced by direct e-mail, or what? I'm open to suggestions here and I'm sure all the other people involved in real tournaments would be likewise inclined to take some constructive criticism in case there was any communicative failure on our part. --Matt Weiner
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