Santa Clara Speech Tournament
December 18, 2006
[This post originally appeared on my xanga on December 10th, 2oo6. It is here for reflection reasons. To view the original entry, click here.]
I don’t think one can truly appreciate the science of a speech tournament until they’ve actually taken part in it.
By taken part, I don’t mean participate in competition, I mean tabbing, being a runner among other things. There are so many things to do, so little time to do it, and tons of variables to depend on for the times to happen.
Such is the science of the Santa Clara University Speech Tournament. Any speech person who has attended, especially the December edition, can tell you that it runs atrociously late, which essentially means that this tournament can still be going at midnight or later. I myself, like others, have complained for years how slow the tournament goes — the surplus of hours between rounds, doing homework, taking random photos, walking around campus and hopelessly waiting for posts to go up. And like others, I myself absolutely hated this tournament because it was a weekend that I could otherwise spend doing homework before a hellaciously evil week of school.
After this weekend, I think the hatred is gone. I have forgiven the evil demons of the Santa Clara Speech Tournament. And now I understand why it runs so late — we never have enough people to do enough things at a given amount of time. We’re always short on people running back and forth from the tab room (where people tabulate scores and whatever — even you could’ve guessed that) to the judging room. I myself have made at least 10 – 15 of these trips over the last two days (and that being a raw estimate), and how have knees that are hurting, and a cell phone that is lost. Mind you its not any more fun that it’s raining too and you have a jacket that lacks a hood and you don’t have an umbrella. Yes, campus is small, but running back and forth is so tiring. But hey, at least giving directions is easy (and so is explaining events).
In other events, I am finally done with my first quarter of college. Finals ended on Friday. I think I did okay, although I think I’ll also be entertaining a few C+’s for this quarter. Ah well.
Seasons greetings!
