Stats for this tournament have been uploaded. Requests for corrections can be emailed to me at
[email protected]. As has been mentioned, in the Competitive Division, Hunter A defeated High Tech A to claim the championship. Wilmington Charter took third place. In the Standard Division, High Tech C defeated Darien C to claim first place; Western Lehigh came in third. All teams in the Championship bracket of the Competitive division (Hunter A, High Tech A, Wilmington Charter, St. Joseph A, Princeton A, Darien A) earn bids to HSNCT, as well as the top team in Consolation 1. Both Trinity A and East Brunswick A finished with the same record in their afternoon matches, so it is possible that they will
both receive bids, but that determination is ultimately up to NAQT. I believe that in addition to the teams that earned bids to HSNCT, Henderson A, Kellenberg A, and West Egg will also
receive bids to the NSC.
jonpin wrote:Further posts should instead ask why Princeton continues to do things like: not have printed schedules ready on Saturday morning, take an hour-plus break for lunch and then still need nearly an hour for rebracketing two rounds later, have the championship division in another building but then come back to the main building to sit around for who-knows-how-long before finals, and so forth.
I think one of the reasons these problems have persisted for so long in our program is that we have no form of institutional memory; what lessons each generation of leadership has learned about what works and what doesn’t is only passed down verbally (if at all), and quickly becomes lost or forgotten. Because of this, the same mistakes are repeated and the format and organization of PHSAT vary from year to year, usually resulting in a tournament of lower-than-expected quality. For what it’s worth, my co-president and I are doing our best to rectify this. Over the past year we’ve been working on compiling a guide to be passed on to future leadership with tips and information on how to more effectively run our team—and you can be sure that the section on PHSAT will include things like making it explicitly clear to staffers the exact place they should be putting old packets and scoresheets after each round to prevent disarray, running the Standard and Competitive divisions entirely separate from one another with their own TDs to relieve the administrative burden, retaining a staffer who is solely dedicated to ensuring stats are kept up to date after each round so that rebracketing and finals can be determined in a timely manner, etc. Obviously we can’t undo the things that already happened, but at least we can try to make sure that they won’t happen again.
jonpin wrote:not have printed schedules ready on Saturday morning
Although the schedules were printed Friday, there were still 3-4 copies of the questions being printed off on Saturday morning, which was frankly even worse. To avoid paying our school $250 to make copies, we tried using our individual student printing quotas to get them, which was a huge mistake since some students couldn’t print theirs until the morning of the tournament, and trying to organize the packets diverted attention from other facets of the tournament and was a significant factor in kicking off the whole mess. Next year we will definitely be taking the $250 loss. (Ideally, though, we’d be able to read packets electronically, which would render the whole problem moot)
jonpin wrote:take an hour-plus break for lunch and then still need nearly an hour for rebracketing two rounds later
This is hugely annoying to many teams, and resulted from really bad planning on our part. Obviously it should not take that long to rebracket, but even so we should have just finished all 7 prelim rounds before breaking, even if it necessitated a late lunch. This would have mitigated the impact of slow-moving rooms, made the actual process of rebracketing quicker, eliminated the extra break, and allowed us to do individual awards after lunch so that there isn’t even a need for all the teams to reconvene following afternoon matches.
jonpin wrote:have the championship division in another building but then come back to the main building to sit around for who-knows-how-long before finals
This is another failure that came about through a combination of a lack of foresight and the snowballing of all the other problems that were going on. The original intent was for teams in that building to go straight into their finals without returning to the main building, but because I was trying to address problems in the main building I had one of our other staffers oversee the championship brackets and clearly failed to properly explain to both him and the teams involved how things should’ve proceeded, so that's another screw-up on my part.
jonpin wrote:and so forth.
I know there were many things that went wrong with this tournament, and I want to do my best to make sure they don’t happen again at Princeton or under my watch. Anyone with particular issues they would like to address and/or advice on how to improve our tournaments in the future should please feel free to post here or email me at
[email protected].