At 6:23 pm PT, the effects of the partial eclipse were clearly visible in the tree shadow on our driveway. (And the shadow looked blurry in person, too.)

My husband and I decided that this evening we’d make of  our occasional excursions for a meal at In’N'Out (not directly relevant for the story, but I just had to toss off the mention for those of you who suffer from In’N'Out envy), but we took some time before we left to take a look at the shadows in our driveway.

Took a bit of fiddling to get the right angle and reduce the jiggling.

We were off the main track of the eclipse, so all we got was a partial instead of the annular eclipse visible further east of us. But that was enough to entirely change the ambient light. Sunset tonight isn’t until 8:15, but at 6:15 this evening the light looked as though the sun was right at the horizon, about to set. Not quite as weird as the partial eclipse I saw back in 1970, when at mid-day in a cloudless sky, the light was comparable to a solidly overcast day, but definitely out of the ordinary.

Dave got out his binoculars (he’s a physics and astronomy guy, so he’s usually ready for science-y opportunities like this) and held them up so the sun could shine through them onto his shadow on the driveway. It took a couple of minutes to find the right angle and steady his grasp enough so that the sliver of sunlight was clearly visible:

Got it!

Then when we got to the In’N'Out, the tree shadows in their parking lot were even better:

Tree shadows in the parking lot at 6:35 pm.

A few random thoughts prompted by responses I’ve received to my recent posts:

• When I first got involved with USFA, I didn’t much question the general culture—at least, within the fencing circles (BC, TC, the board) I frequented—of confidentiality and discretion. The longer I’ve been at it, though, the more I’ve come to wonder how much sense it really makes. The USFA is, after all, a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation subject to fairly substantial public disclosure requirements. I’m not sure how much this “discretion” is deliberately cultivated, partly due to fear of people misinterpreting works-in-progress or to discomfort with messy democracy, and how much is due to procrastination or preoccupation leading to late or non-existent announcements of meetings or discussions. This aversion to fully open discussion often leads to members or specific member subgroups feeling blindsided by policies that seem to appear suddenly out of nowhere. We would be better served in the long run by developing more habits of openness.

• If a tune stuck endlessly in your head is an earworm, what is an idea that keeps haunting your brain—a mindworm? That quest for the source of the “premature distribution” of the USOC audit report draft keeps nagging at me. A commenter who works in the Department of Defense says it makes her think of something she learned from working there:

In no case shall information be classified in order to:

1. conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
2. prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
3. restrain competition; or
4. prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

I’m pretty sure that our draft audit report has neither competitive nor national security implications, but both #1 and #2 seem potentially relevant. Perhaps I’m just dense, but I haven’t yet managed to think of legitimate reasons for its confidentiality, even in draft form.

• During my brief tenure as chair of what was then the ROC Advisory Group, I decided it would be good to know more about our target market for the ROC tournaments and asked the national office staff how many USFA competitive members had never fenced in a national tournament. That was pre-Railstation, when the database on the old AS/400 was, shall we say, limited. Other than comparing NAC and SN entry lists by hand with the membership list, there was no way to extract those numbers.

Now with Railstation, we’ve got a database we can actually query and use to help determine what we do: How many members fence only locally? Regionally? Nationally? How much crossover do we still have across which weapons? Which age-levels tend to fence up? Up how many levels? We’ve got the ability now to look at our demographics and tailor our competitive offerings to who our fencers are now instead of who they were 15 or more years ago. We could eventually even figure out how to build adapting to our demographics into our structure, how to make it the continuous process it should be.

• Other than this week’s posts and those about Summer Nationals, my most popular blog posts were the “Officials’ Cuisine” series from November 2010, when I posted photos of the lunches provided to tournament officials early in the season during which payment of honoraria, per diems, and out-of-pocket expenses were delayed until the following August. I am not often an angry person, but that weekend I was livid. Here was a group of individuals who, despite knowing that they would not be paid or even have their expenses covered for nearly a full year, still arranged vacation days from their real-world jobs and finagled their finances to carry the expenses they would incur (essentially granting the USFA several dozen small interest-free personal loans) for as much as a year, in order to travel to work long hours on concrete floors being yelled at by fencers and coaches and parents, because they were unwilling to let the fencers down. The lunches provided to officials that weekend spoke not just of a fundamental disrespect, but of an outright contempt for the volunteers who make USFA tournaments happen.

There was a big stink, of course, and eventually a promise of no more than one day of cold lunches during each future NAC. This season has been somewhat better: (Most) officials are paid their honoraria and per diems on the last day of each national tournament, though out-of-pocket expenses such as bag fees and ground transportation are paid later as funds become available. My last expense check, for example, came in late February and covered my out-of-pocket expenses for October through December.

(For those who are unfamiliar with USFA’s pay scales for officials, everybody gets a $20 per diem for each travel and work day, and an honorarium for each work day. The honoraria vary according to the category of the official: Referee honoraria range from $20 to $100 according to rating, BC staff uniformly get $75, armorers have their own pay scale, and I believe the trainers get an amount in the same general range, though it’s only a fraction of their normal professional compensation for such work. Nobody’s into officiating at national tournaments for the big bucks.)

For years I, along with other BC and FOC folk, have warned that we’re not developing and retaining enough officials to keep up with the growth in our entry numbers. (Even though we develop 4 or 5 new BC trainees each season, that’s only enough to keep up with the normal losses due to family and work obligations.) As soon as we start paying reliably again, we’re told, that problem will disappear, as though the money is the only motivator. Sure, the delayed payments are an issue, as are the often-brutal working conditions, but I’m convinced that morale is a huge factor in our volunteer attrition. There is a limit to the number of times most are willing to search for the cheapest available fare only to see it rise by $100, $200, or more, before it is approved by the national office for booking (I’m told this is also a problem for international referees), or to wonder why national office staff routinely get single rooms while volunteers must share, or to see the expenditures for meetings such as that Tournament Summit completely wasted. Even if the flights and rooms are value-in-kind or comped, those are still resources that could have been used to better effect. Eventually, some officials simply can’t stand to watch the continuing losses attributable to carelessness, inattention, or sloppy controls any longer, while others conclude—however erroneously—that the financial situation must not really be so bad after all.

My favorite stupid expense is a relatively small one from a couple of years ago, when the national office sent a carton of copier paper from Colorado Springs to wherever the tournament was that weekend; as I recall, the shipping charge was something like $246.

That’s demoralizing.

• Finally, I’d like to commend to you for your listening pleasure the monthly conference calls of the USFA board of directors. Those of us on the west coast have a major advantage because for us the calls begin at 6:00 pm and we’ve still got part of our evening left by the time they end, usually somewhere 9:00ish. But if you’ve got the stamina, these calls offer drama rather like that of an old episodic radio soap opera: long stretches of recapitulation of previous episodes leavened occasionally with melodramatic new developments. Consider a portion of last month’s call, when during the financial report, the Mssrs. Clements, Glon, Schiller, and I think Becker inquired into some of the expense line items. Somehow the questions moved into a discussion of the number of national office staff assigned to attend the Olympic Games in London—5, when we’ve rarely if ever sent any office staff at all to the Games—and why so many are to be sent when our financial situation is so dire. (The following is only a paraphrase; I did not record the call nor take stenographic notes.)

Mr. Glon: I would like, please, to know the names of the staff members who will be going to London and what function or job each one will perform.

Mr. Dilworth: Are you trying to micromanage me, Wes?

[Eruption of multiple voices, indecipherable.]

Mr. Dilworth: Hmm. I appear not to have that list on this computer.

[More voices.]

[Eventually] Ms. Weeks: All right, Mr. Dilworth will email a list of the staff members and their functions at the Games to the board by 9:00 am tomorrow morning.

[Discussion moves on.]

Usually sometime during the later stages of such calls, I start fantasizing about the coming attractions for the next month’s call. Imagine the radio announcer, a mellifluous baritone, or maybe William Conrad in his best Rocky and Bullwinkle voice:

“Don’t miss our next exciting episode! Will the inquisitors get the answers to their questions? Will the board receive copies of that mysterious list by 9:oo am? Will there be enough Olympic credentials for everyone who expects one? Who will do the regular jobs of the staff members going to London? Will the hidden boundary between micromanagement and due diligence ever be revealed? Tune in next month to find out!”

(Listening in on board calls can have weird effects.)

But now I’ve got a ton of TC work to catch up on, and SN’s creeping up on us sooner than I’m ready to think.

If you’re an eligible USFA voter, please perform your own due diligence and be sure to vote next week.

See you in Anaheim.

When I posted what was essentially a public scream, a last-gasp attempt to focus some attention on a few major continuing problems I felt were not being addressed  within the USFA, I expected it to be read by a few dozen people, perhaps even a few score. I had no great hope of provoking much of anything, but I knew I had to try before I could consider walking away.

I’m blown away by the many kind notes and comments and by the sheer number of visitors my broadside attracted to my sleepy little blog. My final hit count for May 13, 2012 ended up at 978, with 577 referrals from Facebook, 55 from fencing.net, 44 from Tim Morehouse’s blog, and the rest apparently from email referrals as readers circulated the link to others. That’s nearly triple my previous single-day high, from one day of the 2010 Summer Nationals.

I’m pretty sure that’s more than the total number of voters in the last USFA election.

No, I’m not going to tell you who to vote for.

I’ve never been a fan of the throw-the-bums-out approach. But neither am I a fan of uncritically voting a party line.

All I ask is that you think about what you want for the USFA and then look carefully and critically at the candidates. Look past the generic make-everything-better statements for the specifics of what they want to achieve: Do they think the USFA is on the right track? Are they asking the right questions? Do they know enough about how the USFA works (or doesn’t) to even know what to ask? If you don’t see the answers in their statements on the USFA candidate page or their linked material, ask them directly. Most of them provide an email address or are on Facebook—ask them for their answers and ideas. Figure out who will take us in the direction you think we need to go, and then VOTE FOR THEM. (Balloting opens May 18 and ends on June 1.)

I’ve spent too many post-tournament dinners with BC staff and referees and coaches, having heated discussions reinventing the USFA, figuring out what we would do if we could run the world. That was fun, once, when we had some small hope that we could make some of it happen. But those conversations have been too much the same for too many years now, too little grounded in the current reality of the USFA, too frustrating to contemplate any longer.

If we could recreate some of that sense of possibility…

I do love running national fencing tournaments. Thanks for the little flicker of hope.

This is me having fun.

Next thing I knew, I was working more tournaments than the girls were competing in. Within a couple of years, I wasn’t just helping with data entry—I was running competitions and then entire tournaments, assigning strips and BC staff, and dealing with questions and problems from fencers, coaches, parents, referees, and spectators. I discovered that I love running huge fencing tournaments—the bigger, the better. I love the combination of detailed and big-picture focus required to chair a tournament. I love watching the interpersonal dynamics: fencers & referees, fencers & parents, parents & officials, coaches & officials, officials & officials. I love watching fencers work their way through an elimination tableau, managing their intensity and stamina to keep winning all the way to the gold. I love watching fencers cope with disappointment and frustration to keep coming back and trying again.

my typical concrete playground

I’ve never been one for resort-type vacations, the kind where you sit on the beach and relax in the sun. Masochist I may be, but give me the 15-hour days within concrete walls, listening to the whines of scoring boxes and the screams of Cadet saber girls. Give me the parents who haven’t yet learned that it’s their kids who are fencing and not them. Give me the coaches who believe I’ve deliberately assigned their fencers as far from each other as possible within the venue. Give me the referees who never seem to learn that they should eat lunch when they’re told they should eat or they may never get another chance. Give me the generically awful concession food, the kids who roll their eyes at their overprotective parents, and the cranky and charming veterans. Give me the fencers tickled out of their minds to have won their first DE and those for whom winning gold medals has become almost routine. Give me the ten days of chaos and 6,500 7,000+ entries that is Summer Nationals and let me play.

I love running huge fencing tournaments.

the bigger, the better

So why am I ready to walk away from fencing?

_________________

One of the first—and most important—concepts we teach new BC trainees is “You will make mistakes.” Everyone involved in fencing learns this: fencers choose wrong actions, referees blow calls, BC staff mis-transcribe scores or names. What is crucial is what happens next—do we learn from our mistakes to prevent them from happening again? On the BC stage, that means we figure out how the error happened, and do what it takes to minimize the chances that it will happen again—refocus attention, improve staff training, alter our procedures, and if it comes to that, change personnel. Our mistakes, if they are unavoidable, should be brand new mistakes we’ve never made before.

Some of my tournament peeps
(l. to r., seated: Wayne, Other Rich, Nancy, Carla; standing: Marc, Irena, me, Coffee-Joe, Linda, Rich, Tanya, Brandon)

For several reasons, we are not learning: the United States Fencing Association is making the same mistakes it’s made for the past two Olympic quadrennials. A couple of weeks ago (courtesy of Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words), I came across the perfect word to describe USFA’s current straits: “omnishambles.” Apparently gleefully in vogue to describe British politics, it is a combination of tragedy and farce in politics, encapsulating “serial misjudgments and misadventures.”

Among fencing’s omnishambolic aspects:

• USFA members often receive incorrect information from national office staff who neither know nor consult the appropriate rules and policies before answering questions from members. Avoidable errors in the processing and updating of tournament entries have caused event delays of 10–30 minutes at every national tournament this season. Confusion and misunderstandings about travel and hotel arrangements for officials have also been common. As noted in the draft USOC audit report (and not specifically addressed in the executive director’s April 26 report to the board), 24 individuals have left positions in the national office since 2008; the staff of the international department alone has turned over completely twice in the past two years. Such rapid turnover certainly helps to explain the staff confusion about fencing policies and procedures, but what explains this number of departures from a staff of only 13 or 14 individuals?

• Others can speak more authoritatively about USFA finances, but I cannot help but wonder at the sloppy controls noted in the USOC audit report draft: after the USFA financial debacle of 2008, how is it that our accounting procedures are anything less than squeaky clean?

(And while we’re on the topic, I can imagine an executive director who, on receipt of a USOC audit report draft, might share it with the full board, explaining what it says, where he thinks it’s wrong, and what revisions he’ll recommend to the USOC for the final version. But that’s not the ED we have. And I can imagine a board less concerned with the “premature distribution” of a document marked neither “confidential” nor “not for public distribution,” and more concerned with the substance of its content and the frustration that led to its public release. But that’s not the board we have.)

• The bulk of the work developing USFA policies is done—in theory—by various committees appointed by the board. In practice, the four “standing committees of the board,” six “additional principal committees,” six more “committees of the board,” and four “task forces” comprise an ungainly, labyrinthine governance structure, suffering from murky delineations of responsibility, diffused authority, difficult communications, and a notable lack of direction.

Consider one relatively simple example: determination of the national tournament calendar. Let’s see—that’s to do with domestic national tournaments, so obviously that should be determined by the Tournament Committee (an “additional principal committee”). But wait, there are other interested groups, too: the National Team Oversight Committee is concerned on behalf of the high performance director, the national coaches, and the elite programs; the Athlete Council has an interest, obviously; other groups (the ROC Committee, the Youth Development Committee, the Veterans Committee) have regional calendars dependent on and potentially affected by the national calendar. Now, of course, we have the recently created Tournament Oversight Committee, composed mainly of the chairs of most of these other committees, to help coordinate matters.

So whose job is it to take the lead on creating a future season’s calendar? The TC could start, but would end up needing to get input from the NTOC. How do we do that? We committee chairs don’t get a directory with emails and phone numbers for all these committee chairs, so we’ve got to start with tracking down contact information. If our calls don’t get returned or emails answered, we might decide to talk with the appropriate people at the next NAC (if we happen to see them and if they’re not in the middle of fencing or coaching or refereeing or running an event). Or maybe we have a nice chat, and the chair promises to consult with her committee and get back within the next couple of weeks. Or maybe it’s the TOC’s job to coordinate proposals? Who’s in charge here?

The next thing you know, it’s already April and everybody’s in panic mode because there’s no calendar yet for next season, and it needs to be decided right now so it can be posted to the website within the next couple of days, and suddenly there’s a proposal floating around which the committees only just found out existed, and oops, I guess we’ve got to go with this one because we don’t have the time any longer to consider all the ramifications more thoroughly, so whatever the problems with it, this is what we’re stuck with for next year. (But we’ll fix it for the season after next—we’ve got plenty of time to start thinking about it now.)

Apply the same process for qualification paths, classifications, team selection, and other policies as needed. Repeat annually.

Last August, I was cautiously optimistic that we could break this pattern when I was among a group—tournament-related committee chairs, as well as a few board members and national office staff—invited to come to a weekend-long “Tournament Summit” in Colorado Springs to work out a competition plan for the coming Olympic quadrennial. Then I saw the agenda—we were to start by identifying problems; developing solutions was not on the schedule. During a morning break on the first day, one of the board members mentioned that he’d been to a similar meeting four years earlier. “Nothing happened after that one, either,” he said. At the end of our weekend, the executive director gave a nice pep talk about what a good start we’d made and promised that he would send out the notes from our discussions to us within the week. He has yet to do so.

• Finally, there is our board of directors, which utterly baffles me. I’ve worked with most of these individuals at tournaments for years; I consider many of them friends. Individually, they are energetic and accomplished people—coaches, club owners, athletes, successful professionals in non-fencing businesses. As a governing entity, though, the board meanders unpredictably between ridiculously detailed micromanagement (such as 45 minutes in February spent discussing whether the automatic award of classifications to members of national championship teams should be discontinued) and unwillingness to exercise appropriate oversight of USFA operations (as in “we cannot micromanage office personnel”).

Watching board meetings is painful. Some parts are routine: approving the minutes, accepting committee reports, complaining about financial reports getting to the board too late to allow for thorough review before the meeting, hearing the executive director say, “I don’t know; I’ll have to look into that and get back to you,” especially disconcerting in regard to budget line items.

The Strategic Plan is much admired—by the board, at least. But without effective leadership and mechanisms for achieving its goals and objectives, it’s just a wish list, a long, comprehensive, intimidating wish list. Every so often I look at this part, relevant to my work on the TC:

USA FENCING STRATEGIC PLAN

Goal 4: Enhance and grow the sport
• Strategy 2: Review and refine tournament purposes and program structures.

• Objective 1: By April 1, 2012, have an approved plan for tournaments at all levels for the 2012-2016 quad. Proposed schedule to accomplish this objective:

• September: Create a Tournament Oversight Task Force (TOTF) and sub- task forces for Local, Regional, Sub-National (SYC, ROC), National events and ranking/ratings. Each task force and sub-task force must have deadlines and a specific set of objectives to complete.
• October: Formulate questions for committee and membership surveys and research.
• November: Go live with surveys.
• December: Formulate proposals based on research and survey results.
  Disseminate proposals to committees and general membership.
• January: TOTF to provide final report for BOD including recommendations.
• February: Present to BOD.
• March: Vote on strategic tournament plan for 2012-2016 quad.

Ambitious and worthy objectives. They sound a lot like what the TC was originally meant to do, and quite a bit like what that Tournament Summit last August was intended to work on. I’m even a bit sad that the TOTF isn’t on the current task force list—it would have made a nice addition to the committee alphabet soup, fitting in well with the TC, the NTOC, and the TOC. That strategic tournament plan for the new quad might well have been a good thing to have done, too.

Our whole governance structure seems to be best at creating committees and making lists, but we’re not good at all with the follow-through, with the accountability. What we’re missing is leadership.

And that missing leadership is why I’m going to need a lot of persuasion to vote for any incumbents at all in this year’s USFA board elections. I’ve worked through the established channels. I’ve talked with national office staff and management and with elected board members about the problems that plague us, and I’ve seen no improvement. Going public is the one option I’ve not yet tried.

I wish I could say that I am alone in my frustration, but I am not. It is not my place, however, to speak for the other volunteers who’ve reached the same point I have, where we’re ready to walk away from the tournaments and the sport we love. They must speak for themselves.

Elvis has left the building.

On the other hand, it’s an easy tournament to work—the events are large, but there aren’t that many each day. On the other other hand, there’s always the board meeting at JOs, which this year met both Saturday and Sunday evenings. By the time the board finished its last agenda item at 11:35 Sunday night, I was the only spectator left. (I’m told that the executive session that followed lasted another hour or so after that.)

• Fencing Time is coming along, and we’re getting used to it. I’ve become accustomed enough to using the Bout ID to find bouts in the tables now that I don’t need the bracket/bout number combination I used to rely on in XSeed. (But it’s still nice having lots of options for finding things.

• We discovered that the framing of the ad section on the fencing results website took over the entire screen on iOS and some other mobile devices when zoomed. (That’s now been fixed.)

• I was disappointed I wasn’t able to get to Squatters or one of the other brewpubs in Salt Lake. In the pre-Winter Olympics days decades ago when I lived in Utah, one could not buy alcohol easily in restaurants and I was looking forward to seeing more cosmopolitan dining. But between attending the board meeting sessions and working my events, I wasn’t able to get out much for evening meals. Oh, well–maybe next time.

• The Salt Palace turned out to be a smaller variation on the Georgia World Congress Center–a short walk from the hotel, followed by a long, long walk inside to get to the farthest possible hall at the other end of the building. But the walk back and forth inspired me to begin a collection I’ve considered starting for years—Convention Center Carpet Patterns:

For years I’ve marveled at the complicated multicolored carpet patterns to be found in public spaces. I assume the garish mix of colors and abstract designs are meant to minimize the visibility of debris and deterioration, and I’m always curious how such patterns would look in smaller spaces. None are anything I’d like to see in a residential eating space, that’s for sure.

Can’t wait to see what new visions in carpet await in Cincinnati.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1IMM5XOwaM

Much as I hate to see anyone need to take a medical withdrawal, it was nice that one happened on Sunday—it allowed us to verify that Dan’s overnight fix had corrected the bug from Saturday.

Sunday also gave us another example of the advantages of separately posting pool results and tableau. Someone in the Division I Women’s Saber event (why, I wonder, were most of the problems in Portland in saber?) came to us, wondering why it appeared that 83 fencers were promoted to DEs when the format sheet said that only 77 would be promoted. That’s how we caught that operator error, where the DE round was set to the default 80% promotion rate instead of the 75% it should have been. A quick and easy fix, but one we don’t want to have to do at SN.

The most remarkable part of Monday was that I was able to start releasing strips to the armorers for teardown by about 1:30 pm. It used to be routine for teardown to begin (or for the fencing to end) that early, but it’s been years since that was possible. Our strip layout was odd and awkward for a number of reasons (the armorers even stashed some replacement equipment under the BC stage so that it would be more accessible than it was from their armory in the far corner), but it was a great layout for teardown. The first section released (pods A–E) was far enough from where the fencing continued that the teardown process was barely noticeable, and by the time I released the back section (pods H–K), fencing was down to only the replay pod (G) and the finals strip.

Our 3D Tetris is easier than it was when this photo was taken in March 2011.

We’re getting better at packing up the BC crate, too. We paged some armorers to help get the server case into the crate—it’s astonishing how much easier it is for six people than just three to lift that sucker over the side of the crate. And once we got the server into the crate, the 3-dimensional game of Tetris that is making all our bins and boxes fit went much more quickly and easily than in the past. After congratulating ourselves on our cleverness, we realized that the improvement was mostly due to the reduction in the number of boxes from registration that we had to include—apparently, J.R. and Joe [Sibley—known familiarly among BC types as "Office Joe" to distinguish him from our Joe Salisbury, aka Coffee-Joe] had pared what they ship from one event to the next.

Joe sent me the stats for the live results over the weekend. We had a bit under 7,000 unique visitors, who each averaged 2.46 visits. Joe had set the server bandwidth to his normal default, and both he and Dan and a couple of other tech geeks reacted to the “bandwidth exceeded” message that popped up on Saturday with “Cool!” Joe says we used in a day and a half what is usually a full month’s usage for most of his clients. He bumped up the capacity an order of magnitude or so, so there were no further bandwidth issues.

But we’ve definitely got a hit with the live results.

Update [1/21/12, 10:43 pm]: Joe (that would be Salisbury) suggests I should have mentioned—because it was such a nice big number—that the total  page views on the results site as of the morning of January 18 was 105,794, and that there were visitors from more than 60 countries. He’s right—I should have.

The Foucault pendulum in the lobby of the Oregon Convention Center is one of the prettiest I've ever seen, but I never did figure out how the disks reset through the day.

Saturday turned out to be just as interesting as Friday was.

We began to be more comfortable with the new look of all the paper we were working with. FT is flexible about how you can print everything—we can have pods and/or quadrants and/or page numbers and/or table brackets and/or a unique bout ID number with or without an accompanying barcode on the DE bout slips. We experimented a bit with the placement of all these items to get the most helpful combination, so that everyone could use whichever bit worked best for them.

XSeed’s unique identifier is the fencer number, derived from the alphabetical list of everyone entered in the entire tournament. It took most of a day for those of us working the table side to quit having to slap our hands to stop our automatic search back up the tableau to find that fencer number we no longer needed to worry about, and a bit longer not to feel like we were forgetting something by writing only the fencer’s name on the slip.

We discovered one advantage to FT’s use of the unique bout ID when someone inadvertently handed a stack of bout slips to the wrong computer operator, who didn’t notice that they weren’t for her event before she entered them. She scanned the barcodes, which pulled up the proper bouts in the proper event, and they were all entered properly into the correct event without her having to switch from the event she’d been working in. We just have to be careful that the bout slips all end up in the correct physical folders.

Another cool thing is that FT lets you print whatever range of the tableau you want. So if we’re stopping at the 16 to move to the replay pod, we can print the tableau only up to that point, and then print out a new one from the 16. This will be handy for SN—when BC table space is at a premium, we can switch to smaller tableaux as events fence down from their original four or eight pages.

During the turn of the Division I Men’s Saber, we discovered a fairly serious bug in FencingTime (which was also a perfect illustration of why we prefer to post the pool results and the DE tableau separately). James Williams came to the BC table to complain that even though he’d won all his pool bouts, his win percentage showed on the round results as .83. It turned out that there had been a medical withdrawal from the pool before it was completed, which means that all of that fencer’s bouts are thrown out. FT did that, but when it calculated the pool results, it still figured it was a pool of 7 instead of 6. Not only was James’s win percentage wrong, but so was that of everyone in the pool except the poor guy with no wins. Dan and Joe figured out a workaround for the problem, so we could continue the event—there was only about half an hour’s delay dealing with it—and Dan added it to the ever-lengthening to-do list in his FT notebook.

The bug didn’t seem to do James any damage, though—he went on to take the gold medal. (We BC folk aren’t supposed to play favorites, but since James started fencing at the same club my daughters did, I can’t help but be pleased when he does so well.)

Late night, unfortunately. As is usually the case, the concession food we could get with our vouchers wasn’t nearly as good as what we’d had for lunch.

As I set up my own computer at the BC stage, a couple of A/V techs were just finishing setting up a speaker line for us, so we would be able to play the national anthem over the PA system. We’ve had an mp3 of the anthem on the tournament computers for years, but just holding the microphone to the computer’s speaker doesn’t work, so we’ve had to skip the anthem when there was no live singer. Inevitably, though, we never got to use the speaker line—the Portland local volunteers had arranged singers for every day of the tournament.

The folks out at registration discovered a small bug in FT— the first scan of the membership bar code brings up the fencer and a second scan checks the fencer in. Dan had apparently intended for the first scan to bring up the fencer name but had planned that the second step—checking the fencer in for that event—would be done with a mouse click on a screen checkbox. The double scan was far more convenient, so it was immediately reclassified as a feature.

The big advantage to the FT check-in function is that it’s a live check-in on the network, so that the current information is accessible from the computers within the venue. Once we reach close of registration, we don’t have to wait for the printed list of no-shows to be brought in from registration—we can print it directly right there at the stage. Even better, any club changes or other corrections made out at registration go directly into the database, so that we don’t have to wait for them to be entered into the computer before we can start the event.

Because of this new version of FT, though, we were all slower getting events started and running. The computer operators (even those who were familiar with earlier versions of FT) were working with unfamiliar screens, with a different order for setting event formats, and the printed pages looked different from what XSeed gave us. That’s one of the reasons January was picked for FT’s first full run—with only three events each day, any problems wouldn’t be likely to affect the overall schedule much, and we’d be able to adapt our work flow appropriately.

One major difference between XSeed and FT is that in XSeed, you set up the event format for all rounds at the beginning. FT asks you at the beginning of each round what the format for that round will be, which is great if you want the flexibility to suddenly opt for a second pool round or repechage or fencing out 16 to all places. For us, that’s an unnecessary opportunity for operator error—in a tournament like January’s, where the Division I events have a 75% promotion rate from the pools instead of the more common 80%, it’s all too easy for the computer operator to simply hit the default selection. It would not be (and was not, in fact, when it happened) a big problem in Portland, but could be disastrous at SN or one of the NACs with multiple age-levels of Veteran or Youth events. So Joe’s asked Dan for a configuration function, with which the computer lead could set all the formats in advance.

Another FT change from XSeed, which required us to change our process, is the ability to include the strip assignments on all the sheets we print. So instead of printing out all the pool sheets and then writing the strip numbers by hand, we give the strip assignments to the computer operator before printing. The only trick with this is, in events with lots of pools of 6 and 7, to be sure to distribute the uneven pools among the available strips so that the 7s have the option of double-stripping on adjacent strips once the 6s are finished.

So eventually—in better-than-average time—the pools went out, the pools came back, the DEs went out, the afternoon event started—and then we got to the really fun part of the day. We’d already had quite a few people come tell us how much more legible they thought the FT printouts were, but we hadn’t yet made public the next logical step.

Joe had created a QR code and sent it to me a couple of weeks earlier, and my immediate reaction was that we should tell people about what was coming right then. Calmer heads prevailed, though, with the idea that we should make sure it all worked right before we went public. So I’d satisfied myself with making the signs to post as soon as we were ready, and once in Portland waited all through Friday morning for Joe to give the word.

Once we were well into DEs and knew all the rounds were functioning the way they were supposed to, Joe gave the OK, and I grabbed the signs I’d copied the day before and posted them on the bulletin boards and around the BC table.

Finally!

Once the signs were posted, I sat and watched to see how people reacted to LIVE RESULTS! at a USA Fencing national tournament.

The reaction didn’t take long. Tanya even received three or four approving emails within the first few minutes after we went public.  We got positive responses all weekend, of course, and though it was difficult to tell because the venue was one of those rooms that never seemed crowded even when it was full, it looked as though a substantial percentage of fencers had realized they could find their strip assignments using their smartphones, so the bulletin boards never seemed quite as jammed as in the past. A few coaches and parents joked that it just wasn’t right that their at-home spouse knew how their kids placed before they did.

There was that one guy, though, who looked at the sign on the bulletin board, took out his iPhone, and proceeded to take pictures of the posted sheets. But we took pity and showed him he could find much more information without using the camera at all.

A great day for flying up to Portland—all too often, there's too much cloud cover for this view.

I expected this would be an interesting NAC—in every sense of that adjective!—and I was not disappointed in that expectation.

Even if there had been nothing else going on, I would have been disoriented for this NAC, just because I’m so used to needing to get up at 2:30 or 3:00 am to get to the airport in time for an early morning flight with at least one layover to get me to the venue early enough for setup. I always use the lack of real sleep and the time zone change to put myself into Tournament Time—that weird actual-time-doesn’t-matter state necessary for running national events. A lunch-time flight in my home time zone with no layover just doesn’t seem like a real fencing trip.

My daughter got the real fencing travel this time—she had a layover at O’Hare, and the hour her plane sat sitting through two gate changes before it could unload made her miss her connection. But she was first on the standby list for the next flight, so even with the delay, she still made it to Portland in plenty of time for dinner.

Setup for me was relatively painless—all the scoring boxes were set up in plenty of time to get the strip numbers up on Thursday, and everything—bulletin boards, copier, all our supplies—were in place fairly early on.

The process was a bit more involved on the computer side, because this was a momentous NAC for us: since the contract with Dan was signed last summer, FencingTime had met all the intermediate tests, so Portland would be the first national tournament where we would be running FencingTime. While we had XSeed available to open up as a backup if it turned out to be necessary, we would not be using it to shadow FencingTime in real time.

So the little netbooks we use for check-in had to have the new software installed, as did the tournament laptops, and Joe had to make sure the server was configured and the network set up properly. And, as always, Carla and Tanya had to find and correct problems with the event seeding, especially in the Division I events, with their more complicated seeding rules. All in all, though, considering the amount of work we had to do, our 7:00 pm setup finish time was pretty good, and we were as ready as we could expect to be for dealing with whatever glitches and bugs and workflow changes we’d face in the morning.

Of course, that morning would come awfully early—because of the new check-in process with FencingTime, we—Tanya, me, Joe, and the rest of the morning computer staff, would need to be at the venue by 6:50 am. So we arranged to meet for breakfast at 6:00, so we could catch the train early enough to be at the convention center in time.