Simply put, Laird Lewis was amazing. When Geoff, Lucas, and I started planning this tournament, we pictured a few changes. What we came to see over time was that these few changes evolved into things that we could barely have thought possible. I can speak on behalf of Geoff and Lucas when I say that the past two days surpassed our wildest expectations.
We thanked a lot of people at awards, but one group we could not stress enough is the student volunteers. Without the volunteers, in both large roles and small, there would be no way the tournament could have been successfully run. I greatly appreciate the fact that students stayed on task and obeyed requests with great efficiency. Myers Park is the only high school in the state that has the manpower to run a two-day tournament as big as this one was, and I’m glad we proved it.
On that note, I wanted to take the time to thank a few specific people for their work that I observed. This list is in no way comprehensive, but merely a personal reflection of things I saw and heard throughout the tournament.
Merritt, Simon, David M. – Thanks for taking care of things efficiently, and for Merritt always being ready at the radio to answer questions.
Angelica – Thanks for always being flexible and for working really well with the ballot table in getting judges, from what I could see and hear.
Brian, Rasesh – Thanks for running. I think that says enough. Oh, and Brian for dancing. That was pretty tight.
Wesley, Kevin – Thanks for handling extemp draw and keeping an event that has the potential to have problems run very smoothly, not to mention successfully running our biggest event.
Elena – Thanks for handling celebrity judges so that it was one less thing everyone else had to worry about. From what I could tell we had an amazing range of people who really enjoyed the final rounds.
JD – Thanks for following requests without question and for doing anything and everything required of you. Mega thanks also for organizing the amazing-looking awards setup.
All of the cafeteria staff – Thanks for helping where it likely counted most: keeping the debaters happy by serving them good food.
Vicky, Hannah – Thanks for making sure the tab room stayed organized and that ballots were stuffed properly.
This list is definitely not comprehensive; there are so many other people who deserve thanks: Avantika, Lee, Amberli, Elizabeth S., the list goes on and on. Just know that if you seriously dedicated yourself to volunteering this weekend, which was almost always the case, that your work, regardless of how miniscule it may have seemed, truly had an impact on making the tournament great.
I know this sounds sort of sappy, but making this tournament succeed required a team effort, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that when every individual volunteer did his/her part, the whole tournament worked together like an anthill works with the commitment of individual ants.
So basically I’m saying thank you to all of you for being ants and for making the tournament an efficient anthill.
-Roshan Sadanani