Well, I would hope that, in general, collegiate
(and masters level) quiz bowl players are mature
enough to know that tournament officials (a) do make
mistakes and (b) aren't out to get them. Thus, problems
can and should be resolved without resorting to foul
language.
But in general, I've noticed a string of
these kinds of problems lately: namely, tournament
officials miscalculating somebody's W/L record, etc. This
seems correlated with the rise of fancy computer
programs used during the tournaments to do stats. Back in
my days as a tournament director (he says,
reminiscing about the Bronze Age), I compiled W/L records
during the tournament _by hand_ on some master sheet or
blackboard, usually while I was also moderating in one room.
I never made a mistake. If teams were tied and a
points tiebreaker needed to be used, I took five minutes
with a calculator and looked through the scoresheets
of the teams involved.
So, in our zeal to
have "real time" all-star stats and that sort of
thing, and to use the latest fancy stat programs, have
we lost sight of what's really important, namely
100% accurate won-lost record keeping?
Doug