PB10 Comments

JonCoochBU · Mon, 29 Jan 2001 05:24:03 -0800

Now that the pain of watching my beloved G'Men
get pounded is waning, I can throw my two cents on
Penn Bowl into the collective fountain.

On the
whole, Samer and Penn put on a good event, and I commend
them for all the work they put it over the last few
months. Having been involved with running a 60+ team
tourney at last year's ICT, I can appreciate the amount
of planning that goes into such events.

As
has been said, the only major error made was the
misordering of packs, leaving Cornell and Wichita playing on
their own questions. That led to packs being read out
of order, which you can't really blame on anyone
because no matter what a TD does, packs will _almost
always_ be read out of order by someone. The size of the
field just magnified the problem that much more. While
the ultimate blame for this was on Samer, he admitted
it and no one begrudge him for it (things he did
well far outweighed things he didn't.)

I do
have a few complaints though. The layout of Williams
Hall is incredibly asanine. People should not have to
take an elevator to go one floor. Before lunch on
Sat., it took me 10 minutes to get from the ground
floor to the 3rd because the elevators were slow and,
upon trying to go up the stairs, I ended up on the
wrong side of the alarmed doors. Is there no other
building on Penn's campus that could accomodate PB? Here,
we're lucky to have our College of Arts and Sciences,
but surely there must be something easier to get
around in at Penn.

Second, what was the
motivation behind the index card rule? Why did we need to
have a code numbering system for teams and players,
when it still didn't result in indiv. stats being done
before the playoff meeting? It just struck me, as a
moderator, that many things were made far too complicated
and that it led to unnecessary problems and
confusion. As a friend of mine put it, it reeked of a
'Haitian election.'

My last comment is something
that's bothered me for the three PB's I've been at as
player and staff. Samer did a better job of including
more team's questions in play packs, but still did not
include some of everyone's. Speaking from personal
experience, BU has not had a question used in any of the last
three Penn Bowls, and this year our pack was even
rejected and sent back to us once before being accepted (I
think 1 or 2 were used in the backup pack, but it's
only by accident those saw the light of day.) To ask a
team to submit 72 questions and then tell them that
not one of them is usable is a slap in the
face.

Again, I thank Samer for what was another enjoyable trip
to Philly for BUCB. Nevertheless, either find a way
to get all teams hard work involved in play, or
start refunding part of the exorbitant entry fee to
teams whose questions are wasted year after
year.

Jon Cooch