Hi all!

This is only a Test Tournament to help your judges go in and practice going into each of their pool rooms, practice starting and entering ballots, and going into the rooms testing their video and mics.

This is also a place where your kids and you can go in and practice going into rooms and testing mics and cameras, and figuring out what is going on. They should test every possible device in any location that they may end up competing from in order to make this happen.

Coaches, you will be able to test using the squad room with your kids, and going into the coach room as well.

We had a much better weekend this weekend, but still ran into issues....we are almost there. I know many of you haven't attended an online tournament yet, and may not for awhile, but I still encourage you to get your kids on and have them do this. It may be on fall break for you, but all it takes is a bit.

This way you can also know if your kids aren't linked to tabroom properly and need to email tabroom to get that sorted out before tournaments start. You can also test your asynch speech uploads to ensure they are working properly.--Note--Google Drive files need to be viewable to anyone with a link and youtube do need to be public for that day of tournament.

The tournament will be open for one day: October 15 9am to 9pm. The rooms are only designed for 15 at a time....So get your kids to do in, check things, make sure they can hear and talk with others, and then go. Judges should go in, check that they can access ballots, click on links, view rooms, test their sound and video as well. 

If we have a lot of response I will set out times for each school to have their own time to test the rooms to be safe.

I know this is a struggle and I wish there was an easier way, however, I do promise that this works, and will work, if we can get these things sorted and tested out. We like Zoom--yes it has a lot more features and is what we are used to...but the cost of the system that uses zoom is very expensive and undoable. Using zoom rooms requires a lot of time breaking people out into rooms, and is unmanageable. Many very large tournaments are making this work and I know we can too, we come together and make it work!!!!

Be positive for your kids, help them to see the value of trying new things and figuring it out and keeping this activity alive. 

You can enter as many people into each event, enter judges into every category to try. Debate will show as a speech so that we can put everyone into one room right now. 

I will panel rounds that morning and they will be available all day to do.