Humble Beginnings
When I joined the district’s Fine Arts Department as an assistant to Diana Schumacher, the North East ISD Executive Director for Student Activities, one of my responsibilities was to coordinate UIL meets for our middle schools. Dr. Richard Middleton, the District Superintendent and the Associate Superintendent for Campus Support, Dr. Mark Scheffler, understand the importance of UIL and felt the promotion of the activity would be best served by creating an interest at the middle school level.
Diana and I had our work cut out for us. Starting any district-wide activity must include the support of administrators. We knew the starting of the UIL programs would rest upon the school principals motivating their staff to take on the challenges of a new activity. We eased any reservations they had by providing them with information about the activity and assuring them assistance with their programs.
The second challenge was finding outstanding individuals to become school coordinators. Once the principals were on board, they recruited teachers who had the organizational skills as well as the optimistic attitudes to encourage other teachers to participate.
The third challenge was figuring out how to actually host a meet. I had several years of experience running speech and debate tournaments for high school and middle schools but I had never run a UIL tournament before. We decided to start off small and offered only five events for our first practice meet. Several mistakes were made and the tournament ran severely behind schedule, but we survived. The second tournament ran much smoother and the awards ceremony was only a half an hour late. By the third tournament, we finally ran solidly on time and haven’t had a late tournament again.
Keys to Success
Last year’s tournaments were twice as big as the first year tournaments and ran like a welloiled machine. The achievements and success can be credited to a group effort. Here are a few tips for success in tournaments.
1. Seek promotional help from administrators. We were fortunate enough to have the leadership from our superintendent and associate superintendent, but the school principals had a major role in getting the students and teachers involved.
2. Work closely with the school coordinators. A good coordinator can make a world of difference. Our best coordinators are well organized, which lessens the workload for the event coaches. They also serve as cheerleaders by making sure the students’ successes are recognized by the entire school.
3. Encourage parent involvement. We have at least 50 parents helping with judging, hospitality and concessions. We have several parents who regularly attend tournaments because they enjoy the experience and appreciate the learning environment.
4. Plan ahead. Almost all of the mistakes we made were due to last minute planning. It is very easy to become complacent after running a couple of tournaments. After three years and 15 tournaments, I still find ways of forgetting things if I wait to the last minute. While my wife has finally convinced me to use a checklist for planning the meets, there is nothing better than a proper amount of preparation to lessen the effect of Murphy’s Law when running a tournament.
Our season is planned at the end of the previous year and is placed on the districtwide activity calendar. We try to avoid as many conflicts as possible when deciding the dates. The dates are becoming easier now that we are in our fourth year because we have consistently kept the same dates and are now becoming established. I also have found that sending out the entries one month prior to the tournament, with several reminders during the deadline period gets the best results. Last minute changes are inevitable but most of the changes will be minor if there is enough time to properly plan for the tournament.
5. Communicate the plan of action for running a tournament with the coaches and teachers. I cannot express how exceptional the group of teachers and parents are that regularly run our tournaments. We start off each tournament with a 30-minute staff meeting before the first events begin. We briefly go over proctoring, grading and judging procedures and request that people who do not have assignments help where they are needed. We explain all questions and problems should only be handled in the tab room. Test proctors and judges are told to pick up their material 15 minutes before the test. Unassigned coaches are put on standby. By communicating these instructions we eliminate late starts for rounds and tests.
6. Invite comments and criticism. The tournaments run smoothly today because of the numerous suggestions and comments from coaches, coordinators and parents. The tournaments are products of having an “open” policy towards constructive criticism and recommendations.
Mistakes have been made in the past and I’m sure they will be made in the future. The only thing a tournament administrator can do is to recognize when a mistake has been made, try to correct it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. By allowing everyone a voice in running the tournament, everyone feels ownership and is more understanding when a problem does occur.
7. Always look to improve the tournament. We are constantly looking to better the tournament. Spelling tests consumed a tremendous amount of people power to grade and were always the last events to be completed before our awards ceremony. Last year we changed the schedule and moved spelling to an earlier time slot and reduced the words list by half for the practice meets. The coaches felt the reduction of words would not affect the outcome and would still provide the students with a realistic practice for the district tournament. The decision also helped other events because we now had more help from graders who were normally busy grading the spelling tests.
8. Grow with the interest. The running of our tournaments is fairly routine at this point. We are now adding new events to our meets to encourage more interests. We held a Lincoln Douglas debate tournament during our district tournament last year and will introduce the social studies test this year. While LD debate is not currently an official UIL middle school event, we wanted to encourage this event because it is growing in popularity. We want to develop a strong feeder system for our high school UIL programs, which includes LD debate.
We held the preliminary rounds on Friday and incorporated the elimination rounds in our regular Saturday schedule. The event was very successful, so we have applied to the UIL council to consider making it an official event for sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
9. Reward and recognize as many people as possible. We started out recognizing only the top six students in each event and division. We now recognize the top ten students. We also recognize schools for increased participation. Some of our smaller schools have doubled the size of their entries so we make sure to congratulate them during our morning meetings and award ceremonies. NEISD also awards a Middle School Cup, equivalent to the UIL Lone Star Cup. The Cup has become a sought-after goal for students, coaches and administrators alike. The award is divided into a small and large school division and recognizes the schools’ athletic and academic successes together.