Great Lakes Feis

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• Since the feis was the same weekend as Windsor, both feisanna shared musicians and adjudicators.
• Feisworx handled registration.
• Extra number cards were provided for the various Arts&Crafts competitions some of Clan Seger had entered.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Again, did they really have to open registrations in March when the feis was held in mid-August?
• As originally published, the syllabus had the wrong age splits for Prelim competitions. This had to be corrected on the fly during registration. In the committee's defense, no one at the NAFC apparently caught this mistake when their syllabus was submitted for approval last year.
• While there was a preregistration, you had to be staying downtown to get to it.

GRADE

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• Same age group on same stage scheduling all across the feis
• Four levels of Adult dancing (!)
• There was a perpetual trophy awarded to the Adult Open/Prizewinner dancer who placed the best in all his/her competitions. Scoring was done on the basis of your finish in each Open/PW competition, and used the same points system that is used to score Prelim and Open Champion dancers (first place in each competition was awarded 100 points, second place 75, third place 67, etc.).

WHAT WENT WRONG

• The one drawback to the Adult Perpetual Trophy competition was that if you were male and in adult Open/Prizewinner, you either had to learn a slip jig (a dance males are normally discouraged from doing in competition in the Midwest) or spot the rest of your competition 100 points
• Novice-level competitors had a Traditional Set competition. Open/Prizewinner level did not.

GRADE

WHAT WENT RIGHT

• They used the same floor plan as they did last year.
• Nice, big stages -- provided you weren't dancing three at a time (more on that below)
• Each stage had a table for the stage monitor. You knew exactly where to check in as a competitor, and the monitors had someplace to put their paperwork other than hands or floor. Why don't more feisanna do this?
• Even though there weren't signs at the Awards table, they were set up in front of their particular results sheets (Beginner, Advanced Beginner, etc.). After you had looked at your results, you were in the area you needed to be to pick up any awards you won.

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Even though there was a Boy's changing room, it was located about as far as you could put it from the only entrance that allowed you re-entry and still be under the same roof as the feis site.
• The only Men's room that seemed available to the main room had the exact same problem that the Boy's changing room mentioned previously -- it was located very far away from the only room entrance that allowed re-entry.
• Given the increasingly ugly mood of parents as the day went on (more on why below), it was not a good idea to set the Tabulation operation up out in the lobby in plain sight and within reach of everyone in attendance

GRADE

WHAT WENT RIGHT

WHAT WENT WRONG

• Children below the age of 13 were made to dance three at a time in competition, as in previous years. It has never been right at any time outside of an Oireachtas or Nationals that I have witnessed it.

• Results posting speed was erratic all day, varying between minutes after you danced a competition to hours. I personally witnessed exactly why it happened because (as mentioned above) the committee obligingly set the tabulation operation up on a table outside the main room and I had a good, long look at how it ran. A runner would come by and drop their competition folders on top of the pile that sat at one end of the Tabulation table. Volunteers would then take a folder off the top of the same pile for re-keying into a results page for individual dancers. In geek-speak, this is known as a LIFO queue -- Last In, First Out. It's a disaster waiting to happen for any operation (be it feis management or computer programming) that absolutely must take place in the minimum amount of time.

  To list just one example of how it affected Clan Seger, my vocal competition results had not been posted by 5 PM. We were all otherwise done with our day, and I still had the four-hour drive back to World HQ ahead of me. We left, because we had more important things to do with our time. I do know a lot of people were impatient, upset, and eventually (judging from the secondhand stories I heard about what happened after I left) angry with what was happening.

  The solution to this problem is so simple I was unable to get a committeemember to understand it. You set up a box, open at the top, and place it at the end of the Tabulation table. Label one end "RUNNERS -- PLACE FOLDERS IN THIS END" and face it toward where runners will be approaching the table. Label the opposite side "VOLUNTEERS -- REMOVE FOLDERS FROM THIS END" and face it toward your Tabulation people. You have now set up a FIFO queue (that's First In First Out) very similar to how both Dayton area feisanna manage competition folders in their respective Results operations.

• The multiple adjudicator scoresheets associated with Rachel's Traditional Set competition got separated somewhere between the Adjudicator and Tabulation. Tabulation thus proceeded to assume that the first sheet they found represented the entire competition, did their thing, then handed it off to the people running the Results Board for posting.

  Right about the time Rachel's first place in Trad Set went up on the board, the volunteers in Tabulation discovered the other sheet associated with that competition. At this point, the committee could have done one of two things:

  1. Make an executive decision that the second scoresheet represented yet another division of the U11 Trad Set and posted the results from the second sheet as its own competition. This was the solution used late in the 2002 Dayton Feis when the competition being danced on my stage suddenly ended up one competition out of sync with the competition the adjudicator thought he was judging. It's also a compassionate solution, because the committee is not only admitting the mistake was their fault they're attempting to correct it without hurting anyone in the process.
  2. Cross out the already-posted results, re-tabulate the entire competition, and post the new results. This is a course of action guaranteed to make dancers cry and parents angry.

  Apparently unsatisfied with the scale of the monumental screw-up already in progress with Results posting (see above), the committee unerringly chose option B. I had to re-read both Pittsburgh reviews, the 2001 Nation's Capital Feis review, and the Forest City Feis review to confirm that this may have been the single worst operational decision I have ever witnessed at a feis. Before you accuse me of overreacting because a Clan Seger child was involved, let me point out that there were other familes affected even worse by the mistake -- and the committee's choice of corrective action.

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