In the middle of a call, you don’t always have the time to break things down in detail. But after the match is a great time to do so. Talk with players about your rulings to get their perspective.
Feedbag #12: On a Wing and a Player
Tag: Edited by Angela Aliff
Coaching a Friend, Part 3
Last time on Coaching a Friend, we discussed the advantage we can gain by informing our coaching with our knowledge of our friends. In this final installment, I want to talk about the most difficult and possibly most necessary part of coaching a friend. Make it count. Our friendships also create coaching opportunities that others just won’t have. Your friend is more likely to start from a receptive position to your feedback and also more likely to act on what you say. Words spoken by people
Coaching a Friend, Part 2
Previously on Coaching a Friend, I wrote about the importance of remaining objective when identifying coaching opportunities involving our friends. For this installment, let’s focus on how we can use our friendship to take our coaching to the next level. Use what you know. Even though your knowledge of your friends can make it more challenging to spot coaching opportunities, it can also be a strength when providing coaching. You have the benefit of insider knowledge to how they think and
Coaching a Friend, Part 1
Your coaching can be informed by your knowledge of your friends and made easier by your level of comfort with them.
Protection from Feedback
I coin a lot of words and phrases related to feedback. Usually, these are complete nonsense. But sometimes the framework of this good game we play and judge offers a phrase with usefulness beyond rules enforcement. This is true of protection, a keyword that prevents something from being blocked, targeted, dealt damage, or enchanted [by a quality]. In this blog’s context, we can understand “protection from feedback” to be a characteristic that makes an individual incredibly difficult to
Scaling Feedback for Aspiring L2s
When I was a kid, I loved to read. One series that I grew to love was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. The fun in these books was the feeling of choice. You had power to decide how the story turned out. Similarly, participation in the judge program is choosing an adventure. Not every judge’s story will (or should!) look the same. As I’ve said from the beginning of this series, we must understand where people are and where they want to go to give them the best feedback possible. Once
Feedbag #11: Exemplars vs. Reviews
Hello and welcome to this month’s edition of the Feedbag! Last month, we covered how to sell your local TOs on the value of feedback. This month’s question comes to us from of Portugal: When you perform exceptionally in an event or during your everyday judge activities, you may get an exemplar. The reviews meant to praise your work may have become rarer in a post-Exemplar world. I do not have the data for the entire judge program, this is just an assumption based on my experience and my country's
Quality Is Its Own Quality
Last year, I was chatting with some judges in the Mid-Atlantic Slack about review counts, and one of them mentioned that he felt that reviews written was not a great metric to track – that quality mattered more than quantity. My response was the idea that quantity is its own quality. Receiving a well-written review is obviously more beneficial than receiving a poorly written review. But the difference in benefit between receiving a review and not receiving one is much greater. And while I always
Coaching a Student
Coaching a student is much more in line with the traditional idea of coaching than my last topic. We do this all the time in the judge program. We call it mentoring. In fact, L2 judges are required to show a “willingness to mentor” other judges. While this practice is more commonly discussed than coaching a mentor, there are always ways to maximize the effectiveness of your coaching. I’d like to offer a few tips for how to get the most (coaching) bang for your (mentoring) buck. Learn
Focusing Feedback
Since I love stories, I'm going to start with one that I heard recently from a judge friend. We were chatting about reviews (surprising, right?), and he mentioned a review he'd gotten from someone recently that said something like this (paraphrased, a lot): "You seemed really down during our draft on Saturday night. You should work on cheering up." Needless to say, my friend was pretty upset that a sentiment about an after-hours, off-site, for-fun thing made it into a review. I started thinking