You know, writing and judging really have a lot in common. That probably has something to do with why I enjoy both of them so much. One of those things, one that it took me an incredibly long time to get over, is that it’s hard to know how you’re doing unless someone else tells […]
Let me tell you a story about the 4-minute barrier for the world record one-mile run. For nearly a decade, the record stood untouched at 4:01.4. People thought running a mile in under four minutes was literally impossible. Then, in 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4. The next month, John Landy broke the […]
Hello and welcome to the fifth installment of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered how to have a conversation with someone who has provided feedback you disagree with. Our question for this month comes to us from “PO’d by TO”: I’d like to write a tournament report, but my experience with the TO was […]
Self reviews are somehow simultaneously the easiest and hardest type of review. What makes them so, and how can you average those two sides out to find a happy medium? It’s common for newer judges to not even realize that writing a self review is a thing that they can do. With your first exposure […]
Welcome back to another edition of My First Review. Looking back on the first two reviews we’ve featured, I noticed that both were longer than a typical first review. While their length is by no means a bad thing, I don’t want to give judges the wrong idea of what to expect out of their […]
Communicating areas for improvement can be difficult. You want the judge you’ve been observing to improve, and you’ve got some ideas for them. Those ideas need to be communicated. But successful coaching takes more than that. If you want a judge to act on your feedback, they need to agree with what you are saying. […]
Welcome to the fourth edition of the Feedbag! Last time, we covered how best to handle delivering critical feedback to a judge who was acutely aware they hadn’t been performing to expectations. Our question for this month comes to us from Flummoxed-by-Feedback Judge: I recently received some critical feedback that I simply disagree with. I […]
We all (hopefully) have goals. These goals have a variety of purposes, timelines, and success criteria. We will, invariably, fail at some number of our goals. It’s perfectly fine for this to happen. I started this year with the goal of writing at least one judge review at every multi-judge event I worked this year. […]
Welcome back to another edition of My First Review. A judge’s first review usually comes from an event they’ve judged, but rarely is the event their first. Why is that? Perhaps there’s just so much going on when you judge that writing reviews falls by the wayside. It could be that, as judges, we have […]
It’s always an interesting exercise looking back at your experiences and first interactions you have with people who eventually become friends. Recently I did this entirely on accident by casually roaming through the reviews I’d received early in my judging career. I took the time to open and read through a handful of them, in […]