As you get more experienced in the judge program, it’s likely that you’ll eventually be called upon for a leadership role in an event. If you’re anything like me, your first time team leading or head judging will be a time of great excitement, but also great anxiety. My first time team leading, I learned a lot (primarily by making a lot of mistakes), and I wanted to keep track of it for next time, so I wrote up an outline of them in a text file. Over the next year or so, I made similar documents for all the team lead positions and another for head judging, using them to refresh my memory every time I prepared for one of these roles and adding to them afterwards. Other judges who were about to team lead for the first time asked me for access to these files, and now I’m putting them online.
The goal of these articles is to outline the major logistical challenges facing these leadership positions and give some ideas about what has worked well for me in the past. I make no claim that what I discuss is the only, or even best way to handle those situations; every tournament is unique and has its own special challenges. But these articles should give you a starting point for the problems you encounter yourself.
The information here comes mostly from my experiences in these roles at mid-size (about 100 to 1000 players) events. You may also want to read DLI’s excellent set of articles on team leading, which focus mainly on GP-sized events. The logistical challenges are similar, yet distinct. I recommend reading his articles also for more ideas on how to address the same problems as the events scale up in size.
General leadership
Deck Checks team lead
Logistics team lead
Paper team lead
Head Judge reference