2013-2014 State Tournament Survival Guide

success-md If your team has advanced to the NH-DI State Tournament, congratulations! We’re really looking forward to seeing them there!

The tournament will be held at Nashua South High School on Saturday, March 29, 2014. Please check the State Tournament home page as often as you can! This is where we will post the preliminary tournament schedule, along with other important announcements about the tournament.

Nearly all of the information in the NH-DI Regional Tournament Survival Guide also applies to the State Tournament, so we won’t repeat it here. Instead, we’ll just mention a few things that are a little different for the State Tournament.

Registering Your Team

Team Managers should receive an email shortly with a link to your NH-DI Online page. You can also reach this page by going to www.nh-di.org/online. You’ll need to log in by entering your User ID or email, and then your password.

Click on the “teams” tab, and then the “register my state teams” link. This is the page that you will use to register your team for the State Tournament. It’s nearly identical to the “register my teams” page used to register for the regional tournament. It will contain a list of the advancing teams that listed you as their Team Manager or coordinator. Click on the button for one of these teams to enter the information for that team.

Appraiser and Two-Hour Volunteer

When your team registered for your regional tournament, you had to supply an Appraiser and a two-hour volunteer. It’s exactly the same for the State Tournament. We need a lot of people to run a tournament, so we require each team to supply both an Appraiser and a two-hour volunteer.

Your two-hour volunteer does need to be one person for two hours, and not a succession of different people. Some jobs take a little while to learn. If the volunteers with these assignments only stay for a short time, it makes things much harder for the volunteer who is responsible for that area.

Regarding your Appraiser, there is one important difference. There isn’t enough time after the regional tournaments to train any new Appraisers, so you’ll need to find an already trained Appraiser who volunteered for one of this season’s NH-DI regional tournaments.

If you do not supply an Appraiser, you must let us know by Friday, March 21, 2014, and pay the $125 No-Appraiser fee by Monday, March 24, 2014. There may also be a point deduction for teams that fail to provide a two-hour volunteer, or whose volunteer is a no-show.

Please don’t worry! In the next section, we’ll explain how to find someone.

Finding an Appraiser

If there is another team from your school that did not advance, you might want to start with their Appraiser. But what if you don’t already know someone who could be your team’s Appraiser? In that case, you’ll need to contact other trained Appraisers. Here’s how you do it:

Bring up the registration page for your team by following the link in the email that we sent to you, or by logging into NH-DI Online. Once you have logged in, you would click on the “teams” tab, followed by the “register my state teams” link, and then click on the button for one of your teams.

You will see entries for “State Appraiser,” “State Volunteer,” and “State Payment.” You would use the “State Volunteer” link to let us know who will be the team’s two-hour volunteer. The “State Payment” link is used to pay the No-Appraiser fee, but we really don’t want you to have to pay this. We’d rather have the Appraiser!

Click on the “State Appraiser” link instead. This will bring up a page that includes a list of all of the available Appraisers. The contents of this list will change frequently. When a team finds an Appraiser, their name will be removed. Appraisers might also be removed if they aren’t available on the day of the State Tournament.

New Appraisers might also appear in the list. For example, the Appraisers for teams scheduled for the second week of regional tournaments will not show up until after those tournaments. That’s because most of these Appraisers have a child on a second week team. They can’t make a commitment until they know whether their own child’s team will advance to the State Tournament, because Appraisers aren’t able to leave to watch a performance in another room.

The same list of Appraisers includes a button to the left of each Appraiser’s name. Once you’ve found someone who agrees to be your team’s Appraiser, click on this button to let us know about it.

We may receive more team-provided Appraisers than we actually need for some Challenges. If this happens, we might assign your Appraiser to a non-scoring role in a different Challenge, or ask them to be an all-day volunteer. Please make sure that your Appraiser understands that this can happen if we have too many Appraisers for their Challenge and/or role. We still need them!

Special Scheduling Requests

Special scheduling requests (if truly compelling) must be sent via email to Craig Richardson (craig.richardson@nh-di.org) by Tuesday, March 18, 2014. We expect all teams to attend the State Tournament for the entire day!

Improvements in Team Challenge Solutions

Teams may continue to refine, or even totally replace, their Challenge solution at each level of competition. However, any changes must be completely original, and may not be an adaptation of something that was presented at an earlier tournament by another team.

People to Contact

For any Appraiser-related issues, contact our Appraiser Coordinator:

Steve Greenwood (steve.greenwood@nh-di.org or 595-3564)

For scheduling and any other tournament-related issues, contact our State Tournament Director:

Craig Richardson (craig.richardson@nh-di.org or 673-7299)