Hi,
I run a lot of youth tournaments. Most of the time I am the only TD there (I am a local TD). Often, a chess-playing parent will help me with helping players get to their tables, keeping things quiet, helping record the results. All game decisions are referred to me and my computer does the pairings.
I have been listing my helper as the assistant TD for the section. The USCF tournament checker notes that the assistant is not a TD, but does not flag it as an error or warning.
Is this an OK thing to do? I have been told by a Senior TD that I should not be doing this. Is there an official USCF stance on this subject?
The Senior TD is right; i.e., you can’t do that. They performed no TD functions nor are they a TD. Since they are not the chief I suspect the software just ignores them and gives them no credit; however, I would check with Mike Nolan about that one.
Tim Just
Chair, Tournament Director’s Certification Committee.
We don’t have a program to report TD credits yet, so the question is currently somewhat moot. However, someone who is not a certified TD is not likely to claim his TD credits for advancing to the next level, is he?
A decision was made over a year ago not to flag a non-certified assistant TD as an error. Perhaps it is time to reconsider that decision?
So far we have rated 537 events held in September, and there were 22 events in which an assistant TD was not a currently certified TD. Is it worth holding up rating those events to remove those TDs from those events?
Slightly tangental, but related to the comments about TD credit. I have recently been working at several larger tournaments as an Assistant TD in order to gain experience and practice in eventually organizing similar events of my own. In going over the TD certification procedures, however, most experience requirements [for under the level of NTD] cite only tournaments in which the TD is listed as the Chief of the event for credit (as category events or for number of participants). Where exactly, if at all, does being formally listed as an Assistant TD matter?
I found the following rules regarding assistant TD credits:
26a, 29, 30c2, 30c4, 33, 34b, 37, 38c, 38d, 38e.
Fairly common now-a-days is to gain TD credits by being the chief of a section at a large tournament. The idea is that doing the floor work and back room work at a 30 (or any number) player section of a large tournament and doing the same thing at a stand alone 30 (or any number) player event is mostly the same TD experience.
It really isn’t clear what the duties of a section chief or assistant chief are.
Is the person who stays in the TD room at a major event and handles pairing and prize issues for a section doing the same thing as the person who is in charge on the floor of that section?
When Tim and I discussed this two or three years ago, I thnk he initially had about 8 different experience categories. I discouraged trying to have separate fields to list ‘backroom’ experience and ‘floor’ experience, mostly because I don’t think the data would be accurately reported, and because for most events (the average event has around 20 players in it) there isn’t that clear a division between the two.
That’s why we divided TD experience reporting into three areas of responsibility:
Overall event responsibility
Section responsibility
Working as an assistant but without either overall event or section responsibility.
We also track ‘assistant chief’ at both the event and section level, the latter mostly to be consistent with past reporting for historical purposes, but I’m really not sure whether that means ‘assistant’ or ‘co-chief’ in practice.
These days we might need another experience category, ‘computer chief’, to recognize the individual who submits the memberships and rating report, since those skills tend to be different from the skills of a floor TD or a backroom TD. (We may even want to recognize that in more than a few cases the person doing the computer uploading is not, and may not need to be, a certified TD for other purposes.)
If that is what the Chief sends in, that is what is recorded. If someone challanges that designation (asst.) then it gets checked out.
I can recall that one NTD wannabe listed himself as the chief Asst. at a national event. I was the actual asst. Chief TD at that event. As chair of the TDCC I got to bust him when it came to my attention.
Now that I have opened this thing up, who can I ask to get the non-certified TD’s stricken.