The First Two Days

Since I got a late start on this thing, I'm going to condense the first two days we've had here. First off, where here is. This year's NDT is held in sunny California - Fullerton to be specific. The tournament is hosted by CSU Fullerton. Its low to mid 70s here and sunny. I’m wearing shorts and a T-Shirt. Be jealous.

Anyway, we flew out at 7am Eastern from Dulles – we left fabulous Fredericksburg around 4am. We flew jetBlue which was totally sweet – they have cable TV and lots of leg room. We arrived at Long Beach airport around 9:45ish Pacific. We spent most of the rest of the day checking in, setting up, and doing work. Everyone here has been cutting cards, highlighting ev, filing blocks, and just generally getting in the groove.

It’s been kind of the same story for most of today. We got up on tournament time, got a team breakfast and had a rousing conversation about thresholds for sending food back at restaurants for wrong orders. We also took the team picture today. Thankfully, Jim Lyle arrived just minutes prior to the picture, and we were all glad to have him both in the picture and here in general. Hopefully I’ll get a hold of the team picture and post it here, provided I figure out how.

We’re about to go to the pre-tournament dinner thing where they have food and give out the big awards. The big buzz is the Copeland Award - the award given each year to the top team coming into the tournament as voted by the NDT committee. Our distinguished coach Adrienne is one such honoree. I hear Berkeley is probably the favorite, but Emory and Harvard are also close contenders. We’ll just have to wait and see who it is. I think it’s also neat that UMW knocked that Berkeley team out of the Wake Forest tournament earlier in the season in the doubles, and we’ve also got multiple wins against that Emory team as well.

So, we've made an impressive little niche for UMW debate on the national circuit - to say the least.