Today's tournament went well. It was a good experience for the guy, and the drive there, though long, was pretty smooth. He won a match and lost two, which means it was somewhere in the correct range of difficulty for him.
That said, one thing did piss me off. There was a match in which the opponent's dad kept saying "he's going to make a mistake" about the guy. I couldn't think of a non-escalatory way to say "stop doing that" in the moment, and I did not want to turn it into some sports dad incident, so I just kept yelling other stuff over him. I don't think the guy noticed.
The other shitty thing was that this dude told this kid to just be defensive and wait for the guy to make a mistake. That's OK for chess or a poker cash game in which that is a big part of the game. In judo, there's various rules that try to prevent you from just running away and blocking, but they can't stop everything. Additionally, eventually, it's detrimental to your development. People will figure out how to get around the stiff-arming. (Admittedly, I can't most of the time, but you know, people actually good at judo can.)
Well, real games involve real people with these kinds of rough edges, and obviously, the guy doesn't care, so I guess next time, I'm just going to shout over the other guy even more loudly.