The Joy (sic) of Tournaments
I wanted to take a moment to talk about Tournaments. It’s been brought to my attention by Danny that a lot of visitors to this site are either attending or running NFA-LD tournaments for the first time. As a 12 year veteran of NFA-LD, I’ll try to shed some light on the issue.
Tournament Administration/Attendance
When scheduling rounds for an NFA-LD tournament, I personally allow 1 hour for the preset rounds and 1:30 minutes for the power paired rounds. You can probably release the powered rounds in 1:15, but I like to build in the extra 15 minutes in case their is a tab emergency (missing ballots, judge issues, etc). However, at my tournament we don’t run IE’s OR Parli at the tournament, it is ONLY NFA-LD. IF I was running IE’s or Parli in between the LD rounds, 1:15 is plenty of time to schedule for an LD round because you don’t have to turn it around into the next round immediately like I do. Some people even try for the 1 hour time allotment in this schedule, but I don’t recommend it.
Occasionally you will even encounter a tournament where IEs and LD are in the same flight. I don’t recommend this to tournament organizers but if your judging pool and room requirements can handle it, it does save some time. Just make sure you schedule enough time for the flight, probably 1:30. Also, please only let LDers enter ONE IE event in the flight aside from LD. This will save you some headache, trust me. Students, if you ever find yourself double-entered with LD, you should do your IE first. Sign into your debate round and let your opponent or the judge know that you are off to give a quick IE, and then return for debate promptly. Some tournaments will force you to do LD first, and then the IE. If this is the case, sign in to your IE round first as DE-LD, get to your LD round early, and try to start the round early or at least on time. LD rounds take about 45 min, and there is transit time. Judges have been known to leave IE rounds without waiting for debaters, thinking they were drops. This is why you should do IE’s first if possible.
Also, if you are running tournaments, I would suggest a few things. Speaker Awards are nice. Low point wins are possible and speaker awards DO reward people who didn’t break. Last year, one of my students was 2nd speaker at Nationals, despite NOT even breaking (she was 3-3 and had a very tough draw, debating 5 people who cleared). Also, they reward people who might get upset in Octos. I think that there are enough reasons to prove that speaker awards award different enough sets of people that they are warranted in LD.
Tournament directors should also be aware of the rules for NFA-LD quals. All divisions are qualifiers. You must have 9 participants for Semis, 17 for quarters, and 33 for octos. No more than 16 can ever qualify for NFA Nationals in any given division. If you have more than 65 LDers you will not have 32 qualifiers. That means you have to make a decision on how you will report the top 16 to NFA. You should either report the top 16 seeds heading into elims, OR the 16 competitors in octofinals. I recommend the former personally because it preserves the importance of prelim seeding, but I’m open to arguments on this.
Tournament Strategy
It has been suggested many times in the past that out-rounds are the perfect place to spring a new case. Personally, I’m not so sure. I’m going to discuss this under the assumption that the new case is not quite as well prepared as your normal case. There probably aren’t as many 1AR/2AR blocks written and you don’t have in-round experience running it. For me, the season is just build up to Nationals. Once you are qualified for NFA-LD (breaking once in any division, as long as the tournament broke to the appropriate number) the goal is to prepare yourself for Nationals. I think that means running the same case all year, fine-tuning and developing your 1AR blocks. The value of surprise by running a new case isn’t very high, especially since it is the first time you’ve run the case and you are just as likely to be surprised by their answers. Even if you lose in elims running your normal case, you are likely to be losing to arguments you weren’t prepared for. Which is good for you because you will see the arguments again and be ready for them. That loss helped develop your season long strategy of having a well prepared 1AC for Nationals, in which your 1AR is entirely plug-n-play.
Are there exceptions to this? Surely. Maybe you are hitting your nemesis, or maybe it’s a tournament you value highly or carries some prestige and you want to pull some punches and send people to the library. What about Nationals? Should you run new cases in outrounds of Nationals? This strategy has worked for some in the past. Recently, Jon Kohlscheen and Mike Storey of Creighton ran their stock affirmatives in the final round of NFA the last two years. Jon lost and Mike won. So despite the small sample size, you can win or lose no matter the choice you make. You have to do what you are comfortable with. There is a LOT of prep time in-between debates and your opponent is probably using it well. Running a new case does help neutralize some of that prep time. One other strategy is to make small changes to your affirmative. Maybe run a new advantage scenario. Maybe change plan text a little bit to get out of some of the arguments you anticipate them running. The most important thing is that you run the case you are most comfortable and confident with.
Make sure you keep detailed flows of what your opponents ran so you can write answers when you return home. Get cites for all the evidence that they read against you. If you do this, you will only get better on the affirmative as the season progresses. The formula for clearing at any LD tournament should be win all your affs and at least one neg round.
If you have questions about tournament procedures, feel free to post a comment and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. You can also e-mail me with questions at lafayettedebate (at) gmail (dot) com
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