An Idea for Practice Debates

Posted by John Boyer

October 18, 2007

I’ve spent a lot of time in my 7 years of coaching trying to come up with ways to make practice debates more productive and one in particular has been the most helpful. One of the problems I’ve had with practice debates is that they aren’t always productive because the aff might be unique to the circuit which means the neg debater isn’t getting practice running arguments that they would run against other affirmatives. Additionally, the aff isn’t getting an experience that mirrors a real round, because they already know the generics at the disposal of the negative debater. This idea is to minimize these problems with practice rounds.

As you see debates all year, make sure your debaters get detailed flows and full cites for the affirmatives you debate against, especially the affirmatives you see most often. Then spend some time recreating that affirmative back home. I’m usually the one who does this so debaters don’t spend their time cutting someone else’s aff, and instead spend time cutting answers to it.

The idea is to kind of build a stable of demo affirmatives that are the same as the most run affs in your region. Then occasionally, senior debaters or graduate students should debate as the aff with the demo affs. Your negative debaters will finally get real practice arguing their strategy against the top cases on the circuit. Your affirmative debaters will get practice running ‘new’ arguments and will get to understand how the negative strategy interacts with the demo aff. This will also highlight the flaws in the 1NC strategy you’ve developed for that really popular aff.

This is an idea that I want to experiment more with, but I think puts an interesting twist on practice rounds and will do a better job refining those 1NC strategies that you have for the best cases on the circuit. Winning negative rounds is the key to breaking and you can still have the occasionaly practice round with your affirmative to stay fresh.

Finally, I want to introduce you to someone. His name is David Airne and he is the Director of Debate at the University of Alabama. David is kind of the de facto leader of a coalition of NFA-LD programs that maintains a detailed case list. David will send you the entire case list if you send him a list of the cases that you see throughout the year. He has been sending updates almost twice a week since the case list started. You can e-mail him at:

davidairne@hotmail.com

Share on Facebook

Coaching, Instructional

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.