No, No One Had to Say It

Despite the lack of people asking for individuals’ unsolicited debate takes generally, my first in-person tournament both in college and in two years had me thinking a lot of things that I wanted to share.

1. In-Person Debate Rocks

Holy shit.

Being able to genuinely connect with other debaters is such an amazing and wholesome experience, and makes me realize that this is the real reason I am never going to quit debate (knock on wood). As a newer debater in college who never got to really meet their competitors before everything went online, it was so satisfying to be able to put personalities and faces to names. Honestly, my only real disappointment is realizing that I’ll never be able to properly meet the graduating seniors that decide to leave debate.

Something I don’t think people mention enough is the difference in quality and understanding on in-person feedback vs. over zoom. On the debater side, the biggest problem is that it’s very easy to check out during a zoom RFD and just absent-mindedly take down notes. You just don’t mentally afford faces on the screen the same attention and respect that you might in-person. The same goes for judges – when it’s not hour 8 of zoom and you don’t have the same level of connection with the debaters in front of you, it’s a struggle to give RFDs/feedback with the energy competitors need to avoid it going in one ear and out the other. It’s this level of feedback that led me to dig deep on some arguments that I now realize I’ve fundamentally misunderstood for years (post coming soon).

2. K AFFs will be less topic-related until there is a better topic for the C/I

If you are tired of K debates where the 1AC gets up and either impact turns the topic or debate in general, then stop voting for topics that don’t make sense for reasonably predictable alternative interpretations of the topic outside a legal framework. Examples like antitrust or space that have other constraints supporting a legal actor are basically unworkable for C/I leaning AFFs. That’s a shame because impact turn debates are generally less about discussing the topic or substance in that direction, which can be boring for both sides.

3. Debate needs more content and hype

But KU is enough <3

4. Michigan

Losing CEDA following NDT–shout-out to Wake for some amazing debating–was one thing, but the Twitter drama really sent it over the edge. Don’t let it detract from the fact that Josh killed it though.

5. Performative Offense

Using examples of performative offense to implicate flows besides just pulling up a new sheet was really big this weekend and for good reason. Judges typically don’t feel comfortable pulling the trigger to straight drop a team on something like, I don’t know, forgetting to replace the name of the AFF in your blocks BUT can justify using this against a team when it is spun on the line-by-line. Whether or not more judges should be willing to drop teams on these various forms of unethical arguments is a different question (looking at you CEDA finals). Teams like Liberty and Wake did a fantastic job of winning rounds off persuasive explanations of how things like homogenization affected the permutation, for example.

I wish I could comment myself more broadly on cool argument innovation more generally, but no coaches is tough for scouting all the really cool shit people are doing in rounds you can’t watch yourself. I know everyone this weekend was able to realize the creative strategies that the judging and negation doesn’t usually allow for at other tournaments.