Introduction/Qualifications
So, you debate at a “small school”. Maybe you just want to learn how to prep in general. Although these suggestions are based on my own experience as a “small school” debater, they should be applicable to anyone that wants to get better at debate.
For context, I went to a “small school” (Cambridge High School, in Georgia). We had a ton of talented debaters that were willing to work, but no coach. While we competed on the National Circuit (perks of debating in Georgia!), we only ever went to local tournaments. Aside from the several-hour bus ride to the Kentucky Season Opener, I never traveled more than an hour or two for a debate tournament. My only camp experience was at Georgetown 3-week my sophomore year of high school (shoutout to the Arnett-Malsin lab). I never got a TOC bid and when competing in Open/Varsity did not break to even a single elim round. Undeterred, I walked onto the UGA Debate team without a partner going into college debate career.
The Georgia team dynamic was/is the opposite of my high school experience: last year, we had two coaches per debater. Despite this fact and Georgia’s historical reputation as one of the “larger” and more successful debate schools, I would still consider myself a “small school” debater. Although I now have access to coaches (something for which I am immensely grateful), we only had one team competing at tournaments by the end of last year. If I want a card read in a debate, for the most part I am either stealing it or cutting it myself (coaches responded to links sent in slack with a link to the O.T. Genasis and Young Dolph classic, Cut It).
Over the years, I’ve tried to ask every successful coach, judge, and debater that I know how they got so good. Although it’s easy to receive advice, it’s much harder to put it into practice. Process over product is a simple concept (even if you’re not getting good results now, practicing good debate habits over time will reap major rewards), but as the proud owner of a consistent 2-4 record I can tell you it’s not that always easy. There are some things that can help, however. Here are the biggest determining factors (in my experience) in the success of your “small school” debate career.
1. Work
It’s inevitable. Top-level college debaters spend around 40 hours a week doing debate work while top-level high school debaters spend around 20 hours a week. Obviously, these numbers are variable but unless your name rhymes with Gayden Smarton you’re going to need more than just skillz to get wins. Not all work is equally valuable, however. Preparation/work can be broken down into several constituent components, each independently contributing to your in-round success.
a. Speaking.
If you want to improve your speed and clarity, you should be speaking at least 30 minutes per day. I like to break my sessions into 6 mins of warm-up (two 3-minute drills back-to-back, choose from pen, backward, or overenunciation), a 15-minute speech (or as long as you can spread for now) as fast as possible to boost your endurance, and a 9-minute (or 8-minute for HS) regular speech. You always want to end by giving a speech how you would in a real round. This helps build your muscle memory so you’re not spreading incomprehensibly fast when you finally get to the actual debate.
For peak efficiency, give speech redoes. You can do them in any fashion, but what works best for me is: fully writing out blocks/card indicts that can be deployed when we hit those args, recording the speech (and flowing yourself for extra practice), sending it to a coach/reviewing myself and then doing it again. Afterward, organize the blocks into appropriate areas. Now you’ve prepped, flowed, and practiced speaking in one convenient exercise!
b. Blocks.
Good prep is essential. Every arg that you think about and answer before the round is one less that you have to waste prep on during the round. Efficient prep practices can reduce the potency of even the most powerful full press approach from big schools. A Kentucky or MBA block dump is a lot less threatening when you can just plug in your prewritten response that neutralizes all of their cards. If there were answers/analytics you wrote in-round, edit them and turn them into blocks after the round. If you’ve been diligently writing blocks during the year, by the time the end-of-year tournaments roll around you’ll have answers to common arguments blocked out all the way through the final rebuttals with proven answers that you’ve tested in practice debates. What do you do with all of prep time that you saved by having prewritten, easily adaptable answers? Spend it crying, idk. Or use it to get a dub with proper prep practices, this lecture is great.
c. Card Cutting.
Cards are simultaneously over- and underrated by most of the debate community. Some people seem to think that having a card is like waving a magic wand–this is not the case. At the end of the day, a card is just evidence for an argument. That’s it. An incorrect argument is still incorrect even if you have 85 cards to support it. It doesn’t particularly matter if you read 10 cards to your opponents’ single analytic if the analytic was sufficient to answer the argument. To be clear, cards are still important. Strong evidence is often the difference between an L and W, especially when the judge looks closely at the cards after the round. Not all judges will do this or might not like your evidence as much as you so it’s important not to rely on the strength of your cards alone to win the debate.
As a small school debater without access to an army of card cutters, it can feel like the game is rigged against you. However, the time you spend cutting cards is time learning arguments. Cutting a card involves reading and processing information which then gets stored in your brain for easy access later. But, the debaters that don’t cut their own evidence never took the time to read and understand the original source material. A funny thing will start to happen as you cut more cards: when you hit teams with coaches that give them a full dropbox, you’ll know their evidence better than them. They didn’t cut the cards! How are they supposed to know what the unhighlighted portions say? Why are those specific words highlighted and not other ones? If you understand the research behind your opponents’ evidence better than they do, you’ll win. To quote Dom Toretto, “it doesn’t matter what’s under a hood, the only thing that matters is who’s behind the wheel;” a car engineered by 10 coaches is worthless without a knowledgable driver.
d. Thinking About Debate.
If you want to get better at debate, you need to spend time thinking about arguments. It’s non-negotiable. Debate brain time is not limited to when you’re at practice or tournaments. Whether it’s in the shower, during your commute to school or work, or during the boring religious activities your Catholic parents make you attend, you should be thinking about debate as much as possible. This will also prime your brain to be more effective when you are explicitly doing debate work as you’ve already done the preliminary thinking around the arguments that you want to develop. I have ADHD so I was (and am) always thinking about debate constantly in the background, but it wasn’t until I got to college that I realized that this isn’t exactly normal. Although I was already spending way too much time thinking about debate, my coaches emphasized that setting aside time to specifically think about debate (not speaking, cutting cards, writing blocks, or flowing, just thinking) can be an effective tool for “small school” debaters to get better at debate while not necessarily having access to the same resources as big school debaters. Do exercise caution, however–I almost got in a bike accident once because I was thinking too intently about the deterrence DA. Nevertheless, there will be noticeable results to increasing the amount of time you spend pondering debate mysteries.
e. Wiki Trolling.
Regardless of terminology–at UGA, we call it culling–after every tournament/season you should be going through and stealing every relevant card/block that you can find. Organize, incorporate into your own files, rehighlight/recut (if you have the time and energy). You should know every card that has been disclosed on the topic. Use big schools’ armies of card cutters to your advantage and allow them to supplement your research. Warning: don’t read unedited cards that people cut against them, they will think you are silly.
2. Style
Figuring out your style is incredibly important. Maybe it’s policy, maybe flex, or maybe it’s the the K–regardless of orientation, learning what works best for you and how to execute those strategies can make or break your career. Debates tend to be fairly predictable and the more prepped/used to responding to certain arguments you are, the better your chances of success. Your style of debate directly impacts the strategy that you choose. A K team that likes to go one off on the neg will have a completely different set of arguments prepared to respond to a big stick policy aff than a team that likes to go for process CPs and tiny DAs. Understanding your debate style allows you to better prepare. If you know that you prefer going for the K nine times out of ten, direct a proportional amount of effort to prepping the K as opposed to Con Con or vice versa. Knowing your opponents’ style can also help you prepare. This is where familiarity with the wiki comes in handy: the more information that you have available, the easier it is to figure out what strategies teams may be weak against. I don’t think that one style is necessarily better for “small schools” than any others. There have been a bunch of successful teams from “small schools” using a diverse spread of different styles. The important thing is to figure out what style works for YOU and putting all of your effort into improving that rather than wasting time on arguments you don’t want to go for.
3. Mindset
Approaching “small school” debate with the correct mindset is crucial. Just like work, burnout is inevitable. At some point, you will run out of steam. Take a break and enjoy some time away from debate. Catch up on school, social life, or even just binge some shows. It’s important to remember when fatigue sets in WHY you do debate (or figure that out if you don’t know yet). The things that you miss (or would miss) without debate – community, friends, teammates, scholarship, competitive nature, etc. are helpful to think about when you’re struggling. Spite seems to be a common motivator as well and it certainly is for me. When I need a kick in the butt, I remember that there wasn’t a single college coach that reached out. When I joined the team, I didn’t have a partner. I wasn’t expecting to be able to debate even one round my freshman year, yet I ended it at the NDT. The most powerful motivator for me is remembering the jealousy that I felt (and still feel) towards those that get the respect. The ones with rep, the ones that you get called out for having GDS (good debater syndrome) if you’re attracted to them. This community rewards success. But as anyone that’s debated at a “small school” or had a losing record could tell you, there are more reasons to debate than show up in the wins and loss columns. Maybe you don’t want to win the TOC, you just want to have some fun at tournaments and make some friends. That’s okay! Figuring out what you want from debate can help you progress exponentially as your practice can be more targeted. If you’re fine winning two or three rounds a tournament, don’t waste your time doing extra unnecessary work. But if you want to progress, nothing can beat hard work. Nobody was born good at debate. At times, it can feel like the top speakers were bestowed with a special gift from a benevolent god that conveniently forgot about your existence, but they work incredibly hard using the exact same drills as you. If they got there, you can too!