There are probably several hundred kids that would call themselves circuit debaters. Circuit debate is at one end of the debate spectrum. I guess the term “style” might be the best description of the spectrum, but I’m not sure that’s a perfect fit. The other end is usually called “traditional” debate. You’ll have to indulge me as I toss the entire LD debate world into one of these two bins.

Circuit debate is hyper-competitive. It’s the type of debate that you’re trained for when you attend certain popular debate camps. I’m trying to avoid using adjectives like “top” or “best” because that’s all relative and not very important. Suffice it to say that most of the large LD debate programs across the country would recognize these camps, hire coaches that coach circuit debate, and generally train their students to compete in circuit debate.

Circuit debate has case and argumentation rules and expectations that evolve year by year, many more than traditional debate. Wins and losses are decided primarily on a technical level. To be sure, speaking ability is still important and valued, but persuasion is much less so, as the judges are technical as well and decide mostly on the detailed flow. It’s this structure of rules and expectations that creates a type of debate that snags the interests of the circuit. It embraces an array of tactics, requires a high level of research and preparation, and facilitates amazingly diverse and sophisticated debates. I’ve been told this is what excites and drives the circuit debaters. It’s also conducted at warp speed. Two hundred words a minute and you’re slouching. But hey, more words, better debate.

And that’s fine for the circuit. Traditional debate is different. It’s not better, it’s not worse, it’s not harder, it’s not easier, it’s different than circuit debate. And there’s the rub, since for the most part the judges fall into the same two camps. The judges decide who wins and when there is conflict they’ll usually defer to their camp. So you need to do the math; if there are more circuit judges, try to debate circuit; if there are more traditional judges, do that — if you see it coming and if you can change directions mid-stream.

The 2011 NCFL LD tournament was a boat race for the circuit gang. Yes, that’s a good name for it: a prototypical beat down, the outcome never in doubt from the start. Coaching a single debater on the national circuit all year, it was natural for me to examine how the best circuit debaters, those who demonstrated consistent success in the bid tournaments, fared in the NCFL LD break. They were crushed.

The NCFL field was 214 LD debaters. If we look at the top circuit debaters, those who earned at least one TOC bid last year, there were about 120 of them in the entire country. By my count 15 of them were in the NCFL LD field (apologies to anybody I missed). The break was to doubles, 32 out of 214 or 15%. The TOC-bid circuit broke all of three kids, only 20%. Considering that many, if not most, of the LD entries had far less experience, the TOC-bidders’ break percentage among those who “stood a chance” was much less than a random draw. And considering the accomplishments of this group on the circuit, certainly much less than they expected and were used to (and if I missed any then the numbers are even worse).

The CFL is a more traditional league than the circuit, so on balance, the judging there is traditional. And let’s not mistake that for inexperience. Most of the judges I observed were well seasoned. The game was played by mostly traditional rules, so to succeed, the circuit folks had to adjust properly, and most of them did not. I learned quite a bit from observing other judges, through friendly conversations between rounds and sometimes specific comments after a round. There is a tremendous diversity of points of view and styles. Some of the things I heard other judges say and do were frankly staggering. For example, several experienced judges did not flow a word.

At the risk of minimizing all the differences between circuit and traditional debate, and going by what I’ve observed at the NCFL tournament the last three years, including judging all prelim rounds and doubles last year, I think there are three key points the circuit needs to keep in mind.

First, persuasion is at a premium. Not just communication, but at the end of the round persuading the judges that your big picture makes more sense than your opponent’s — getting them to believe you. This is the hardest aspect to put your finger on, but we all know some people do it better than others. The best persuaders outline a good thesis, keep it consistent, and keep it simple. They fold their arguments around the thesis while stacking their opponent’s off to the side somewhere. It’s not the exclusive domain of traditional or circuit, but it’s harder to focus on persuasion while doing all the other circuit things. In particular, circuit debaters are often trained to “layer” their argumentation with as many “even-ifs” as possible. While this is strategic on the circuit and sometimes persuasive in real life, more often than not the use of excessive layers comes off as a perceptual weakness, because the debater that sticks to one or two layers sounds like they are more confident and have a more consistent message.

Second, traditional debate is more about the 10,000 ft. view than the 100 ft. view. Circuit debate is all about the 100 ft. view. Many judges give priority to the former over the latter. Some of the judges outright ignore the details and many are less persuaded by them than the bigger picture. Many traditional judges, the ones that flow at all in the circuit sense, won’t flow or process the details.

And third, many circuit tactics just won’t fly because they are not understood or considered necessary. This is not a deficiency of traditional debate, it’s not worse because of this, it’s just a different game. A circuit debater may spend a lot of time on arguments that are simply irrelevant to many traditional judges. For example, they might spend a lot of time warranting their value criterion and attacking the lack of warrants in their opponent’s. Many judges don’t believe this is required and some don’t completely understand warrants. Circuit debaters are often trained to see the value criterion debate as determining the relevance of contention-level arguments in the round. For example, if you win that “maximizing the protection of life” is more important than “constitutionality,” then it doesn’t matter if your opponent’s brilliant arguments about the constitutionality of an action are stronger than your mediocre arguments about saving lives. Many traditional judges, on the other hand, take a holistic view of the round. They aren’t looking to entirely accept or reject one particular value criterion. In order to win these judges, you need to treat your value criterion and contentions as two parts of the same narrative, and treat your opponent’s the same way.

The same goes for claim-warrant-impact structure to arguments. One would think this is required at all levels of traditional debate, but it’s not. I saw many case arguments, even in the elimination rounds, without warrants, some without impacts. And I saw many judges who did not care about them as much as an argument’s (or an arguer’s) intuitive plausibility. Again, this is not wrong per se, it’s different. And if you’ve spent your time arguing these things in front of judges who won’t credit you for those arguments then you’ve wasted your time. The judge probably won’t care if your opponent dropped your link-turn because they don’t understand the term. Judges won’t reward you for being obtuse, fast, or complex. Leave your theory expando at home, forget about K’s, off-case adventures, and ditch any non-traditional treatment of the resolution. Moral skepticism (or relativism, or particular-ism) will get you to 0 – 5 after prelims.

The NFL nationals are a bit different than the NCFLs, but similar in some ways. The tournament is larger and sports a more diverse pool of competitors and judges. It’s more traditional than the circuit, but not as provincial as the NCFLs. Circuit judges are well represented as are non-circuit judges open to non-traditional approaches. Circuit debaters fare better here, but overall it is still dominated by traditional judging. The six prelims are set in advance, so without power pairing some good debaters will suffer from tough draws while others will benefit from easy ones.

The three key points given above certainly apply to NFLs, but you may have a little more leeway for sophisticated tactics. However the traditional style still dominates and non-circuit peculiarities abound. I witnessed one quite unexpected manifestation of this in the 2010 NFL late rounds (11 and 12): a non-circuit debater deftly used scripted rebuttals to defeat two circuit debaters, including my debater. Scripted rebuttals (in this case large portions of the NR and 2AR) would be anathema to circuit debate — no one could predict in advance what would be on the flow. But they were brutally effective in the persuasion and big picture department and won the majority in both cases which happened to be traditional judges.

In round nine this past year the other two judges were circuit, plus me, who passed for one. The flight A debaters treated us to a knock-down circuit round worthy of quarters at a TOC bid tournament. Flight B was slow-down traditional. The juxtaposition was striking and the rest of the panel commented afterwards just how odd that was. As late as round ten, I judged a debater who interpreted the resolution in a clearly abusive manner, taking most of his opponent’s ground, something that would never have happened on the circuit unless someone wanted to provoke a theory debate – and judges voted for it. In another late round, my debater won a convincing round by a 2-1 decision. The dissenting RFD was that his opponent’s case was “better organized.”

Despite the clearly non-circuit flavor, the good news is that the last three winners of the NCFL tournament, and the last two winners of the NFL tournament, were all circuit debaters — and the list may go back even further. I had the opportunity to judge or observe all of them. They all could spin a good story without stopping for an “umm” or pausing to regroup, making it sound like they were reading it from a script, and all while embracing the art of persuasion. The young man who won the NFL last year had six TOC bids, but in the semis and finals he slowed way down to almost an “aw shucks” drawl. His opponent in the finals was one of the North East’s most successful circuit debaters, but she also won Villiger, a CFL-ishy traditional tournament at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia which had an LD field of 125.

So, there is a path to success from the circuit in these tournaments. You just need to find the right approach. You might start by talking to one of the recent champs. Or don’t worry too much about it, have fun, and experiment. Just don’t expect the circuit treatment.

Good luck!

Brad Taylor is a former LD coach for Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy, Bryn
Mawr PA.  His son, Zachary, competed on the North East circuit for three
years and continues to debate for the University of Rochester.  Brad is a
Technical Fellow at DuPont.

1. Have a concrete plan.

Often camps will have a wide array of opportunities available: lectures on different subjects, new drills on different skill sets, many instructors to talk to, practice debates, demonstration rounds, etc. While having all these resources at your disposal presents a tremendous opportunity, it also makes it easy to get lost. Don’t try to do too much – if you try to “cover” everything, you may make it harder to improve very much in any one area. Remember, for most people winning one or two more rounds per tournament (or improving your speaker point average by a single point) represents a major jump up to the next level. It’s the difference between average and breaking, and the difference between breaking and going deep in outrounds. So, what can you do that is going to get you that one more win per tournament or one more speaker point per round?

The best way to accomplish this is to have a plan going into camp. Work with your coaches before camp and your instructors once you arrive at camp to identify some concrete areas in which you need to improve, and plan your camp experience around those objectives. This does not mean that you can’t branch out or pursue subjects that are of interest to you – those things should definitely inform the planning process. But, don’t feel the need to try to experience the entire curriculum just for the sake of getting to everything.

There will always be trade-offs. Ask yourself if you will really improve more from the lecture on advanced contractualism than you will from the one on giving a great 1AR or learning to research more effectively. If you already give great 1ARs, then by all means go to the contractualism lecture. But remember, you are going to give a 1AR in about half your rounds; you will encounter “advanced contractualism,” but not nearly as often. Which is more likely to help you win that one more round per tournament? Also, consider what resources are available to you during the season. If your coach’s strength is public policy analysis, maybe it makes sense to focus less on that and more on technical skills or philosophy. If your coach is a philosophy guru, you probably don’t need to spend every waking moment in a philosophy lecture.

Camp is a great opportunity for intellectual exploration, and you should certainly come to camp with the expectation of learning about ideas and concepts that are deeply interesting and exciting. But, to the extent that you want to improve competitively from camp, doing an honest assessment of priorities and pursuing them diligently is your best bet.

2. Expand your comfort zone.

A few weeks ago I posted an article about improving your mental game. One of my suggestions was to take advantage of opportunities to expand your comfort zone so that you don’t have to do it in important rounds. Camp is an excellent opportunity to do that. There is no competitive trade-off to trying new things, because it’s not a competition. All of your drills and practice rounds at camp are aimed at making you better in the long run.

So, spread your wings. If you’ve never gone straight-ref in the 1NC, run a plan, written a framework-heavy case, run a kritik, etc., now is your chance to give it a try. You might not become an expert, but you can develop your skills enough to make you dangerous. Another good way to expand your repertoire is to work on judge adaptation. Can you debate at 60% of your top speed if you have to? Can you extend your case without using too much jargon, or explain a dense philosophical position with simple terminology and concrete applications? Can you answer an abusive strategy without running theory? If you can’t, you are giving up rounds and speaker points.

The least productive thing you can do is come to camp and practice things you are already good at. That sounds intuitive, but you would be amazed how many people are afraid to try new things because they don’t want to look dumb in front of the instructor or they don’t like being frustrated by making a change. Having an instructor correct you is exactly why you are at camp. Making changes is exactly why you are at camp. Don’t let the desire to look like a good debater prevent you from actually becoming a good debater.

3. Keep usable records.

Many people learn lots of new skills and concepts while they are at camp, and then go back to their teams and fall into their same old patterns. You need to think ahead about how you are going to take what you learn at camp and use it during the regular season.

For example, you sit in a philosophy lecture and take notes, and those notes help you understand the subject. Great. Will you every look at those notes again? Will you really be able to apply your newfound understanding six months from now? If the answer to those questions is no, then you have sacrificed a tremendous amount in terms of using camp to get that one extra win or speaker point. So, what do you do? If you retyped and organized your notes, would you remember them better or be able to use them while brainstorming or blocking down the road? What if you approached the instructor on a subject that interested you and asked her to help you write a basic framework using the philosophical ideas you just learned, or to construct a file on the subject? My bet is that you will get more use out of an evidence file on utilitarianism than your notes from a utilitarianism lecture saved on your computer somewhere.

You just had a great word economy drill with a great instructor. You are going to be super-efficient at that practice round later today. But, will you be that efficient in six months? If you’re not, will you know how to fix it? In addition to simply doing the drill, give yourself a concrete takeaway. Create a checklist to remind you of the things you need to key on to give a great 1AR or write a plan AC. Create a regular drill routine that lets you practice that core skill once a week or between rounds at a tournament, or just when you feel like you need a tune-up. The point is, don’t just walk away with knowledge in your head and hope that you remember it or that the skills will still be there months from now. Put yourself in a realistic position to implement what you learned over the long haul.

These strategies will be a little different for everyone, but my point is that you shouldn’t count on simply improving by osmosis. Don’t sit around trying to absorb debate skill and knowledge – take concrete steps to make sure you have a usable resource at your disposal at the end of camp.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to attend a summer institute. Be grateful for the opportunity and make the most of it while you’re there. When the time to compete rolls around, you won’t regret it.

1. Be prepared for diversity.

Nationals is full of judges and competitors with idiosyncratic sensibilities about style. Expectations for case structure, delivery, and affirmative and negative burdens will run the gamut. So will preferences for a more pragmatic, topic-specific debate versus a more abstract, philosophical debate. There are a couple of things you can do to prepare for this.

First, use a simple, positional casing style. Remember, an argument is an argument. If you have a compelling, straightforward thesis on the topic you will appeal to a much wider range of judges. Trying to be overly technical or overly complex is likely to obscure your argument and alienate a large chunk of the judging pool. Note that this does not mean dumbing down your argument. It means advancing a clear and precise advocacy so that form does not get in the way of substance.

Second, impose your will on the round. You will inevitably be in debates where it seems like you and your opponent are talking past each other. The more you can talk about your burden and how your case meets that burden, the better off you are. You want the judge evaluating the round through the lens that you have provided. Force your opponent to come down out of the clouds to address your position on your terms. “My opponent is not explaining the implications of his argument on the criterion. My analysis demonstrates that governments have an obligation to provide a basic minimum level of wellbeing for all their citizens and my first contention demonstrates that narrowing the rich/poor gap is necessary to accomplish this.”

2. Be mindful of your physical and mental health.

Nationals is an unusually demanding tournament. It is long, stressful, there are big breaks between rounds, and you generally don’t know how you’re doing. Combine those things with nervousness about competing for a National Championship and the week can get pretty wearing.

First, you need to take care of yourself physically. Make sure you work hard in the lead-up to the tournament so that you don’t have to spend long hours at the tournament trying to cram in all the preparation you feel you need. Get plenty of sleep and try to eat healthy. These things can be difficult when you’re traveling, but if you can try not to vary your routine too dramatically. This will prevent you from feeling strung out and therefore failing to debate your best.

Second, take care of yourself mentally. Sometimes there are long breaks in between rounds, so have a plan for what you are going to do to relax. You can play cards, watch a movie, hang out with teammates, whatever. If you try to stay 100% focused over the course of a long day, you will wear yourself out. Have a plan for how you are going to deal with stress. On the flip side, think about how you want to refocus yourself when it’s time to debate. Before the round, read your case out loud, read through your blocks and frontlines, etc. You can’t script everything that is going to happen in the round, but you can get yourself in the right frame of mind to make good decisions in the round. Alternatively, maybe trying to do too much before a round psyches you out. If you know that’s true, plan ahead – have a simple pre-round routine that won’t get you too locked into your preparation. The general point is that planning ahead for how you are going to manage your state of mind will help you to be ready to debate your best when the time comes.

3. Get back in the swing of things.

For many of you Nationals will be your first debate round in months, and for most it will be their first rounds on the topic. The combination is a recipe for extreme rustiness. So, finding ways to debate before the tournament is essential. Have practice rounds with teammates, other qualifiers from your district (or one nearby), or with friends who also qualified. For friends from camp or people who are otherwise far away, have rounds over Skype. Don’t be discouraged if these aren’t great rounds – the point is to shake the rust off before the tournament rather than during it.

Best of luck to everyone – swing by the Victory Briefs table and let us know how you’re doing!

Sure, a little time off might we well-deserved, and it’s certainly preferable to burning out half-way through your junior or senior year. But there’s plenty of room in the average daily planner to make this off-season count for something.

Here are a few item to pencil in to your to-do lists.

Reading

If you thought the first task was debate camp, you might be making the same mistake most debaters make (more on that later). Whether you plan on spending most of your break traveling the globe or relaxing closer to home, catching up on relevant reading is one of the easiest and productive tasks to take with you.

That doesn’t mean researching all of the potential topics for next season (although that’s an admirable endeavor). It means digging deeper into the philosophy, political theory and current-event knowledge that make even the smartest debaters still smarter. Maybe it’s not the most exciting summer past-time, but it’s well worth the improved lexicon and nuanced understanding you’ll infuse into your debating.

Camp

Camp isn’t an option for every debater, but it’s a worthwhile investment whenever possible. Beyond the obvious skill development, each week you can spend at camp is another opportunity to build connections in a like-minded network of great people. Debate camp is sort of like learning a new language through immersion–the intense exposure to key concepts and aptitudes yields long-lasting benefits.

Practice

Almost every debater who’s been to summer camp leaves wishing that they had the opportunity to do more practice rounds and get more feedback. In reality, that’s almost always a possibility even when you’re not at camp, even if it takes a little extra effort and initiative. Reach out to debaters in your community and remember that community can be a virtual entity as well. Without the burden of school assignments as prevalent as it will be in September, take advantage of that extra time to improve technique and stay sharp.

Team

This will mean something different to everyone, and that’s OK. Some are already a part of big teams, or at least particularly devoted teams. Others work with smaller or teams or teams with mixed levels of commitment. Still others don’t even have that to work with.

The summer can be a perfect opportunity to increase team cooperation, even if that means jump-starting something that has felt somewhat dormant. When else will you have the chance to really build a team, from the ground up or otherwise?

Debaters who find a way to reach out and work with others are almost always in a much better position to succeed, to say nothing of the value associated with teamwork itself.

Write

It’s not enough to be an avid reader when so much of your job involves communication. That’s a two-way street that requires you to speak, write arguments and articulate those arguments coherently.

There’s almost always something of lasting value you could be writing, whether that’s a framework story you plan to use on occasion or a set of responses to the newest trend. If you can improve your written argument, you can improve the arguments you make in-round.

But that’s where people start to disagree—what exactly should we be stuffing that 1AC with?

The trend of late has looked a lot like a Jackson Pollock drip painting—a lot of splatter with no rhyme or reason—we’ll call it “overstretch.”

The intent has little to do with provoking deep, abstract introspection, and more to do with overwhelming the senses of opponent and critic alike in a chaotic full-frontal assault. The result is a mess, and an unnecessarily difficult 1AR.

Today’s judge typically wants to see that a debater is “ahead” on a key issue, that the principle concern of the debate has been solved in one scenario better than the other. The 1AC should be viewed as a jumping off point for winning a particular argument or two, not every possible argument.

The 1AR is ill-equipped to win everything. It’s also ill-equipped to read enough evidence on particular issues of importance when there isn’t already a wealth of relevant evidence in the 1AC. As it is, good Negative debaters have a pretty easy time circumscribing or otherwise expanding the debate to eliminate and/or mitigate the relevance of 75% or more of the 1AC’s output.

A 1AC prioritizing heterogeneity over depth will also suffering from at least two strategic dangers.

First, the evidence-shrinkage necessitated by overstretch puts the 1AC instantly behind on any potential level of the debate. Allowing 1AR add-ons to do most of the heavy-lifting gives the Negative debater an expanded time advantage—the 1AR will struggle to keep up with the 1NC’s time investments, much less the 2N’s ability to rejoin key issues for a full six minutes.

The 1AR’s best option is to give itself a head-start by limiting the scope of the AC’s offense and instead investing time in key issues. Will your opponent be prepared to answer these? Of course—but under-investing in the development of those issues will make your arguments easier to dismiss or beat head-on. Deeply-warranted and multifaceted evidence is almost never well-answered in the NC, and the AC should take advantage of superior preparation and better evidence.

Second, overstretch proliferates and complicates the responsibilities of the 1AR. Rather than having the opportunity to read more evidence and explain the implications thereof, these 1ARs are forced into a hectic dash across the flow and haphazardly connecting the dots.

Sure, we’ve all seen someone do that masterfully, but for every successful execution, there are countless attempts that fail or miss by a hair. The margin for error is slight—for every “game-winning” trick or slick extension the 1AR hopes to make, the NC must first make a mistake (e.g. dropping or mishandling a random argument somewhere). A strategic paradigm based on your opponent slipping up may work in prelims, but it’s unwise against elite competition. They will be prepared for your tricks and have a few of their own up their sleeve.

The overstretch strategy requires technical proficiency that’s difficult to consistently replicate in such a short time. It requires the 1AR to extend and apply multiple spikes, deal with numerous parts of the flow and tie up all those loose ends into a ballot story that makes a shred of sense.

There’s also a reality about judges they sometimes don’t like to admit—at the end of the day, even those aspiring not to intervene would prefer to vote on arguments that are compelling and substantiated. 1ACs that try to do too much crowd out the opportunity to advance those kinds of arguments.

To be clear, we know empirically that the overstretch strategies work sometimes, but the record of their success reflects how often they’re used more than the wisdom of doing so. When debating against the best of the best, the 1AC is better off deploying a focus and internally nuanced position. Give the 1AR something it can actually work with.

Case-writing is about moving from abstract to concrete. Can you actually put into play what seemed like a good idea on the drawing board? The worst case scenario is to invest lots of time and energy into the “brainstorming” phase of the process and at the end of the day be unable to put proverbial pen to paper. Many promising starts end up as half-finished outlines in the “Island of Misfit Cases” folder on your computer. I hope that adopting some of the following suggestions will prevent you from falling into this kind of quagmire.

1. Think positionally.

The first step in the casing process is to come up with an overarching “big picture” position on the topic. For the Jan/Feb topic, I might decide that I want to write a case about subjective self-defense or critiquing Battered Women’s Syndrome. A common mistake is getting locked into case details before solidifying the big picture. When I’m developing a case position, I’m not thinking “What is my standard going to be?” or “What is my contention level offense?” The casing process needs to be more dynamic so that your case structure can organically reflect your overarching position more clearly. In other words, it is difficult to construct a compelling position piecemeal. For your argument to cohere, the case should be structured around the argument you want to make, rather than trying to jury rig the argument to fit the case structure you’ve decided on.

Having a unified, coherent position allows you to do much better strategic planning. Thinking about how positions interact allows you to think more clearly about how individual arguments function rather than trying to confront opposing positions with a series of disconnected, one-off objections that ultimately complicate a ballot story rather than simplifying it. It also allows you to access the literature base on a given case position more easily.

2. Let the evidence drive the position.

Another common error I see in the casing process is to commit to a case position before you know whether the evidence exists to support it. This will manifest itself in constructives with lots of tag lines and “Insert Card Here” in parentheses all over the case. Instead you should start the casing process by getting a good sense of the literature. This will not only improve the quality of your arguments but also improve your efficiency. There are few things that waste time more than investing in a case position only to find at the end of the day that there just isn’t the evidence to support it. Instead of racking your brain to solidify an abstract idea in your head, delve into the research to see what the literature gives you. Without this step debaters often end up winging it on critical links that can derail the whole case position or require a total restructuring.

You may feel like you are wasting time cutting cards that won’t necessarily go into the case, but your underlying knowledge of the case position will serve you well when trying to deploy it in rounds. Moreover, you will understand the other side of the position so that you can more effectively answer it, and often you will use any evidence that doesn’t go into the actual constructive as frontline or extension evidence. If you are going to commit to this case position, you will never be sorry that you have a big file on the subject.

3. You are not done when you write the constructive.

When most debaters set out to write a case, they think that means only writing the constructive speech. In fact, that is only the first step. The skill which will set you apart is the ability to deploy that case position in rounds. That requires planning. Frontlines, blocks, and extension evidence better explaining particular aspects of the position are all important to include in your case file. During this process, you should again be thinking about how your arguments will interact with opposing positions. What arguments can you extend to control the internal links to major impacts? What arguments can you make to weigh your impacts against common disadvantages?

During this process, you will likely want to go back and revise aspects of the constructive speech. For example, if your AC on the Jan/Feb topic does not allow you to make a compelling argument to control the link into patriarchy impacts, you may want to tweak it to facilitate making that argument. At the end of the day, your goal is to walk into the round not only with four to six pages you can read in the constructive, but a position that gives you the tools to strategically engage any opposing position you’re likely to encounter.

Reasons to feel this way abound, of course. The judging at local tournaments is typically inconsistent at best. The competition may be less of a challenge when compared to national invitationals. And it should go without saying that traveling across town is rarely as exhilarating as packing one’s bags for New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

These instincts aren’t wrong—they’re just incomplete. They fail to acknowledge the unique advantages of debating locally, benefits that affect both students individually and our broader community. First and foremost, these tournaments are opportunities to build rapport with other teams, coaches and judges that you can actually interact with face-to-face on a regular basis. Given the extent to which debate has thrived as a virtual online community, it’s easy to forget it can thrive in real communities as well. There’s no limit to the kind of good these relationships can do for you, both in terms of debate and in terms of life.

Teams should be doing more to promote local tournaments for a number of more concrete reasons, as well.

1. Access

Local tournaments are the best opportunity most debaters have to compete. With the expenses and time commitments associated with traveling across the country, there just aren’t many options for anyone facing tight budgets and/or schedules. This increased access to debate is essential to the activity’s constituent virtues—we ultimately want as many students as possible engaged in the research, writing and argumentation that characterize debate’s core pedagogy. Few activities have the same potential to transform a student’s academic and personal development.

2. Skill Diversification

The beauty of local tournaments is that we never really have to choose between developing more intensive research and rapid thinking skills on the one hand and improved speaking and persuasive skills on the other. The national circuit leans in one direction, while local circuits lean in the other. This is a good thing—it allows for the best of both worlds. That isn’t to say both of those worlds couldn’t do a better job as fostering their respective skills, but it does mean we’re more or less headed in the right direction. Debaters will naturally prefer certain styles or find themselves better suited to particular strategies, but that’s not a reason to neglect the opportunity to broaden one’s skill set. Is it challenging to package your argument in a way that anyone could understand? Absolutely! And that’s why it’s a good thing.

3. Innovation

While national circuit debate always seems like it’s on the cutting edge of every trend imaginable, it’s worth remembering that much of the innovation we see on the national level probably started in local and regional enclaves. I’ve seen countless positions and strategies tested out at local tournament before they’re introduced at a travel tournament. In this sense, local and regional tournaments can operate as laboratories for experimentation and a natural discursive extension of the team itself—a space for collaboration, practice and support.

4. Branding & Outreach

Debate has too often come to resemble golf—a “country club sport” that really isn’t much of a sport at all. What’s worse, the styles typifying debate at the national level have put a face on the activity that the outside world doesn’t find very attractive. That’s a separate discussion to be sure, but the beauty of local tournaments is that they allow it to be a separate discussion. If we want more parents and schools to support our community, we should be highlighting just how inclusive this community is. The last thing we want  to do is so dramatically eschew the integral role of public speaking. For a lot of people, debate represents an opportunity to hone real-world discursive skills, and local tournaments maintain a space for debaters to do just that.

5. Practice

Even if you can set the above-mentioned interests aside on account they’re lofty pursuits of “the social good,” there are self-interested reasons to attend local tournaments too. It makes a lot more sense to try out new case positions or strategies 20 minutes away from home than in another state. Local tournaments are an affordable and less time-consuming chance to try out new things. If nothing else, they’re an opportunity for repetition.

For many debaters, local tournaments simply aren’t feasible due to crowded travel schedules. In these instances, rare attendance at local tournaments is understandable, but there should be room for compromise. Rather than attending your 10th bid tournament, why not show up at a local tournament and support the hometown?

Some of the most fondly-remembered people from my years in debate are the coaches and debaters I ran into weekend after weekend at local tournaments. My coach may have been the one twisting my arm to attend those tournaments, but I was almost always glad I did.

Why Debate Should Teach Us Humility

It’s always struck me as odd when top-tier competitors, judges and coaches exhibit arrogance and condescension. Everyone who has had some success at any level or has participated in the activity long enough has been guilty of this at one time or another (me included). A certain amount of pride and confidence will naturally accompany competitive achievement, but we all know that this can cross the line into unjustified confidence and disrespectful attitudes and behavior. I don’t claim that this problem is widespread; by and large I think the people in our community are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But we have all seen debaters, coaches and judges cross the line, and a little self-reflection on this problem is healthy.

In a speech at the 2011 IPPF tournament, John Sexton (the President of NYU and an experienced debate coach) offered a thought that struck me. Debate is the perfect vehicle for teaching us how to think in the 21^st century, when technology is making the world smaller and our communities are by necessity becoming more diverse. We learn through debate that there are reasonable perspectives on both sides of just about every issue, and that persuasion in a pluralistic community relies on appealing to different points of view and building common meanings. When we look for the truth in both sides of a resolution and look for ways to resolve those tensions, we not only recognize diverse perspectives, we practice living in a world where they are the defining dynamic. This skill applies to the classroom, to the boardroom, to politics and public policy, and to our everyday choices. This is not to say that we shouldn’t stand up for our core beliefs (I’ll save the discussion of postmodern indifference for another time), but rather that we are likely mistaken to regard ours as the only defensible perspective and act as if all others simply exhibit a failure to think as well as us.

Beyond that, I hope debate teaches us that nobody is perfect. There are no perfect debaters – everyone gets beaten, everyone has a bad round or a bad tournament. There are no perfect judges – everyone misses an argument or makes a mistake in reasoning out an RFD. There are no perfect coaches – everyone advises a bad strategy, loses their patience or their perspective every once in a while. Everyone has been a beginner – every debater, coach and judge was once a bad debater, coach or judge, simply because we didn’t know better. I hope this reminds us of the importance of patience, and knocks us off our high horse when we remember what it felt like to be on the bottom rung.

Finally, debate should teach us an appreciation for what we don’t know. Many of the issues we debate have been debated for hundreds or thousands of years. There are volumes upon volumes of commentary, a seemingly endless supply of source material from which to draw in discussing just about any resolution. By the end of our debate careers, most of us have learned to reserve judgment on a topic rather than express our knee-jerk reaction. We have learned that we don’t yet have enough information to construct a reasoned position, and that by the end of a topic we’re likely to be thoroughly confused. Even when the core tension in the topic is empirical, many debates arise simply from the fact that we haven’t yet definitively answered the question. In the long run, does targeted killing undermine global security by feeding the narratives of terrorist groups, or is this outweighed by the reduction in their operational effectiveness? Some day we could know the answer to that question, but right now the best we can do is guess. By necessity we extrapolate from imperfect information in all aspects of our lives, and everyone will revise her opinions over time. The experience of abandoning some of the convictions of our youth should make us less cocksure about our opinions in the present.

Why Debate Sometimes Fails To Teach Us Humility

Despite all this, we sometimes go astray. Because our activity is competitive, we will always have a rank conscious culture. Who has won the most rounds, the most speaker awards, the most tournaments, beaten the best debaters, and earned the most prestigious titles? There is nothing wrong with recognizing achievement, but we should be leery of the pitfalls associated with constructing celebrity. This is particularly difficult to avoid in the internet age, where results are instantly communicated via Facebook, Twitter, and various debate sites; many websites, Victory Briefs Daily included, have struggled to find the right balance. There are many skilled debaters, coaches and judges, and they should be recognized for their ability, but no one is beyond reproach. It is unfair to them and unfair to the community to insist that they are.

Beyond that, communities are often full of cliques. It would be easy to blame this entirely on the fact that our participants are high school students, who are notoriously cliquish, but we are all guilty from time to time. We identify ourselves on the basis of teams, debate styles, camp affiliations, geographic regions, age and experience, etc. These associations are inevitable and often healthy, but they also facilitate building ourselves up in relation to out-groups. The “us versus them” social dynamic can override what debate teaches us about the importance of recognizing diverse perspectives.

What We Can Do About It

Our community is large and dynamic, and arrogance is not the type of problem that we can hope to solve completely. That said, we can all do things to make sure that this important character lesson is not lost on debaters, and at the same time make our community a more pleasant place.

Students:

All of us can be more reflective about the way we treat others. Let’s do away with the label “random” opponent. The connotation that if you haven’t heard of them they must not be good is supremely arrogant. Also, let’s drop the sense of entitlement to perfect tournaments and perfect judging. Having run many tournaments and judged many rounds, I can assure you that neither is easy. The community has a right to expect a certain level of effort and competence in these roles, but when individuals inevitably fall short from time to time, we should be understanding. Your righteous indignation when others fall down reflects a lack of perspective, and you might learn that lesson the hard way when someday your positions are reversed.

Don’t build yourself up by tearing others down. There is nothing wrong with choosing your style and executing it with conviction, and there is nothing wrong with disagreements about what the best style is. If you allow disagreement to turn into personal enmity (especially for people you’ve never even met!), you’re letting arrogance get the best of you and missing a valuable opportunity to learn from friendly interlocutors (and meet some cool people).

Don’t participate in making the community an unwelcoming place. Mean spirited gossip does this. Racist and sexist remarks and actions do this. Condescending to someone who is less experienced or who debates in a different style does this. Humility means recognizing that yours is not the only perspective, and your amusement or disgust are not the only emotions of which you should be mindful. Also, teach other people. You were a beginner once, and you benefited from the generosity of others. Use your knowledge and experience as a resource, not a justification for arrogance.

Being thoughtful, kind, and humble are virtues – thinking you’re always right is not. Of all the things you will take away from debate, I assure you that will be one of the most important.

Judges:

You should try. Stumbling in after a night of drunken revelry, then demanding that debaters supply you with three different colors of pen, cardstock paper, a timer, a laptop and a pillow obviously suggests that you think this enterprise is all about you.

Similarly, berating debaters for technical mistakes or stylistic differences indicates that you think that yours is the only valid way to view debate, and the debaters should be awed by your superior intellect and debate knowledge. Instead you should give constructive feedback in every round. As I said above, you were once the beneficiary of someone’s thoughtful critique – now you have an opportunity to do the same.

Finally, not paying attention because you think a round is beneath your judging abilities is superlatively disrespectful to the debaters who have worked hard to prepare. Sometimes we’re tired and it takes a lot to muster the attention that the round deserves, but making an effort will make all the difference to the debaters.

To many debaters, judges represent the community of adults in the activity. Be thoughtful about how you want to represent us.

Coaches:

I believe that the most important thing a coach can do is model the choices we want to see in our students. When we are condescending and arrogant, our students will be condescending and arrogant. It’s amazing how much debaters pick up the personality traits of their coaches. We need to be mindful of the responsibility that creates. Teach the difference between confidence and arrogance. Engage disagreements respectfully – we can voice our opinions and simultaneously work to prevent legitimate discussions from devolving into flame wars. We can treat opponents, judges and tournament officials with respect even when we disagree. We can teach our students that every choice they make reflects on their character, and we can be invested not just in their competitive successes but also in the people they become.

We are stewards of the activity. It was well attended by those who came before us, and we are presently shaping those who will come after us. Everyone hopes to get something different out of their experience in debate, but we can all appreciate that encouraging thoughtfulness and humility will not only help our community effectuate these diverse goals, it will also make our students better people. Regardless of trophies, medals, and certificates, a student who learns the value of humility, to my mind, will have had a successful debate career.

First, there’s no unique advantage to broadening the scope of a particular debate on this topic. Anything that can be learned in the abstract about targeted killing can just as easily be learned through concrete examination of a proposed targeted killing.

Conversely, failure to address the specific dimensions of the targeted killings has the potential to create absurd and tangential discussions. Sure, there may be some value to imagining targeted killing as a tool to be used by anyone for virtually any reason, but there’s more value to assessing its realistic, short-term applications. There’s nothing revolutionary about this kind of prioritization—we encourage students to think through their college plans before taking up questions about their retirement.

If there are indeed broad philosophical or theoretical concerns with the use of targeted killing, then that scrutiny should apply equally to any specific policy (e.g. targeting a particular terrorist, Iranian nuclear scientists, etc.). To the extent broader concerns are irrelevant to these specific policies, all the more reason to save them for another day. Therein lies the double-bind for those insisting on a “whole-res” approach: the topic literature at risk is either so significant that it remains germane to a plan debate or it is insignificant enough to justify transcending the scope of the plan.

Aside from the benefits to students, a plan-based debate just makes sense in this case.

Targeted killing may be widely used within the parameters of certain national security threats, but it is still practiced on a case-by-case basis. It may be a systemic operation, but recourse to targeted killing in any given instance is still subject to separate cost-benefit analyses. Rather than resting upon the vacuous assertion that targeted killing is merely a ” tool in the toolbox,” a plan gives the 1AC both strategic ground and commensurate responsibility. When the 1N runs a disadvantage, the 1AR can’t shift ground and say, “Well, targeted killing wouldn’t be used in that instance.”

A plan requires the 1AR to defend something. Assuming that something is of reasonable broad scope, then there should still be excellent negative ground.

Note that this probably means defending more than a lone targeted killing. It should defend a policy that reflects a category of scenarios in which targeted killing is justified. In this case, the 1N can describe disadvantages, and it can reject the identifiable logic of the policy. This is also consistent with empirical implementation—targeted killings aren’t entirely one-off events. They’re justified as components of a policy, not as isolated and exceptional circumstances.

The idea that a plan circumvents the foundational tenets of LD is also troublesome. There’s absolutely no reason a plan debate can’t incorporate important philosophical premises: the legitimacy of anticipatory self-defense, the use of realist foreign policy, the dominance of Western interests, etc.

To be clear, these aren’t just reasons it would be permissible for 1ACs to run plans—they’re reasons they actually should.

It isn’t an accident this topic was written and selected at this particular juncture in history. Our debates should reflect that.

Please pardon our delay.