Sailing toward CFL Grands

Tuesday night is, of course, when the mariners get together and fondly reminisce about the good old days when debaters were debaters and proud of it. We concentrated on a couple of things that are worth sharing.

First, there is the question of following up a tournament, i.e., what do you do for the next tournament based on your performance at the last tournament? The answers tend to vary from person to person just as the results and performance vary from person to person, but a few things seem pretty basic. First of all, all cases need to be rewritten, although the level of rewrite will vary. If you did well, what you should be looking at are just little things, areas where your opponents were always zeroing in that need strengthening, or sentences that kept tripping you up, or maybe upgrading evidence; after all, the day you stop researching a topic is the day you decide you don’t want to win any more rounds. If you didn’t do so well, you’re looking at anything from a complete rewrite to a serious overhaul. While it’s nice to blame sunspots, judges and the quality of the ziti in the cafeteria for lack of success, usually weak cases play a crucial role in the losing of rounds. Starting from scratch may be a lot of work, but given that one definition of insanity is expecting different results from doing the same thing over and over may suggest that if you don’t rewrite your cases, you’re pretty much certifiable. (And in debate circles, being certifiable is really taking things to extremes, given that everybody is already mostly crazy to begin with.) The second big area is responses. Rounds that aren’t lost at the case level are lost at the response level. Obviously choice of what to push and what to let slide is something that can only be determined in hours of lost sleep over regretted choices made in the heat of argument, but having good responses in the first place is something else altogether. If you don’t have a response to everything you heard (or saw on some other flow), get one. If you don’t have a piece of evidence to back every response, get one. You certainly won’t use all your responses, but you’ll feel better knowing you’ve got more than just a handful of arrows in your quiver. And as for evidence, it’s one thing to respond to your opponent by saying, “Nyah, nyah,” and another thing altogether to respond to your opponent by saying, “As Immanuel Kant said on his daily walk through Konigsberg, ‘Nyah, nyah.’” You won’t use a quote in every response, but it’s good to use some in the responses that are most important in supporting your position or knocking out your opponent’s position. Given that it is highly unlikely that you already have a quote for every response, and, as I say, research never ends, this is an easy area for improvement.

The other thing we did was prep for Grands. We’re not big preppers, at least at meetings, but given that the Panivore and the People’s Champion are doing Pffft together for the first time, and that SuperSquirrel is doing a topic that was picked yesterday and is still a little green around the edges, this seemed like a good idea, and it turned out that it was. The Pffffters look to be in decent shape, and good suggestions were gleaned from the assembled multitudes, including from Termite, who seemed mightily disappointed that Zizek never came up in the conversation, mostly because he was the only person in the room who can pronounce Slavoj correctly. On the LD side, S-S’s cases were full of solid material, so much so that each one ran about an hour and a half, but a little judicious editing should help that. And so, on to Grands, which is not going to be a picnic for anyone, with the usual bunching of the top area talent all competing for 6 slots in each division, plus for me the usual Grands tabbing nightmare.

Oh, yeah. We also talked about which judges hate which debaters’ guts. Very enlightening, and not at all true. Dropping you a hundred times does not mean you are hated, merely that you haven’t won the last hundred times. Nothing personal. It’s all business. Like The Godfather.