We closed registration for the fifth of our Online Debate League events last night. The tournament is Saturday.
I can go back way into the darkest days of the pandemic and find my musings on what we might do with the idea of virtual tournaments after it was all over. It was something that had never before been possible, that was devised and pretty quickly institutionalized by the reigning arbiter of debate activity, the National Speech and Debate Association. The tools were—and still are—there. In-person events are inarguably preferable, but we now had an engine for something else altogether. How to enable that engine was the question.
A few regular tournaments on the calendar, for one reason or another, have simply gone completely virtual. Space is the usual reason for this. It seems that it has become ever harder for hosts to find enough rooms for a tournament. Colleges and high schools, after the forced hiatus of the pandemic, see no reason to reopen their doors to the thundering horde of forensicians anymore. There's liabilities and custodial concerns and at times even simple ignorance of what these debate people are actually talking about. You want what? When? For the whole weekend? Some venues haven't disappeared completely, but they've split up into partially in-person, partially virtual. Maybe one or two divisions are on the campus, the others are on the computers. There's even the option of hybridization, where some of the participants are there and others are online, which I think is the least attractive of the possibilities, offering neither the benefits of a live tournament nor of a virtual tournament. I showed up in an empty classroom in Paducah after a five hour bus trip to debate some schmegeggie on my laptop? Na'ah.
The calendar, at least in the Northeast, has more or less completely gone back to live, although some folks have moved toward live for most of the tournament and virtual for the last few elims. This allows everyone to get home after the main body of the event, and limits the virtuality to the elite handful of top performers and judges. This seems to please everyone, more or less. It allows for gentler scheduling of the main event, it empties the buildings, and it gets people home at the most decent hour.
And then there's our ODL, the Online Debate League. As I said above, thinking about what we could do virtually after virtual was no longer a necessity was the genesis of the project. The thing that especially started it was the simple reality that the northeast has practically no live policy debate anymore. Few schools have policy teams, and few tournaments offer policy divisions. Once upon a time policy was the only debate. Now it's not. (The reasons for this are complicated and a whole other discussion, so we'll table that discussion for now.) But there still are schools, mostly big programs, that still have policy teams. So we created the Online Policy League to provide rounds for those schools. The price is virtually at cost (we do have to pay to use the NSDA's tools), and location is of no consequence. We'd offer novice, intermediate, and varsity divisions. And we'd see what would happen.
The OPL did pretty well. We ran some tournaments, and people came, not crazy high numbers but enough to warrant continuing to do it. Over time we polished up the back end of what we were doing as we got the hang of it. And from there arose the ODL, which aimed to bring LD and PF into the arena. An argument could be made that LD is on the same diminishing track as Policy (again, a subject for another day), and offering rounds seemed like a good thing. And at that point, why not throw in PF too? Yes, PF, unlike LD and CX, is thriving and probably the default high school debate activity these days, and once you've opened your virtual doors to everyone else, what's the harm of including PF? Additionally, we officially folded the league into the infrastructure of the NYCFL, so we'd have some way to handle the financial side of things, operating under the umbrella of a real institution. Et voila, ODL.
We're rounding the final turn of this season's set of tournaments. I'll be honest with you: I wish it were bigger. I wish more people were taking advantage of it. We had to do a bit of juggling for Saturday's tournament to make it viable, combining a division or two, that sort of thing. Ultimately it will be fine and it will achieve the express goal of the league, to provide rounds, and the educational experience that comes with the rounds, to any interested school. My thing has always been, the more rounds the better. Want to get good? Practice. (What a revolutionary idea.) ODL, if nothing else, is good practice. It is something to prepare cases for, it is a place to try out your ideas, it is a place to get the hang of things, to maybe get judged by someone who will be judging you later in the month at a live high-stakes event. Whatever. I don't feel a terrible need to justify its existence. I just wish I knew of ways to get more people aware of that existence.
Oh, well. This was, realistically, only year one. I don't think any of us are planning to throw in the towel just yet. At least I'm not. I've got nothing to lost.
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