TOC 2011 Part 3

So in LD, a brand of debate has been created especially for the TOC. Those debaters who prefer this brand habituate certain tournaments throughout the year at which the brand dominates, or is at the very least accepted. You cannot access this brand locally in any quantity. Because this brand is, if nothing else, limited in its preferred judge pool, most regional tournaments can, at best, come up with only a couple of judges truly brand aware. These judges are for the most part actively engaged in promoting the brand, either as full-fledged or part-time coaches, meaning they are attached to the debaters who debate the brand. When a preponderance of these debaters and these judges get together at a particular event, then you have what we call a national circuit tournament.

One chooses for oneself, as a coach or a debater, what path to take. Obviously, a coach selecting a path brings a team along for the ride, although there are occasionally students who blaze their own path separately. The determination to do circuit LD debate, where the TOC brand is applied, has some prerequisites. Chief among these is serious mazuma. First of all, you need money to get the training to be a TOC debater (camp). Then you need money to get to TOC debate venues (the national circuit). And to have success, you need personal coaching. The circuit, being small, is finite, and it is not terribly hard to track what all the members of the circuit are running, and figure out how to deal with it, and to come up with comparable positions of your own, but if you’re also going to high school once in a while (and at most circuit debaters go to high school only once in a while at best), you need someone to do this for you. As a general rule, you or your coach hire associates. As I say, mazuma. Big piles of it.

Because of the expensive buy-in, pretty much all the same organizations attend all the circuit events year after year, because only a small handful of organizations can afford it. My school certainly can’t, although individuals in my school can—and have—on their own dime. Of course, to some extent organizations come and go, but for the most part, there are debate schools, and those debate schools go to the debates, wherever they are. How often does your high school ping pong team get on a plane? How often does the average circuit debater? The reason the same schools show up year after year is that they have the resources. They usually also have fine, professional coaches capable of handling those resources, but the resources are a must. Sure, a couple of schools sell enough pencils to the blind to cover all their expenses, but most don’t. Schools are paying the bills, or parents are paying the bills, but somebody is paying the bills, because the bills are there. Airlines don’t let you fly because they like your aff.

So it’s debate schools, the same debate schools again and again, that comprise the national circuit. On the fringes some individuals come and go, but those same debate schools are there all the time. And when the TOC rolls around, they’re definitely there too. Take a look at the names of the schools over time, the ones with the students who have won, if you don’t believe me. You could say, well, they just happen to be good, and maybe they are, but that’s not my point. They are also, first, blessed with financial resources and second, using those resources on a very specific, very small universe of debate. An analogy might be a big school that has a great football team year after year. In that situation, no doubt the school provides great coaching, great practice, great prep rooms and equipment, benefits of time out of class not granted to the hoi polloi, and maybe even a nifty stadium. Once you provide the environment for greatness, and if you have the resources (in football a big enough population so that you can find athletes, in debate a smart enough population), you can probably do it over and over. Can you be the top team every year? Probably not. But can you be among the top teams? Probably yes.

Again, there is nothing wrong with any of this. Some schools have more resources, and some schools have lots of smart kids, for whatever reasons. I don’t begrudge them this. But not having these resources means that schools won’t participate as these schools do. The good news is that in many cases these resource-poor schools can still provide plenty of great benefits, academic or athletic, without having to be on the so-called top circuit. From an educational point of view, the benefits of debating at a hotly contested regional event with no bids is probably indistinguishable from the benefits of debating at an octos tournament, much as the benefits of debating LD or Policy or PF are relatively indistinguishable from one another: although each might accent different aspects of the art of debate, they are all still debate when practiced seriously.

No matter how you slice it, the national circuit really is the $ircuit, statistical deviations notwithstanding. Again, nothing wrong with that, if you’ve got the money. And if you don’t, all the benefits ought to be available for debaters for whom the $ircuit is a mere chimera. The $ircuit is a tiny percentage of overall debate. Because the buy-in is so great, overall debate doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the $ircuit, and vice versa. There may be stylistic influences from the $ircuit to the real world, but that is to be expected in any active pursuit, where new ideas are always bouncing in. They’re going to bounce in from somewhere, and the forge of camps and $ircuit is a natural source, considering that these also inform much of what we might call the debate media. I mean, even this blog is way more than merely cognizant of the $ircuit: I tab week after week, often at tournaments with serious bids (and just as often at novice tournaments). I’ve been on the LD advisory committee. I just tabbed PF at the TOC and LD and PF at the NDCA.

The question is, then, given that we’ve demonstrated that the $ircuit exists with the dollar sign, how does that affect TOC?