Last Wednesday night on TVFT we talked about, first, CatNats, and then TOC. It’s either amazing or remarkably mundane that all you have to do is point us in the right direction and we’ll immediately start blathering. It’s what we do best.
The subject of CatNats was not a positive one. I haven’t been for a couple of years, but I’ve honestly mostly enjoyed the experience because it’s usually been in an interesting city, and you get to see people you may not have seen for a while, and you get to hang out with friends and your varsity folk. I’ve never given much thought to the tournament itself because it just always seemed to be there, iconic, locked into what it was, and you went because you went. In our universe, the NYCFL is very active. Throughout the year we have plenty of speech events, plus two big debate events, plus our qualifier for Nationals. That qualifier is tough. Usually there’s a dozen competitors in the field who could easily grab one of the six slots. One just falls into the lockstep of participation, and since qualifying is such an accomplishment, one aims for it.
Then there's the tournament. The thing is, it runs differently (in debate) than every other tournament, in ways quite contradictory to what we usually proselytize on TVFT. It's not transparent by any means: not only don't they tell you who won which prelims until days later, they don't even announce the winners of the elim rounds until the next elim is posted. It's got too few rounds for a meaningful break. It's exhausting. It's expensive. It's got random (and often inexperienced) judging uncharacteristic of a national finals event, with no paradigms and, for that matter, no identification of the judges. It's got lag pairing and, perhaps, three out of five random rounds (but we don't know much about these, because of the lack of transparency). It's got an odd number of rounds. It is, in a word, the anti-tournament.
Still, as I say, I haven't given it much thought. I have no expectation that it will change, and no interest in changing it. It's not evil, it's just lost in some universe different from the rest of our debate universe. I push our Speecho-Americans toward it as their culminating national event, if they're up to it. But should I be pushing our LDers? I really don't know. But I have to admit that after last week's conversation, I'm beginning to have my doubts.
4 comments:
So what would you push your LD'ers to attend as a culminating event? You've already expressed issues with the way the TOC is run, the NFL is too impractical for your school system, and the NCFL is something of a poorly run tournament. What becomes the championship the normal debater in your program strives for? NDCA? Though NDCA has it's own issues with size. It's kind of hard to see a tournament that only has about 40 kids and accepts anyone who applies until they get to 70 as a national championship either (though I really do like the way NDCA is run and it definitely has potential). But so what does the end of year culminating event become?
There were 41 states at ncfl nationals. It's difficult to argue that it's not a valid national championship
I'm replying to Dan tonight. As for the 41 states, no doubt there were fifty states at Harvard, but that does not make Harvard a valid national championship. You need more than just numbers.
Anonymous: How many of those 41 states had LD competition? How many of those 41 states had qualifying events to send kids to the NCFL as opposed to sign-ups?
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