Debate: The MHL Workship 2012

Saturday was a great day.

First of all, there’s something about looking out at that sea of new faces at the beginning of the year. Most of these people are not only here for the first time, they’re here at some new place to learn some new stuff that they really don’t know much about. I’m really proud of the workshop and what it does. We had great attendance, and I think we learned a lot about improving it for next year. I think we also had some great discussion about working with the debate community as a whole, either for the NYSDCA or the MHL, depending on which might be relevant. (And of course there is a lot of overlap between the two.) That’s one of the nice things about this day, the chance for coaches to sit down and talk in a relaxed atmosphere, when we’re not trying to get out a round or whatever. How often does that happen?

I think the biggest takeaway this time out was the need to trim the sessions down to 45 minutes. We just go a tad beyond the traditional attention span, not only for the listeners but for the presenters. We can still cover all the same stuff, just in more, shorter sessions. Simple enough. We also saw a lot of benefit in the solid local seniors working with the young ’uns that we want to develop, and I’ll talk about that separately some time this week. In the event, in any case, how sweet is it that one of the top debaters in the region and one of the rising debaters with the most potential to become likewise, staged the demo round? And, of course, no one paid for any of it. Good stuff.

My sessions were, first, the parents. Quite a good turnout, which surprised me. I went through the hoo-ha of what to expect at tournaments and why we need them to help out and all that, and then walked them through PF, which nowadays is mostly where they’ll land. I do sort of think that the age of the LD parent judge is fading away, if it hasn’t already.

The next session was O’C and I and the Monk (this is why there’s a glossary, people) going over the life with the new coaches, of which there was quite a large number. We talked about what tournaments were the best to try, the skinny on the Ivies, invitationals, travel, housing, etc. When I was a new coach, I pretty much had to figure out things on my own. I also had to register for everything by snail mail. Times have changed for the better.

Then we met, i.e., the NYSDCA, and discussed all sorts of business. As I said, I’ll relay that here over the next few days.

The final session was the most fun. Kaz and I were going to do separate sessions with the noobs to brainstorm the Modest Novice topic, but given the numbers that were left at the time, we decided to pool our resources. Hence we did an ad hoc team leadership deal that was absolutely great. We complemented one another’s thinking, while meanwhile keeping a reasonable amount of control on the group (i.e., the usual number of people who always have their hands up versus the others who need to be recognized if they even blink). Anyone who was in that session and is debating next week at the first-timers’ got a really good leg up. And Sheryl and I had a ball doing it. Almost as much fun as the DiDeAd. But not quite.