Debate: Mostly Jake

We had the first Speech Workshop of the season at the chez last night. As always, this was a very useful event. I watched two of our seniors, our Coca Ptains, do their DIs, and was very impressed. The point of these sessions is, of course, to break down what they’re doing point by point, but they didn’t need a lot from us. A little strategy here, a little nudge there, that sort of thing. We’ll have another in a couple of weeks to help out some more people. While we were at it, we discussed Speecho-Americanism as practiced by the Sailors in general. It was all good.

Big Jake opened prefs and strikes last night. O’C and Bietz and I spent a lot of time discussing this over the weekend. My thing is, you have 6 categories, from most preferred to strike. You can adjust them in tab as you see fit. The traditional thing to do is to have 1 through 4, then 5 is conflicts and 6 is strikes. Which means that everybody gets the chance to strike, say, 10% of the field and then conflict another 10%, which ultimately adds up to striking 20% of the field. But the tournament is giving you only 10% strikes, plus a what you need as conflicts. Using the normal system, you can turn that 10% strikes into 20%, conflicts or no conflicts. I don’t buy it. That means you just get way too many strikes. As I see it, every tournament allows you a few strikes to eliminate judges you know are toxic to you. That’s fine, although MJP almost removes that necessity. In any case, the more options you give somebody to eliminate judges, the more they will take you up on that option. This is where tournaments start catering to people who can only debate a certain way. As the VCA knows, I believe that MJP works against that, if everyone uses it. But MJP, plus 20% or so strikes, is effectively a true corralling of the judge pool the way you want it. And that’s too much. At some point you have to win over judges who are inimical to your style or position. If Romney and Obama only had to convince their constituencies, we wouldn’t have to hold the election, and we certainly wouldn’t have to have them debate. They have to win over the so-called undecideds. So should high school debaters, if they’re any good. If a high school debater is only good in front of some judges, that is fine, but it’s a limit that should be acknowledged. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s less competitive than the debater who is good in front of all judges. You’ll never convince me otherwise if we’re talking about the benefits of debate for high schoolers.

Anyhow, we worked it out at Jake that the rankings of 1-5 are real, and could happen. The ones down at the bottom probably won’t, but they could. At Yale, with a smaller pool, we had 4 categories plus strikes, which worked fine with that smaller pool. I think I had one 4-4 in a down-and-out round. As for conflicts, you go in and mark them in tabroom separately from everything else. This should mean that people just go in and conflict people who they really have a conflict with. This is as it should be. We’ll also give conflict sheets to the judges on arrival, but everyone knows that the judges never pay attention to those until after they’ve been assigned a round judging someone with whom they have a conflict. Given that most of the judges are supersmart college kids, the inability to plan the obvious five minutes ahead of time is fairly set in the genes. We’re used to it by now. Sigh.