Debate: Open Letter to Our Colleagues in the Region

Although we are sending this via the mailing lists of the MHL and the NYSDCA, we do not claim to speak officially for those groups in this message. We speak entirely for ourselves.

We are not quite sure what we are up to these days as a region. On the one hand, we are rich in opportunities for debate. On the other hand, schools are not taking advantage of these opportunities. Schools pick and choose what tournaments to attend based on criteria that are seemingly self-defeating and demonstrably tournament-defeating. No one has anything to gain by this. If tournaments disappear from the schedule, venues that have time and again proven capable of hosting complicated contests over the span of a weekend will disappear, as will their desperately needed fund-raising, and the number of rounds available to everyone else’s students will diminish accordingly.

This is not acceptable.

First of all, as a region, meeting and competing week after week, we have a, dare we say, social contract to support one another. You have your tournament, I have my tournament, we all try to get to all of them. Obviously no one can be in two places at once, but given a choice of place to be, local should be first.

However, that doesn’t seem to be the real issue, i.e., folks traveling great distances to attend tournaments rather than those in the region. The problem instead is simply schools not supporting local events. We believe that every program needs to ask itself if it doesn’t have an obligation to support the programs of its neighbors, often on a reciprocal basis. The reason a team attends a tournament is not so that the hosts will attend the team’s own tournament, but by the same token, if a team does support a given tournament, doesn’t that tournament bear some responsibility in returning that support?

Secondly, the tournaments that seem to be suffering from what we see as neglect are not the powerhouse local tournaments. The tournaments that are hurting usually offer no TOC bids, and are perceived as unappealing to the top varsity debaters in search of those bids. Quite honestly, there is sense to this, that the top varsity debaters would seek competition at their own level, especially those with the talent and drive (and money) to attempt to qualify at the national circuit level. But this is not every debater on a team. An active program with members at every grade level absolutely has students who are not on the TOC trail. Some may be some day; some may never look in that direction. Do we abandon them? Do we believe that because they are not as competitive, they don’t deserve the benefits of forensics? Do any of us really want to live in that world?

Obviously we are referring to the immediate situation of the Monticello tournament, but that tournament is not alone in this. But we’ll stick with that. Monticello has no TOC bids. It is not a tournament that will appeal to a program’s top varsity. But it is a proven tournament, for more years than almost any other event in the region. It is a most hospitable school, year in and year out. And on the flip side, it is a program that actively attends virtually every other tournament in the region. They are there, week in and week out. Their own tournament is capable of being a fantastic opportunity for younger debaters in the region, in all three divisions. The SATs always make this a relatively senior-free event. Whose sophomores don’t need more rounds at this point? If they’re coming off great success at Yale, they can have another chance to succeed before being eaten alive at the NYC Invitational. They can amortize the work they’ve done on their Sept-Oct cases. They can get more experience traveling and being housed, with all the maturing benefits that derive therefrom.

It would seem that, looking at the debate calendar, it is sophomores and lightly seasoned juniors who have the fewest opportunities for meaningful rounds throughout the season. Sophomore year is the hardest year of debate, and the one most likely to kill the ambitions of a rising student. This is the year they don’t come back from after continuous defeats at the hand of varsity folks. Sure, for some of them it is a hardening in the forge of competition, but for most of them, it is bleak and unrewarding. And not much fun. They leave forensics and go on to other, more personally rewarding activities. Non-TOCish tournaments allow these younger, less competitive students to enjoy the activity on all fronts.

And it is the non-TOC tournaments, or the not-enough-bids ones, that we are abandoning. Once they are gone, they will not come back. There is no one around here to take their place. Gone will be gone, and maybe their programs will fade along with them. This is not gloom and doom, this is reality.

We do feel that there are some intrinsic issues with the nature of what has hitherto been known as JV or Intermediate debate that should be addressed, and in fact, the meeting of the NYSDCA board last Saturday brought out a basic plan to do so. In effect, it would be the idea of creating a new level of debate and new tournament programs for that level, heavily supported by the NYSDCA and the MHL. But the point now is not to make those proposals. The point is, frankly, to express disappointment with us, as a region, for not supporting ourselves. This needs to change. Dramatically. We all love forensics too much to allow ourselves the luxury of losing programs and tournaments by allowing them to become dispirited.

There is probably nothing we can do to fix Monticello this year. It has lost its PF division entirely, and will run with a small (but we hope productive) LD division and a reasonable Policy division. But there will be other tournaments coming up. We need to support them. All of them.

It’s as simple as that.

Jim Menick, Director of Forensics, Hendrick Hudson High School
Jon Cruz, Director of Forensics, The Bronx High School of Science