Reminder: students must register as league members before they’re eligible to compete.
Tournaments are a vital component of forensics. These competitive environments are where students put into practice all of the information they have acquired in class. Plus, competition is the primary way that students improve in speech and debate.
In fact, students who compete regularly throughout the season often know significantly more on the topic (resolution) than students who only participate in class or club meetings.
Below you’ll find general rules for tournaments and information on how to host your own tournament.
Every year, the league and member schools host a number of tournaments for students to compete at and refine their skills. To ensure that all competitors receive an opportunity to compete and to better keep track of all competitors records throughout the season, all member schools should adhere to two requirements regarding tournaments:
1) It is strongly suggested that each member school host at least one tournament during the regular forensics season (October – April).
2) In order to qualify students for the Championship Tournament, each regular season tournament must submit a full copy of the results and a backup of the tournament data that was used to tabulate the tournament.
These policies are designed to give every student the opportunity to compete and qualify for the Championship Tournament. Additionally, these policies help league staff accurately track each competitor’s record throughout the season.
Find everything you need to know to host a tournament at your school. Click through the tabs to find out what functions are in a tournament, what supplies are needed, and how to set up a room for competition. Plus, how many volunteers you’ll need and where to station them.
Coaches, look at these documents first to get an overview of what hosting a tournament looks like.
To add your tournament date(s) and information to the league calendar, you’ll use an online submission form that will provide all the details of your event, enabling league staff to promote your tournament.
For league-hosted tournaments, there are two different forms used to register students and register judges. For your own tournament, you can devise whatever registration system works best for you. It can be as easy as other coaches emailing you their registration information. Or you can establish a shared spreadsheet that can be filled in. Since it’s your tournament, you decide how competitors and judges register to attend.
If you need additional help and ideas, simply contact the league office.
When setting up your tournament you will need to select which format you would like to host. This could be:
You can build your tournament based on the suggested tournament schedule provided below. Hosts are welcome to make time changes as long as the tournament meets the league standards to be considered “sanctioned”.
The following sheets and templates are available for download. Please utilize these when hosting your tournament.
Each tournament event requires a specific ballot to be used for judging. Please download and print the following ballots for each event you incorporate at your tournament:
Do you need to know how to get your judges trained? Great news! We have two judge orientation videos to help acquaint your judges with debate. Check out the two different team policy debate judge orientations (short and long versions) as well as a tutorial on navigating virtual tournaments.
We also have a power point judge orientation for both speech and debate that can be downloaded.
Regardless of knowledge or prior experience, this is a communication activity and anyone 18 years of age or older is welcome (and encouraged) to participate as a judge.
When hosting a tournament you have a few options on how to tabulate scores. Team Policy Debate can be done electronically through the TRPC software or manually using tabulation cards. Manual tabulation is beneficial when the tournament is 20 teams or less. The TRPC software is great for tournaments that have more than 20+ teams.
Manual tabulations lets you pair teams that the software would normally stop considering (side conflicts). While not desired, there are instances where a school will face another team from the same school. Tournaments that are small may have no other options but to do so.
The TRPC software takes the computation out by power matching and pairing teams based on the scores entered per round. The software program is great for a larger tournament and will save time in tabulation.
The TRPC (Tab Room on the PC) and TRIEPC (Tab Room for Individual Events on the PC) software programs are available free for download by visiting the developer’s website and clicking the appropriate links at the top of this page.
As a reward for hard work, tournament hosts should provide awards at the end of the tournament. Below is a couple of examples that you can use to determine the number of awards to order in advance. As the host, you can adjust trophy orders based on size and budget. Additionally, you can use a spread sheet order form to keep your awards organized.
Team Policy
Speech Events (Based on the # of Entries per Event)
For tournament entries with 17 or less competitors, we recommend that awards do not exceed 50% of the total number of individual competitors. (For example, 8 entries = 1st-4th place.)