General Discussion

Where all my speech and debaters at? What events do you guys do?

I'm a 2nd year Lincoln Douglas debater with a little bit of experience in policy debate and this is my first year doing HI and USX/NX.

No longer in high school, but I did parliamentary!

My school's team was super small and there was a lot of silliness and not a lot of serious debating.

The first time I went to a tournament, a couple of us decided to check out another event so we could see what it was like. We came in at the very end, where someone's conclusion was basically 'this is bad because it would devalue the US dollar, leading to nuclear war with China'.
We found out afterwards the topic was 'Should California build a high speed rail?'
That's a slope so slippery it must have been greased. It of course immediately joined all the other jokes the club had.

@Vertigris ooh nice! Is parliamentary is kind of like congress?

The PF debaters on my team are like so serious and they often get "violent" as in screaming at their opponents and jumping out of their seats when they're about to give a speech.

Wow what a conclusion... US dollar devalued leading to nuclear war with China. This sounds like a debate... maybe policy? Do you remember what debate it was?

Lol that conclusion sounds nothing like the topic.

We have a couple jokes regarding kants and on our team hoodies from last year it says "kant touch this" on the back. This year it's fake supreme but it says hegemony. The year before it said "go with the flow" on the back of the long sleeve shirt and said "kiss my aff" on the sweatshirt. Last season when some of our members went to California for a tournament there was a PF team that ran a K on arms and it was the body part arms not like weapons arms. Ahh debate days...

Our team motto was 'we talk good'. We never got shirts though, there were only like 10 people on the team and it was mostly really casual. Debates/speeches in class for practice could get really weird and silly... I think one time there was a debate over which of two things made a better gift, one being a squid.

But yelling! I can't believe they were allowed to get away with that, I hope they never tried it at a tournament.

I don't remember the 'nuclear war with China' event but I think it was one of the ones where you prepared for the topic ahead of time (which makes that argument so much worse). I just hope that person didn't win.

Parliamentary is 2-on-2 with almost no prep - you learn your topic only a few minutes before the debate. Then the team that goes first gets to define the terms more specifically, so those few minutes of prep could go right out the window for the second team depending on what the first does. Things could get a little messy but it was a lot of fun. So pretty similar to public forum I think (but less aggressive, apparently!)

@Vertigris ohh for us we have like many people on our team. Like... 50 or 60ish???

Yeah I think I remember last weekend we had a PF team where one of the kids was yelling at his opponent and he still won.

Oh ok so maybe like PF, CX, or LD debate. Have you ever heard of people running Kritiks or counterplans in LD or PF? I know those are kinda common in CX as I ran a counterplan the one time I did policy. I also hope that person didn’t win either.

Parliamentary sounds pretty fun. Wish we had that on my circuit.
Supposedly LD should be super civilised since we discuss morality but I’ve been in a couple really violent LD rounds where we were both yelling at each other and at the judge. Oh boy, not fun. PF for us gets aggressive. CX... literally just people hardcore spreading like 400 words per minute. I’m not good at spreading and my partner wasn’t either (we both agreed I was the better spreader) which is probably why we lost all 3 rounds. I main in LD and she mained in interp (she graduated last spring).

@Warmonger
Congrats on your success! Wishing you well for this year.

Speech and debate has lots of different events. Some require that you completely memorize a speech. Some let you use notes. Some give you only a few minutes of prep. Some you do alone, some with a partner. Lots of options if you're interested!

And I know some clubs in my area required their members to go to at least one event, but at my school that was optional and a lot of people never did.

The tournaments were pretty fun when I went to them, although I probably got an odd perspective of it since my school's team was so small and we never really expected to win anything. I think the most people we ever had at one event was 4; one time someone asked us if we were looking for our school's team and we had to tell them 'no, we are our school's entire team'.
It's practically an all-day thing and there's a lot of waiting around between relatively short events. Despite what Gaming4Lyfe has said about crazy debaters, everyone I talked to (even my opponents) was friendly and polite.

@Vertigris

My team is pretty big but we don't often have too many people going to tournaments each weekend. One tournament we won a small entry sweepstakes award. Our LDers are at most 2nd year so we don't typically break finals but we have really strong PF teams and at almost every tournament, at least one PF team from my team breaks finals.

I've had to deal with crazy debaters (and one of my novices had to deal with one too) but in my experience, people who do interp tend to be really supportive of one another and we're all really friendly to each other. A lot of inexperienced judges tend to get put on interp (at least in my circuit) but sometimes, lay judges are put on PF and LD.