LDDebate.org

Wanted to scoop Cruz, here yall go

TOC APPROVED TOURNAMENTS IN L-D FOR 2009-10

The following L-D debate tournaments are OCTAFINAL qualifiers for 2009-2010:

Apple Valley (MN)
Berkeley (CA)
Emory (GA)
Glenbrooks (IL)
Greenhill (TX)
Harvard (MA)
St. Mark’s (TX)
Victory Briefs (Archer) (CA)

The following L-D debate tournaments are QUARTERFINAL qualifiers for 2009-2010:

Alta (UT)
Blake (MN)
Bronx Science (NY)
Crestian (Pine Crest) (FL)
Hendrick Hudson (NY)
Lexington (MA)
Stanford (CA)
Valley (IA)
Yale (CT)

The following L-D debate tournaments are SEMIFINALS qualifiers for 2009-2010:

Auburn (WA)
College Prep (CA)
Columbia (NY)
Dowling Catholic (IA)
Golden Desert (NV)
Grapevine (TX)
Harker (CA)
Iowa Caucus (IA)
Meadows (NV)
Monticello (NY)
Ohio Valley (KY)
UT (TX)
Wake Forest (NC)

The following L-D debate tournaments are FINALS qualifiers for 2009-2010:

Arizona State (AZ)
Colleyville Heritage (TX)
Federal Way (WA)
Florida Blue Key (FL)
Harvard-Westlake (CA)
Houston-Memorial (TX)
Isidore Newman (LA)
Newark (NJ)
Omaha Westside (NE)
Princeton (NJ)
Saint James (AL)
Scarsdale (NY)
Sunvitational (FL)
University of Southern California (CA)
Vestavia Hills (AL)
Whitman (WA)
Winston Churchill (TX)

The following tournaments/awards are INELIGIBLE as qualifiers:

• Any round-robin, summer institute, NFL CFL, or state championship tournaments (even if conducted by schools/universities which host TOC approved tournaments)
• Any speaker award at any tournament (even if earned at TOC approved tournaments)
• Any tournament held outside the eligibility period (September 1, 2009 to March 1, 2010.
• Any tournament not on this approved tournament list unless added by the TOC Director.

TOC APPROVED TOURNAMENTS IN POLICY DEBATE FOR 2009-2010

The following Policy debate tournament are OCTAFINALS qualifiers for 2009-10:

Berkeley (CA)
Blake (MN)
Emory University (GA)
Glenbrooks (IL)
Greenhill School (TX)
Harvard University (MA)
Montgomery Bell Academy (TN)
St. Mark's School (TX)

The following Policy debate tournaments are QUARTERFINALS qualifiers for 2009-10:

Alta (UT)
Georgetown Day (DC)
Golden Desert (NV)
Grapevine (TX)
Lexington (MA)
New Trier (IL)
Ohio Valley (KY)
Stanford (CA)
University of Michigan (MI)
University of Redlands (CA)
University of Southern California (CA)
University of Texas at Austin (TX)
Wake Forest University (NC)

The following Policy debate tournaments are SEMIFINALS qualifiers for 2009-10:

Bronx (NY)
Colleyville (TX)
Dowling (IA)
University of Georgia (GA)
Gonzaga (WA)
Houston-Memorial (TX)
Iowa Caucus (IA)
Kansas City Community College (KS)
Lakeland (NY)
Maine East (IL)
Meadows (NV)
Valley (IA)


The following Policy debate tournaments are FINALS qualifiers for 2009-10:

Arizona
Auburn (WA)
Florida Blue Key (FL)
Fullerton (CA)
La Costa Canyon (CA)
Long Beach (CA)
Marquette (WI)
Omaha-Westside (NE)
Pennsbury (PA)
Samford University (AL)
Vestavia Hills (AL)
Whitman College (WA)



The following tournaments/awards are INELIGIBLE as qualifiers:

• Any round-robin, summer institute, NFL CFL, or state championship tournaments (even if conducted by schools/universities which host TOC approved tournaments)
• Any speaker award at any tournament (even if earned at TOC approved tournaments)
• Any tournament held outside the eligibility period (September 1, 2009 to March 1, 2010.
• Any tournament not on this approved tournament list unless added by the TOC Director.


TOC APPROVED TOURNAMENTS IN STUDENT CONGRESS FOR 2009- 2010

CONGRESS AUTOMATIC QUALIFIERS:

Debaters who broke at the 2009 TOC
Finals at the 2009 NFL National Tournament
Top Six at the 2009 CFL National Tournament

The following Student Congress debate tournaments are SEMIFINAL round qualifiers for 2009-2010:

UC-Berkeley
Florida Blue Key
The Glenbrooks (IL)
Harvard University
NFL 2009 National Tournament

The following Student Congress debate tournaments are FINAL round qualifiers for 2009-10:

Catholic Forensic League National Tournament
Crestian Classic (FL)
Emory University (GA)
George Mason (VA)
Golden Desert (NV)
Grapevine (TX)
La Costa Canyon (CA)
Myers Park (NC)
University of Texas
Villager (PA)
Wake Forest (NC)
Winston-Churchill (TX)
Yale (CT)

CONGRESS TOP SIX

Arizona State (AZ)
Bronx (NY)
Harker (CA)
Manchester (MA)
Nova Titan (FL)
Pennsbury (PA)
University of Pennsylvania (PA)
Rufus-King City Hall (WI)
Shrewsbury (MA)
St. Marks (TX)
Sunvitational (FL)

Top Six in the Super Congress at the February Illinois Congressional Debate Association Tournament

TOC APPROVED TOURNAMENTS IN PUBLIC FORUM DEBATE FOR 2009-2010

PUBLIC FORUM AUTOMATIC QUALIFIERS WHEN COMPETING WITH SAME PARTNERSHIP:

Octafinals at the 2009 TOC
Octafinals at the 2009 NFL National Tournament
Octafinals at the 2009 CFL National Tournament

The following Public Forum debate tournaments are OCTAFINAL qualifiers for 2009-10:

Apple Valley (MN)
UC Berkeley (CA)
Dowling (IA)
Emory (GA)
Florida Blue Key (FL)
Glenbrooks (IL)
Harvard (MA)
Meyers Park (NC)
Princeton (NJ)
Stanford (CA)
Yale (CT)

The following Public Forum debate tournaments are QUARTERFINAL qualifiers for 2009-10:

Alta (UT)
Arizona State (AZ)
Bronx (NY)
Columbia (NY)
Crestian (FL) Florida
George Mason (VA)
Golden Desert (NV)
James Logan (CA)
Lexington (MA)
Manchester-by-the-Sea (MA)
University of Pennsylvania
Villager (PA)
Wake Forest (NC)

The following Public Forum debate tournaments are SEMIFINAL qualifiers for 2009-10:

Harker (CA)
Hudson (NY)
La Costa Canyon (CA)
Lincoln-East (NE)
Nova Titan (FL)
Ohio Valley (KY)
St. Mark’s (TX)
Sunvitational (FL)
Valley (IA)
Victory Briefs (CA)

The following Public Forum debate tournaments are FINAL qualifiers for 2009-10:

Blake (MN)
Cheyenne East (WY)
Freemont (NE)
Grapevine (TX)
Indianola (IA)
Lincoln-Southwest (NE)
Mountain Brook’s (AL)
Millard West (NE)
Ridge (NJ)
Scarsdale (NY)
Springfield (MO)
Topeka (KS)
Whitman (WA)

All 2010 NFL Qualifiers from districts with two or more qualifying teams if the qualifier is certified before March 10, 2010.

EDITED: To add Sunvitational as a finals bid in LD, because UK sent a correction email adding it to the original list. Also edited to fix Crestian's state.

I acknowledge being scooped. (I was about to post the link from VBD.)

A tournament -- the Sunvitational at University School in Florida -- was accidentally omitted from the list. Linda Barker has sent out an e-mail clarifying that it is indeed a finals bid.

Also, "Hudson (NY)," which is how it's listed in the original e-mail, should be Hendrick Hudson.

Was there a legitimate justification for making VBT an octas bid and Stanford a quarters bid? Please don't embarrass yourself with an answer that doesn't actually provide an argument.

Why did Manchester lose its bid?

Yes, there was.

Oh, hey, the Crestian is in Florida I think.

Dave, I'm serious. It's not as if the VBT pool was substantially better than the Stanford pool. On the contrary, the Stanford pool had 4/4 people in sems break at toc, 6/8 people in quarters break at TOC, and 7/16 in octas. VBT had 4/4 in sems break at toc and no one else up to octas. The Stanford pool included both TOC finalists. VBT had a brutal schedule that produced a stupid final round because we were all too tired by the end. Stanford spread the tournament over 3 days this year and didn't run too late.

Daniel- I can't speak for the TOC bid committee, but I can think of a few reasons why VBT might be thought worthy of replacing Stanford as an octos bid.

First, I don't think that your argument for Stanford's relative superiority is very strong. I'm not really sure how you can meaningfully compare the "strength" of two tournaments' pools when they have different bid levels; clearly, Stanford attracted at least some of those hot shot debaters because it had an octos bid (and will probably see at least some of them not attend now that it has a quarters bid). The fact that the differences in the numbers of qualified debaters are small anyway (6/8 vs. 4/8 in quarterfinals, 7/16 vs. 5/16 in octofinals) seems to be an argument in VBT's favor. Moreover, I'm not sure that using the number of debaters clearing at the TOC as your proxy measure for pool strength makes much sense. Though this isn't the case here, it's not hard to imagine there being a tournament with a weak overall pool that happens to have 5-10 really good debaters in it who make it to late outrounds. It seems that if you want to make an argument for Stanford based on pool strength, you would need to use a broader metric (like total number of fully-qualified people in outrounds, total number of bids represented in outrounds, total number of bids represented at the entire tournament, etc.).

Outside of pool strength, I can think of at least a couple reasons to favor VBT over Stanford for an octos bid. Stanford tends to be run well (or as well as it can be given its structural problems) when Dan Meyers or Cherian or someone of that caliber runs tab, but in years in which that hasn't been the case, the tournament has been a mess. I'm not sure it makes much sense for the TOC committee to depend on having an outside tab director come in each year to hold the tournament together. The difficulty that the Stanford debate team has running the tournament itself isn't the fault of the team's members (who are all smart and capable people); it reflects the difficulty of developing institutional knowledge in an environment where there is lots of year-to-year turnover in staff. This is an issue that affects lots of college tournaments that depend on their debate teams to run the show. By contrast, VBT is run by an organization that the TOC committee can reasonably expect to be in this for the long haul. If nothing else, I would expect Victory Briefs to be much more sensitive to criticism and willing to implement changes in its tournament than the Stanford debate team, the members of which tend to be much more detached from the LD (and general national circuit) community.

I think the strongest argument for VBT is based in a concern for regional diversity in bid allocation. Stanford is within 45 minutes (and one week) of another octos bid tournament, and CPS (also about 45 minutes away) just added two more (long overdue) bids. Harker (30 minutes away) also has a semis bid. Southern California, by contrast, has just two finals bids in addition to VBT. I've never understood why regional diversity gets so little play in discussions of bid allocation - putting more bids in areas where they are low helps to build up local circuits and expand the range of people for whom qualifying to the TOC is a goal (or even a possibility). Those seem to me to be unambiguously good things, and they strike me as more important than the marginal differences in pool strength on which your argument is based.

I ran the numbers two years running on quarters bids. Initially my goal was to argue for a bid increase for Valley. However, the numbers -- bid representation, students in elims clearing at TOC (basically, a bunch of metrics of strength of pool) -- all revealed that VBT was far and away the best quarters bid in the country. Next up were Valley and Blake, with Valley slightly ahead, but VBT crushed us both.

So if there were to be a quarters bid elevated VBT made sense from that perspective.

There were also tournament management concerns. I haven't been to VBT in two years, but generally that tournament hasn't had the kinds of structural problems Stanford has had.

Having inside knowledge about both tournaments (acting as LD tab director for VBT and "Tab Consultant" for Stanford) I have to 100% agree with Dave. In terms of responsiveness, concern for the community, and even things as nuanced as motives I think VBT is bound to be a better tournament over the long haul.

Stanford rose to an Octas bid based on the hard work of Cherian and the strength of its Round Robin. Neither of those are present any more, nor is there any indication either is returning. The tournament may be able to ride the wave of support it gained over those years for a little longer, but permanence is unlikely.

Maps of the TOC qualifying tournaments.
2007-2008 http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/8551/bids0708.png
2008-2009 http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5845/bids0809.png
2009-2010 http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/7417/bids0910.jpg

Those maps are really helpful, but I think it does show that TOC bids aren't exactly spread out evenly.