UW has made a few changes to our hosting schedule for this year. We'll still be hosting four high school tournaments for the 2021-22 season. The date of the UWRR and High School Tournament changed by one weekend (the second weekend in December instead of the first), and we added an LD division to the UWRR.  

The UWRR (12/9-10): The UW Round Robin is our policy and LD debate round robin for Wyoming teams only. **We have added an LD division this year.** This tournament will be online, have no fees, and no judging requirement. Compete to win the Sandy S. Patrick Trophy! Please express an interest in entering directly to Matt Liu (mliu6@uwyo.edu). Note: if the UW HS Tournament is in-person, this tournament will likely move to January and remain online.

The UW High School Tournament (12/10-11): all events welcome, this tournament is focused on local Wyoming debate. This tournament will tentatively be online and will have no entry fees.

The Western Series @ UW (2/11-13): a tournament for LD and policy debaters. The Western Series is our take on bridging local and national circuit debate in an accessible, high-quality forum. This tournament will have no fees for anyone in the Mountain West. More details can be found here or on the Tabroom page. 

The Western States All-Stars (4/29-30): this is our regional policy debate championship. It is a round robin format with two pods. This tournament will be online, have no fees, and no judging requirement. Compete to win the Western States traveling trophy!
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[Pictured: last year's UWRR and Western States winners with the respective traveling trophies]

This year's WFI had a panel of guest coaches to talk about the States Counterplan on the water resources topic (and beyond). Our amazing guests included:

• Jasmine Stidham, coach at the Harvard-Westlake School and Dartmouth College
  
• Mike Shackelford, director of the Rowland Hall debate team
• Marge Strong, coach at Presentation High School and Michigan State University
• and Maggie Berthiaume, director of debate at Woodward Academy.

Check it out here! 

UW has locked in our tournament hosting schedule for next year. We'll be hosting four high school tournaments in the 2021-22 season.

The UWRR (12/2-3): The UW Round Robin is our policy debate round robin for Wyoming teams only. This tournament will be online, have no fees, and no judging requirement. Compete to win the Sandy S. Patrick Trophy! Note: if the UW HS Tournament is in-person, this tournament will likely move to January (and remain online). Please express an interest in entering directly to me.

The UW High School Tournament (12/3-4): all events welcome, this tournament is focused on local Wyoming debate. It is TBD if this tournament will be in-person, online, or hybrid.

The Western Series @ UW (2/11-13): a tournament for LD and policy debaters. The Western Series is our take on bridging local and national circuit debate in an accessible, high-quality forum. This tournament will have no fees for anyone in the Mountain West. More details can be found here or on the Tabroom page. 

The Western States All-Stars (4/29-30): this is our regional policy debate championship. It is a round robin format with two pods. This tournament will be online, have no fees, and no judging requirement. Compete to win the Western States traveling trophy!
​
[Pictured: last year's UWRR and Western States winners with the respective traveling trophies]

Author: Lawrence Zhou, UW assistant coach, WYVA coach, Team Wyoming coach

Team Wyoming had an incredible showing at the 2021 WHSAA State Forensics Tournament! We had finalists in every single division of debate – cross-examination (policy) debate, Lincoln-Douglas debate, and public forum debate!
 
In particular, congratulations to Hot Springs’ Jean-Luc Wilson and Jacob Randall for reaching finals of policy debate; Lander Valley’s Kephas Olsson and Mark Susanka for closing out Lincoln-Douglas debate; and Cheyenne East’s YuYu Yuan and Alexa Mejia for championing public forum debate (and additional congratulations to YuYu for being nominated as a Wyoming High School Forensics Association Ambassador)!
 
Team Wyoming members also constituted a significant portion of the other elimination rounds: WYVA’s (Niobrara) Kaitlyn and Jaden Campbell were in semifinals of policy debate, Green River’s Jessica Petri was in semifinals of Lincoln-Douglas debate, and Natrona County’s Artis Winfrey was in semifinals of public forum debate.
 
Many other Team Wyoming members also put up an impressive showing at the state tournament, scoring wins against some of the best debaters in the state: Green River’s Carter Tuttle in policy debate, Green River’s Faith Duncan and Laramie’s Sophia Gomelsky in Lincoln-Douglas debate, and Lander Valley’s Claire Lane in public forum debate.
 
Finally, shoutout to Niobrara’s (WYVA) Logan Rubottom for placing fourth Dramatic Interpretation (and first in his division)!
 
Team Wyoming is a testament to the fact that regular practice and inter-squad competition helps everyone. We have big plans to expand next year and to further help contribute to improving Wyoming forensics. And if you’re not already part of Team Wyoming, we strongly encourage you to join us next year! It should be even better, especially as we improve on the lessons learned from this year. 

Whereas the Round Robin theme was ingenuity and argument innovation, the State theme was probably something more like adaption and consistency. The Round Robin was characterized by lots of elite, hired judging which enabled the debaters in the pool to run with arguments that might not fly with more local judging pools. Unsurprisingly, the Round Robin saw debates that were, on average, faster and more technical than the average local Wyoming tournament. However, the State Tournament did not have such a judging pool. Of the 24 judges entered to judge policy, only nine judges had a listed paradigm on Tabroom.com, and more than one of those paradigms was simply to encourage the debaters not to speak too quickly.[1] We could not rely on deeper files, technical jargon, or wacky arguments to win. Instead, we had to adapt.
 
In that sense, we had some advantage because WYVA had some prior experience in other debate events which were more oriented around persuading more traditional judges. On the other hand, WYVA had also spent the entire season being exposed to more “progressive” and technical forms of debate and one of the hardest things to do is shedding a lot of the bad habits associated with those styles.[2] To help facilitate this adaption, we had a few Team Wyoming sessions dedicated just to talking about adaption and practicing speaking conversationally and without unnecessary debate jargon. In retrospect, I wish we had done a few more practice sessions because knowing how to adapt and actually being able to do it in round are two totally different things.
 
We also had to think about how to beat these teams with more experience than us. In particular, we had to figure out how we would debate against Rock Springs and East, the two teams that had consistently beat us throughout the season (unsurprisingly, Rock Springs won States and East was in semifinals).
 
Aff Prep
Now I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t think that deeply about the strategy to defeat those teams. I was swamped with other debate and schoolwork. And there’s only so much that you can do in terms of cutting new positions at the State Tournament because there’s a natural disincentive to break positions that are too far out of left field. But we did go in with one big strategy change: another new aff.
 
New affs are valuable because they deflate the value of (limited) pre-round and pre-tournament preparation and force debaters into unscripted speeches. You also get the benefit of anticipating the most likely responses to your aff and extensively frontlining them out which saves more of your very precious in-round prep time for thinking about how to execute your strategy as opposed to thinking of the strategy in-round.
 
Of course, not all new affs are good, so why did we choose not to read mandatory minimums or the tax crimes aff? Well, we actually did read mandatory minimums in the first aff round. Despite it being an aff that everyone has read all season, it is still a good aff – it’s just one of those affs that probably doesn’t solve that much, but what it does solve is pretty obviously bad, and doesn’t cause any real harms. The only thing you have to be prepared to answer as the aff is just the standard slate of bad generics like the states counterplan, the federalism disadvantage, and different flavors of backlash disadvantages. If you had a decent 2AC to those positions, you’d probably win most of your rounds all else equal. Unfortunately, the part that concerned us was the “all else equal.” Good teams can make bad arguments sound good, and we were just at an experience deficit against East and Rock Springs.
 
The tax crimes aff was also viable, but it’s just not an aff very friendly for most local judges. If we had gotten a judge favorable to that affirmative position, we would’ve definitely read it.
 
So we prepared to read the mandatory minimums aff for most of prelims but saved our new aff in case we hit either East or Rock Springs.
 
And hit them we did. In the second aff round, we were hitting East, so we broke the new aff. The new aff was about hotspots policing, a policing strategy that focused police resources in very specific “hotspots” of crime. Unlike the vast majority of other affirmative cases read in Wyoming, this aff was not “soft on crime” but rather “hard on crime.” While this seems at first glance to be a very odd strategic choice (the resolution is already fairly aff-biased because many hard on crime policies are just clearly ineffectual and counterproductive), it actually made a lot of sense. The aff was actually written for WYVA’s NSDA District Tournament specifically to read against East. The reason it was strategic is because almost every single one of East’s arguments they had been reading throughout the year was only against affs that were “soft on crime” like eliminating mandatory minimums or the death penalty. We knew that reading an aff in the complete opposite direction of their link arguments would throw them for a loop. Even if East had the prep or the ability to spin their arguments in-round, it would take them a few speeches to adapt in the time-pressured round which would be all that we needed to get an advantage over them. Plus, we knew that East would not read a kritik against us, so we could comfortably get away with saying the police were good without getting into trouble there.
 
Ultimately, we didn’t win against East in that round – they are formidable opponents and managed to spin their arguments to apply to this aff. However, the aff still served us well and we read it in the third aff prelim round and in both the quarters and semis. Even though we lost the surprise factor of reading the aff in those subsequent rounds, teams were still not able to compile a particularly deep case neg against it in the 24 hours since we broke the aff, and because this aff sidestepped the vast majority of team’s neg prep on this topic, it still threw many teams off their blocks and gave us a competitive advantage.
 
This aff came from a time when I was walking to the grocery store listening to a podcast episode from The Weeds which offhandedly mentioned a study about hotspot policing and how it was widely accepted in the criminal justice literature. I was intrigued, so when I got home, I started researching it and I discovered the literature base for it was surprisingly robust, so I immediately cut the aff in preparation for Districts. Aff inspiration can come from anywhere, which is why I strongly encourage so many of my students to listen to educational podcasts to just learn more about the world.
 
Neg Prep
As for negative prep, we knew that we had already debated many of the teams throughout the season and we were pretty certain that only maybe one or two teams would break a new aff at State. So, we mostly focused on ensuring that our existing neg prep covered all our bases against the affs we knew people were reading. We didn’t innovate anything in particular, just refined and updated our existing files. Although, shoutout to Matt Liu for throwing together a politics DA against an aff in under 30 minutes when our files were a little incomplete.
 
Adaption
But that prep is just one part of the equation. Executing that prep is as, if not more, important than doing the prep. I said earlier that the theme of the State Tournament was adaption and consistency. None of the prep we did, from the new aff to the refined neg positions, mattered if it was presented in a way that was off-putting to most judges. Whereas we spent most of pre-round prep at national tournaments talking about strategy and finding last minute updates for positions, we spent most of pre-round prep at the State Tournament talking about the importance of slowing down, sounding persuasive, and adapting to the judges. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if WYVA listened to me give the same spiel about adaption ten times throughout the course of the tournament, because the thing that mattered the most at this tournament was persuading the judges. If they couldn’t understand us (or didn’t want to), then we couldn’t win.
 
In retrospect, I wish we had spent just another week prepping for the tournament, particularly focusing on adapting, going slower, and improving our ethos. In many debates that are close, oftentimes the difference between winning and losing is just whether a judge thinks you sound like you’re winning. While we had a few sessions in which we simulated practice defending the new aff in a more persuasive manner, maybe just another practice round or two could’ve boosted our speaks by just a little, enough to change the seeding and the outcome of the tournament.

This was my second time judging at the Wyoming State Tournament, although I spent most of my time last time judging in the Lincoln-Douglas and public forum pools. This time, I was judging in the policy pool. Overall, I thought the tournament ran well (and I thought it was cool that they borrowed from Matt Liu’s ZRM model), without significant delays in the tournament.
 
Pairings
However, that is not to say there isn’t room for improvement. Many of the pairings came out at inconsistent times. Sometimes, the pairings would come out 5 minutes before the round started and other times it would come out 35 minutes before the round started. While certainly not the worst experience, it is a little frustrating. Having run tournaments before, I can understand that delays are inevitable. However, I do wish some of the delays were more clearly communicated to the debaters. For example, at the East Oklahoma NSDA District Tournament I was judging at a few weeks ago, whenever the tournament would run behind, they would always blast out a Tabroom announcement saying when the new pairings would be released. That allowed judges, coaches, and debaters to not wait anxiously for pairings and allowed them to, for example, get something to eat during the downtime. Hopefully this should not be as much of an issue when tournaments return in-person (hopefully) next season.
 
Oral Feedback
The other major frustration was the lack of oral disclosure in rounds. Written at the top of each ballot on tabroom.com: “Judges should have cameras during judging. No oral critiques should be given. No oral disclosures...must be on separate logins per 2021 online rules. CX is a partner debate.” Now the first part I am a big fan of. There has been a notorious series of incidents across the country where it turned out the judge was not at their computer during the debate, driving during the debate, or even judging two rounds at two different tournaments at the same time. Forcing judges to have their cameras on was a good move – it ensures judge accountability and also is valuable to debaters who can see judge’s non-verbal reactions to their arguments.
 
But the second part about forbidding oral critiques or oral disclosures stands out to me as something that State Tournament should ditch in coming years. I’ll set aside the issue of forbidding oral disclosure for this section (I’ll return to it in a bit) – I could be convinced that not revealing the winner has some value (although I obviously tend to think that revealing the winner is good), but I do think that at least allowing some oral critiques and feedback is valuable even if the judge doesn’t reveal who won. The Wyoming Debate Roundup has already written about the case for oral disclosure and feedback, and I’ve published a longer case for it here, so I won’t rehash the basic arguments for this practice, but I will just add two thoughts about this practice (or lack of it) here:
 
First, it seems especially odd to bar comments at the State Tournament which is, for most, the last tournament they will have on the topic. Apart from the very few teams going to NSDA Nationals, most teams will never argue about criminal justice reform again. That makes feedback that teams will only receive after the tournament somewhat useless. It also prevents teams from improving or iterating on their arguments during the course of the State Tournament. For example, in one of the rounds of policy debate that I judged, I noticed that one team was consistently mispronouncing an author’s name in multiple speeches. I noted this on the ballot but that wasn’t going to be of much assistance to a debater who still had several prelim rounds where they would likely continue to make the same mistake unless someone pointed it out. Being able to just mention to the debater in the post-round feedback session about the proper pronunciation of a name would’ve likely prevent the same mistake in all the subsequent rounds. I think the value of post-round feedback is valuable as teams learn from each round, but especially so at the last major tournament of the year for most teams. As a coach, I do wish we had feedback, especially for novel arguments we were deploying because judge feedback is useful for figuring out how to craft and present those arguments in later debates.
 
Second, when the WYVA team was asking about why the tournament forbade oral disclosure (they were used to receiving it from many of the tournaments they had traveled to), I realized I didn’t know precisely why it was forbidden. After some contemplation, I think the answer has to do with the diverging views on tournaments. I think that roughly, the standard view of a tournament is that the tournament itself is used simply to reward those that did good pre-tournament preparation and that the time following the tournament was the time to learn. I call this the “product then process” view of tournaments – the tournament produces a product, i.e. a result, and then you use that result to inform your process of improving and learning at debate. I think that roughly, my view of a tournament is that the tournament is both an opportunity to reward hard work but is itself also a learning process. I call this the “process and product” view of tournaments – the tournament is itself a process of learning and that can result in a product like a tournament win. These views are very rough and will probably get refined in a later post, but the main point is that I view tournaments as themselves educational experiences to learn from during the process of competing whereas I think the standard view of tournaments is that they are simply competitive enterprises and you can learn from the tournament after. Here, I think it’s obvious that what’s important to many coaches is simply the placement their teams receive at the tournament. That matters, but so to does the process of learning during the course of the tournament.
 
I think my view best accords with debate as an educational activity. I think the immense benefits you can receive from just one good tournament can outstrip the benefits of doing research or speaking drills for a week. I’ve seen debaters make exponential gains in their debate skills from just one good tournament where they had one critic in the back of the room who just gave advice in a way that finally clicked with the debater. I’ve seen teams learn of entire sets of arguments in the prelims of the tournament and then successfully deploy them in elims. The growth that tournaments can afford to students cannot be overlooked.
 
Now, I am not a paid coach at a high school with competitive incentives for success. My pay, or the existence of my program, does not depend on the competitive successes of my team. I think that fact does shape the worldview of some coaches who do need to see results from their students in order to continue justifying funding for their team. I think that leads some coaches at schools to view tournaments as competitive enterprises and the classroom setting as the educational part of debate. I think that’s probably the wrong view because I think that tournaments are often the most educational parts of debate. I think that the process of competing, of debating different teams, and receiving feedback from a wide variety of judges is often more educational than what you learn in a classroom setting (although both are obviously important).
 
I do want to clarify: I would be perfectly happy with banning judges from disclosing decisions but allowing them to offer post-round feedback. While not perfectly in line with my preferences, I think it would be a massive step in the right direction and radically improve the quality of debates locally.
 
Oral Disclosure
However, I would much prefer if they announced results immediately after rounds. Again, we’ve already written about this issue in the articles linked above, but I have a few observations about the lack of disclosure at the State Tournament specifically.
 
First, there should be disclosure in elimination rounds. A huge proportion of traditional tournaments follow this practice. For example, at NSDA Nationals, all elim rounds announce results immediately following the debate. Even in my home state of Oklahoma, they always disclosed results after each elimination round. I think the rationale here is straightforward: the unnecessary stress of waiting for results is not worth holding out. I could see a reasonable exception being made for finals because the announcement during the awards ceremony is meaningful, but in every other round, I cannot see a good case for withholding the results. In almost no other competitive event do you not find out the results of a competition until an hour or more after the conclusion of the competition. The stress that the competitors have about the results is simply not worth it. If a team lost, they should be allowed to enjoy the freedom of being done competing. If a team won, they should be able to begin preparing for the next round without wondering if their preparation will go to waste.
 
Second, information asymmetries are real. Some teams will basically have an advantage of knowing their record because of informal connections to judges, even if those connections are one or two places removed. Teams with connections to judges were able to exploit those connections to obtain information about their competitive record in the middle of the tournament. That results in the worst of both worlds – some teams will know their records and other teams won’t, but that information will disadvantage smaller teams or teams without extensive connections in the debate community, so it is subject to many of the same harms associated with knowing one’s record (whatever those harms may be) but those will be unequally distributed. I think this is especially true at the State Tournament where there is a strong incentive for teams to find out their record and it is difficult for judges to keep their decisions to themselves. Coaches often talk about decisions with other coaches and hired judges may discuss rounds with their friends, and that information can easily get spread knowingly or unknowingly through the grapevine until it reaches the teams whether one intended for that information to be private or not. I don’t think there is a good way to curb the spread of this information because so much of it is gossip and to the extent any clamp down on this sort of gossip is successful, it only further advantages teams with more connections. I think the most obvious way to alleviate this information asymmetry is simply to have oral disclosure after rounds.
 
Third, not knowing one’s record affects one’s performance in later rounds. Every coach of students knows this. If you think that you might have lost rounds 1 and 2, you have a level of uncertainty and pressure that faces you for every single remaining round. That uncertainty and stress translates to suboptimal performance in later rounds. I think it would be best we reduced that uncertainty. 

Overall, I thought this State Tournament was a great experience, not just for Team Wyoming and WYVA, but for everyone involved. While online tournaments are just not the same as in-person events, I thought the tournament went well and helped close a strange debate season.
 
Hopefully you found these thoughts and reflections valuable. If you have any thoughts or comments, please let us know – we’d love to open up more of a dialogue with the Wyoming debate community about these issues. 

If the Round Robin had a theme, it would be that ingenuity and argument innovation are rewarded. In debates that featured new affs or novel neg positions, the team reading new arguments won 5 out of 5 times.
 
By my count, here are when all the major new arguments were broken:
WYVA vs Hot Springs: tax crimes aff
Rock Springs vs Hot Springs: billionaires aff
Riverton vs WYVA: DOJ DA, restorative justice PIC
Rock Springs vs WYVA: climate advantage
Rock Springs vs East: narco-terrorism DA/PIC (not the 2NR, but the 2AC prep drain it spurred, among other effects, can’t be discounted)
 
For me, this isn’t particularly surprising. New arguments aren’t always good, but when they are they catch your opponents off-guard and take away their pre-round and pre-tournament prep. That’s a huge advantage if a debate is going to be close.
 
This was my opening message to WYVA about Round Robin prep: “The Round Robin is 10 days away. That's about 9 days, 23 hours, and 35 minutes more than you usually have after pairings come out. Simultaneously, you'll blink and it will be 1/21. We have more time than we've ever had to prep for our rounds, but I assure you that time is going to fly by. Round Robins are won by teams willing to out-prep their opponents. We've got two aff rounds and two neg rounds, and we know exactly who we're debating. It's time to get serious, and I plan to both show you what that looks like and help you do it. If you both are willing to do serious work to prep for the RR, then I am willing to do serious work for you as well.”
 
In this article, I plan to discuss how WYVA prepped for the Round Robin as part of a broader reflection on how to prep for tournaments. This article is inspired by a post written by a former student of mine; a debriefing of how the University of Kentucky prepared for the NDT. I loved how that post made me think about debate, and hope someone will appreciate this in the same way. I will liberally be linking to whole files we cut for the RR because (a) we open source everything we read on the wiki anyway and (b) WYVA’s dropbox is literally just the Team Wyoming dropbox, which any student in Wyoming can already access if they want to sign up for Team Wyoming.
 
Aff Prep
Right away, we knew we were going to read a new aff. Mandatory minimums is the most popular aff in WY, one of the most popular affs in the country, and was the most popular aff read by the teams attending the Round Robin. We didn’t want that target on our back. Plus, our aff debates were against Hot Springs (a team that outperformed us at the UW tournament) and East (UW tournament champion). These were not opponents we were going to give 10+ days to prep our aff. It was decided: new.
 
A lot went right in our new aff planning and some went wrong. At the WFI I lectured about 5 affs I thought would make strategic affs to read during the year. That is the list we drew from to decide on our new aff. Well, that and an aff about domestic terrorism for which the post-insurrection literature was growing on trees (see below). We decided on the tax crimes aff for a few reasons. First and foremost Montgomery Bell Academy had cleaned our clock on it at the Samford tournament the week prior. The atypical direction of the aff left us with very little to say (a reason I had pushed the aff as far back as the WFI in July). We figured if we read a similar aff our opponents would be in the same position we had been in.  

The new aff played out fairly well against Hot Springs. It was a close debate and I think we would have been in serious trouble if we hadn’t broken new. Unfortunately for Jean-Luc, we clearly weren’t the only school that took Hot Springs seriously. Rock Springs also broke a new aff on him in round 2 (with new affs scoring their second victory at the RR).
 
The tax crimes aff didn’t fare so well against East. Let’s dig into that. First, we called East’s 2NR. We were pretty sure East would go for T. I had seen them debate a few times at States last year, and based on that we prepared for T CJR (bidirectionality), T substantial, and a variety of other procedurals (ASPEC, vagueness). But making the right prediction doesn’t mean making the right call. If we knew they were talented at T, why did we read an aff that gave them a compelling T argument? I don’t have a good answer, this was a mistake in our aff prep and it was my mistake. New isn’t always better – not if you read a weak new argument, or in this case, play into your opponent’s strengths.
 
Mistakes are learning opportunities though. What could we do better next time? We had prepped an alternative mechanism for the tax crimes aff, the self-adjusting penalty work that ended up being read against Rock Springs, and I considered advocating that we read that against East (I thought it would give us a different angle on the T debate). However, we had only cut a few cards on it, and not spent enough time talking about it as a team. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we would have been better off reading it regardless. I also think we would have been better off reading mandatory minimums and focusing our prep on our 2ACs/1ARs/2ARs. Alternatively, we could have saved the new aff for East and not given them the night to prep, but, we couldn’t afford to blow off Hot Springs. The optimal solution, of course, would have been to have a second new aff in our pocket (one that didn’t increase penalties). This was one of our toughest debates, and giving East a night to prep let alone a week was something we probably couldn’t afford. I don’t think that was feasible for our 2-member squad, not even with the help volunteer UW coaches like me pitched in. Next year we’ll be able to start our prep earlier and we’ll try to grow the WYVA squad, developing both a deeper bench and having more of our prep for the year done in the summer.
 
Neg Prep
We had three neg debates to prepare for: Riverton’s juvenile justice aff, Rock Spring’s cash bail aff, and the possibility of a new aff.
 
I’ll start with how we prepared for the possibility of a new aff. The most common 2NRs against new affs are politics DAs, process CPs, impact turns, and kritiks (T should make the list because new affs tend to exist at the margins of the topic, but the complexity of T debates combined with ability of the aff to do deep advanced prep on T blocks means it too often isn’t extended). Kritiks and impact turns were out: we hadn’t had the K lecture yet and the squad is too new to have sufficient impact turn backfiles. Hence we wrote two new positions to deal with the specter of a new aff: the stimulus politics DA and the referendum counterplan.
 
The stimulus politics DA was a solid choice. Biden was literally entering his honeymoon period, the first 100 days of a President’s term when they’re empirically the most likely to get their agenda passed. He had a laser-like focus on COVID relief, that’s a great impact to defend, and there was mounds of good evidence that he couldn’t afford a diversion from a stimulus agenda after dems had just won the presidency and the Senate on the promise of $2,000 checks. Since the link to this politics DA was “the plan / CJR is controversial,” we could be relatively confident the DA would link to almost any new aff.
 
The second new generic we wrote was the referendum CP: rather than “enacting” a new law, submit the idea to the public for a national referendum on whether it should happen. Direct democracy in action. We had good evidence referendums shield politicians from political consequences, making the stimulus DA a net benefit. We had good solvency evidence that CJR is popular. We had an internal net benefit about democracy. Most important with process counterplans, we had great AT “perm do the counterplan” evidence about the word “enact.” I’ve actually had this one in the hopper since the WFI, I’m pretty sure I lectured about it there. We ended up not reading this despite debating a new aff, more on that later.
 
To prep for juvenile justice and cash bail, we scheduled a Zoom call. Brainstorming is always easier with a crowd. For cash bail, we were pretty set on what we wanted to do. Coach Lawrence had judged the aff and was convinced it wasn’t topical. This was the same thesis we had prepped as Team Wyoming at the Holiday Classic for one of the Colorado schools reading jury selection: sentencing is a punishment that happens after a trial (ironically, given their aff, the same T argument Rock Springs won on in finals of that tournament). Like jury selection, bail is before the trial. That’s not sentencing (and it’s definitely not policing or forensic science). We felt pretty good about this one. We also felt very good about an algorithm shift argument that Jaden had written, and we had some other pressure points in the 1NC to make sure Rock Springs wouldn’t be able to focus on T (but if Rock Springs had read cash bail, T would have almost certainly been the 2NR). I would have been pretty confident about that round. Rock Springs decision to read a new aff at the RR was a very good decision, imo.
 
Juvenile justice took longer to plan. Kaitlyn did the neg, and while she cut some amazing solvency arguments, she was impressed by the aff and worried about them winning a big risk of their advantages. We chatted in the Zoom for awhile. We kicked around a lot of ideas. We talked about some advantage CP ideas, we talked about a PIC out of violent criminals (murderers). Those didn’t end up making the cut. One that did make it was the restorative justice PIC. Coach Lawrence was deep in this literature already and knew there were some good restorative justice bad arguments (definitely not a defense of traditional incarceration, hence the PIC: all the aff except restorative justice). The idea that made us confident about this debate was the DOJ DA. Riverton’s plan specified the DOJ would be responsible for implementing the plan. Biden appointing Merrick Garland to AG had been in the news recently, and the pubic radio chatter was pretty upbeat about what a Garland/Biden DOJ could do for the world. So that was on our radar. We were pretty sure we could cut some good cards about the benefits of a focused, undistracted Biden DOJ. The cards jumped off the page. The warming scenario was found pretty quickly and chosen because the turns the case evidence for warming turning structural violence are top-flight. Add to that the DOJ incrementalism cards and we felt great about winning the DOJ DA solved the aff better than the aff.
 
We only cut the DOJ DA for juvenile justice, but with a little reworking this could be one of the better generic DAs on the topic. The key is the link, and I think the place to focus to make the link work is the idea of backlash and litigation: folks who don’t like the plan will sue the DOJ and tie them up with lawsuits.
 
Practice Debates
After Carly Watson and Eric Lanning (Michigan State University) won the NDT in 2010, I remember their coach Will Repko talking about what their new aff prep looked like. Repko talked about how the idea for the aff was conceived in the fall, written in December, and practiced January and February before it was read for the first time in the finals of the NDT in March. This influenced a lot of my thinking about new arguments: they’re wasted if you don’t practice them.
 
We didn’t get in quite as much practice as I would have wanted. We had three practice debates before the Round Robin, one with the new aff where I simulated a Hot Springs / East mash-up, one against cash bail where Coach Lawrence simulated Rock Springs, and one against juvenile justice where I simulated Riverton. A significant part of our neg prep was planning out the mid-debate and the endgame. We developed “all things equal” block divisions and 2NR plans for each neg scenario. We talked about the most likely contingency plans in case the 2AC didn’t look like what we expected. In a perfect world, I would have liked one more aff debate, a 1AR drill on T, and some practice with the new args (politics and the referendum CP). C'est la vie. There’s only so many hours in a day. Next year, we’ll start earlier. Much earlier.
 
The Monkey Wrench
In round two, Rock Springs broke a new aff against Hot Springs. We were in the room because we had constructed a scouting grid: any time someone who was going to debate us was on the relevant side before their debate against us, we would be scouting that debate. So we knew the moment the new aff was being read, and that started a clock: how much time we had to prep before we were neg against Rock Springs.
 
Our strategy went through several iterations before we arrived at: two T arguments, the DOJ DA, the stimulus DA, the self-adjusting penalty counterplan, and the “slavery” PIC. Arguments like the courts CP and the referendum CP featured heavily in early discussions. These are topic staples, generics that compete off “enact.” We figured Rock Springs, having gone to several national circuit tournaments, would be well-prepared for the courts CP. I went back and forth on the referendum counterplan. The CP was new, lots of value in that. The internal net benefit was a solid strategic option given it was a new aff. I cut a few cards that people hate billionaires for solvency, and we thought we could set up a good CX trap about the aff’s popularity to help with that. Ultimately, we didn’t think solvency was capital T true enough. We had 4 good counterplan options. Knowing DeLo and our own time limitations, 2 had to go. We ditched the courts and the referendum.
 
We felt the best about T and the DOJ DA. We had just come off a great round with the DOJ DA, running back an argument we were fresh on seemed like a good choice. I cut some link arguments about billionaires devoting their resources to challenge the DOJ and tying them up with litigation (these cards are C- for an A+ argument, I’d love a chance to spend some real time turning this into a good link with good cards). Before the debate started, I felt optimistic. We had a good strat. Rock Springs was a tough opponent, but we certainly had a chance. Even a good one.
 
Then Rock Springs broke a new advantage. Let’s go back to the theme of this tournament: ingenuity is rewarded. The new Rock Springs advantage changed everything. It, quite frankly, blew up our strategy. They beat us to the climate change impact in the 1AC, and they did so with a stronger internal link. It is tough to win a debate without an external impact, and the new warming advantage meant our DOJ DA was just a case turn. There was of course still ways for us to win the debate. The T violation and the “slavery” rhetoric PIC were both eminently winnable options. But Rock Springs neutralized a day’s worth of prep and all of our pre-round planning. Advantage: aff. Tip of the hat to Rock Springs for having diverse new arguments. Congrats on the tournament win!

The University of Wyoming is hosting a policy Round Robin January 21st-22nd. We have invited the top five Wyoming policy teams based on performance at first semester tournaments. Our goal is to provide an extremely competitive tournament with top-flight judging that benefits not only the teams competing but also any Wyoming debaters that want to observe rounds. Our hope is that disclosure and focused preparation will produce some of the best debates of the year, debates that serve as a model for all Wyoming students. All Wyoming students are invited to watch rounds. If you have students interested in observing rounds, please contact me at mliu6@uwyo.edu. We will share videos of the rounds and RFDs after the tournament for those who cannot make the rounds. 

Competitors 
The following 5 teams accepted invitations to the first annual University of Wyoming Policy Debate Round Robin: 

Cheyenne East GL 
Hot Springs Co RW 
Riverton GP 
Rock Springs PY 
WYVA CC 


During the tournaments friends, family, and observers can follow results here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HWoPJFmp5jQS-hLtLD1rigO_JrMLxN0pbNGQJKlOr_M/edit?usp=sharing
 
Opening Ceremony / Trophy Dedication 
We will hold an opening ceremony Wednesday 1/20 at 7pm (MT). We will be dedicating a traveling trophy that will be awarded to the tournament champion, as well as the award for top speaker. Both trophies will honor legendary Wyoming high school debate coaches. 

​Judges 
Judges at the UW Round Robin will include, among others, some of the most successful high school debate coaches in the country, the Director of Debate for Harvard University, the founder of Girls Debate, and two extremely successful collegiate Directors of Debate who are alumni of both the Wyoming high school debate community and the University of Wyoming debate team. All of our judges are both supremely qualified and eager to help Wyoming debaters grow more competitive and successful. 
A full list of the UWRR 2021 judges can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/nxg17ilr69vn8kt/UWRR%2021-Judge%20Bios.pdf?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR1uWQsgNcW5IWPLCuj6tGIeV-gpL2s4vHow-KHlTSsu1FBe1xiZWxXVBuo


Disclosure 
All teams agreed to provide open-source disclosure of 1ACs they have read as well as common negative arguments they have already read. On the day of the tournament, we expect the aff to disclose what the aff will be 1 hour before the start of the first round of the day (and immediately after the end of the previous round for the second and third rounds of the day). Pairings were released in advance to encourage significant preparation, in-depth research, and argument innovation. Of course, disclosure is only required for arguments that a school has already read. We fully expect and encourage teams to break new arguments to catch their opponents off guard. 
The full disclosure packet is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/z7mwv3nbhs2n83c/UWRR%202021%20Disclosure.docx?dl=0&fbclid=IwAR0V0jl1uzzBzatdzDheJq-UohhC5eY2xYuhWj56YHUc2bFdBqEIlFVVp0s
You can also check out their wikis: East, Hot Springs, Riverton, Rock Springs, and WYVA. 
 
Schedule Thursday 1/21 (MT) 
Round 1 4pm 
WYVA CC vs Hot Springs WR - Tripp Rebrovick 
East GL vs Riverton PG - Tyler Thur 
 
Round 2 6:30pm 
Riverton PG vs WYVA CC - Mike Shackelford 
Rock Springs PY v Hot Springs WR - Jasmine Stidham 
 
Schedule Friday 1/22 (MT) 
Round 3 7am 
WYVA CC v East GL - Young Kwon 
Riverton PG v Rock Springs PY - Will Jensen 
 
Round 4 9:30am 
Hot Springs WR vs East GL - Julia Lynch 
Rock Springs PY vs WYVA CC - Brian DeLong 
 
Round 5 12:30pm 
East GL v Rock Springs PY - Maggie Berthiaume 
Hot Springs WR v Riverton PG - LaToya Green 

Authors: The University of Wyoming coaching staff
Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
Lawrence Zhou, University of Wyoming assistant coach; former NSDA LD champion
Brent Lamb, University of Wyoming assistant coach and 4-year debater at UW
Note: a more in-depth article on this subject by Lawrence Zhou can be found here.
 
We believe that the single most important factor there is for improving at debate is having a conversation with your judge about whether you won or lost and why. Post round disclosure and oral feedback is the lynchpin of success at competitive debate. Although debaters currently receive written feedback on ballots, nothing comes close to the educational gains that are made when you can talk to your judge. Set aside inscrutable handwriting (of which I am certainly guilty of) and indecipherable photocopies: even simple clarification questions make a world of difference in educational pedagogy. If a debater doesn’t understand a comment that I wrote, their opportunities for recourse are slim. If they don’t understand something I’ve said, they can ask for clarification and I can rephrase and expand my comment until it makes sense to them. Oral critiques facilitate complex conversations over the complex issues we ask our students to debate in a way that written ballots simply can’t mirror. A written ballot isn’t as useful as an oral critique in the same way that a textbook is no substitute for a teacher. Not to mention the fact that by the time debaters receive their written ballots, post tournament, the details of debates become fuzzy. Facilitating a conversation with debaters in the moment is key.
 
A written ballot isn’t as useful as an oral critique in the same way that a textbook is no substitute for a teacher.
 
Disclosure of who won and who lost is an essential element of feedback. The efficacy of feedback is gutted if debaters don’t understand the relationship between the advice they’re receiving and why they lost (or how it did help them win). Imagine a medical student practicing a procedure poorly but not being told it would kill the patient: there’s less incentive to change. We believe the most beneficial thing a judge can do for debaters after voting is begin their decision by disclosing who they voted for, then talking to the losing debater or team about why they voted and how the debater could improve, then turning to the winning debater and offering advice to them as well.
 
There are a couple of potential objections to post round disclosure and feedback we can envision. The first of which is the time it takes. We believe oral feedback is worth making the time for. As judges and coaches, we are educators, and the rendering of the decision is our only window to educate students in-person, during a timely window where they are tuned-in and likely to listen to us. We also believe speaking to students is easier and faster than writing a ballot (especially one with feedback that would help students improve). Written ballots have surely delayed tournaments as well. There are also time-saving mechanisms we can build into tournaments to create time for this worthwhile experience. Electronic ballots are a massive time-saver: no need to run across buildings to deliver the ballot (and built-in checks if ballots are filled out incorrectly, saving the time of tracking down rogue judges). We can also place reasonable time limits on feedback, though, time limits should not be enforced just on feedback back on the start time of rounds. Electronic balloting can help with this by immediately identifying rounds that are running late (rounds where the judge has not pressed the “start round” button). The Pattern A/B structure can also be helpful in this regard. Needing to give up a room does not necessitate ending a conversation. Feedback can continue in the hallway or the cafeteria. Finally, if necessary time for feedback can be curtailed on travel days (mollifying reasonable concerns about long drives and curfews). However, we thoroughly believe that disclosure and feedback can be built into the schedule without making the days go longer. We each draw on a long empirical record of witnessing tournaments that run smoothly and efficiently with disclosure.
 
Some may worry students will react poorly to losses, or argue with the judge. This is a lesson students need to learn. Losing with grace is an important life skill. Not to mention, tantrums during the post round have consequences. The students that cannot behave well during a decision will quickly find the reputational costs of that behavior affect the likelihood of their future short-term success. If a student would behave poorly with disclosure, then this is a lesson they need to learn.
 
Others may worry losing students will get deflated. More than a decade of coaching novice debate has taught me the opposite lesson. Although there are emotional moments for everyone, heaps of empirical evidence from around the country demonstrates that debaters thrive with disclosure. Additionally, debaters still eventually learn their record. Finding out you lost every debate after the fact doesn’t remove much of the sting from losing every round. However, it does deny the opportunity to improve and change your course by doing a better job of listening to your judges during the tournament.
 
Finally, some may be concerned about lay or parent judges. Will disclosure dis-incentivize parent judges from participating? First, we should note that we do not think there should be a firm mandate to disclose. If a judge does not feel comfortable disclosing, they should not have to. However, I would encourage them to by telling that what I firmly believe: adaptation is a skill debaters need to learn, and failure to do so is a failure of persuasion on the part of the debater, not the judge. Any parent or lay judge should feel comfortable telling debaters they relied too much on jargon or failed to adapt. Additionally, parent judges improve our community by keeping debate grounded in persuasion. We can value them best by listening to the valuable things they have to say to our students.
 
Therefore, we propose the following action points:
1) Coaches and judges should embrace disclosure and oral feedback.
2) Tournaments should encourage and build limited time into the schedule for oral feedback.
3) Rules barring disclosure or feedback should be revisited.
 
Encouraging post round disclosure and feedback upholds the best principles of good pedagogy. Debate is more than a game: it’s an educational setting. Disclosure and feedback are essential to enabling the most important role of the judge: that of an educator.