Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
 
“You find out life’s this game of inches. … The margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it. One half second, too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch because we know when we add up all those inches, that’s going to make the … difference between winning and losing, between living and dying.”
– Any Given Sunday
 
“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”
-- Tim Notke
 
“A dropout will beat a genius through hard work.”
-- Rock Lee
 
One of the amazing things about debate is that so many of the variables that determine your success are things you can exercise control over. Writing a new aff, researching your rival’s case, giving rebuttal redoes: these are all examples of things you can do to radically improve your chances of success. You can spend time practicing flowing, doing cross-x drills, or learning how to integrate technology into debate. You can prepare for tournaments by scouting your opponents and making sure you're prepared to debate their arguments and innovating novel arguments to get a leg up on your competition. The more you put in, the more you’ll get out.
 
All of those are things you can do any day of the week, either on your own, with teammates, or with coaches. However, there are some things you can only do at tournaments. Tournaments are a scarce resource. You only get to go to so many. Therefore, the time you spend at tournaments is extremely valuable. This post is about how to best improve your chances of success in debate by making sure you use that time well.

Read the complete article below the fold.

Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate
 
Recently I worked with some of the Cheyenne East debaters to identify a need, brainstorm an idea, and produce an argument. Afterwards I realized that the way we took that idea from start to finish reflected a good research process, and it was worth writing about. This essay will walkthrough that process that we went through to show what a good research process looks like.

Read the complete article below the fold.

Author: Matt Liu, University of Wyoming Director of Debate

This informal post is about advice for debating impact turns. It is intended for debaters who already have some experience and know what an impact turn is, and would like to get better at executing impact turn strategies. If that sounds like you, here are 7 thoughts on debating impact turns: 

1. Treat impact turns like a DA. The major implication of this is do impact calc. The block on the impact turn should start with impact calc and turns case args, just like any offense like a DA or a CP with an internal net benefit (and I would argue, just like T or a K).  Same with the 2NR. Why does your impact turn outweigh? How does it turn or take out the solvency of every other impact in the 1AC? How does it turn the impact that you're turning? You should give the impact calc for an impact turn the same level of consideration you would give a DA. Another important implication of thinking about your turn like a DA is don't go for too much. Going for an impact turn and another DA is like going for two DAs, it's a recipe for spreading yourself out. Going further, don't just think about the impact turn like a DA, if it has multiple modules think about every module like a different DA. Going for two modules in the 2NR is at the very least knocking on the "going for too much" door- be careful with this.
2. Offense first. I mean this in a couple of ways. First is the more obvious one, the 2NR. Let's set aside positions you need to kick. If the aff has 2 advantages, leadership and econ, and you're impact turning leadership, then your order should be leadership (with an overview), then econ. But let's make it more complicated: let's say leadership has 4 impacts, and you're impact-turning the satellites impact. Your order is still leadership (with an overview) then econ, but the micro-order matters too. Let's say satellites was the 3rd impact in the 1AC. Should you answer the first two impacts before you start your impact turn? No! You put your offense (the impact turn) first. The 1NC should be set up to support an offense-first 2NC and 2NR. That means no matter the order of the aff impacts, the impact turn should be the first thing on the flow.
3. Impact defense is a necessary and important part of impact-turning. All too often it seems like people forget to read impact defense to the impact that they're turning. Let me address some potential confusion here: even if you want to straight impact turn something, or reduce aff outlets to kick an impact-turned advantage, you still need impact defense. Impact defense is a part of an impact turn, even a straight impact turn. Yes, you do kick turned positions on defense, but the type of defense matters (if you've attended our summer camp, the WFI, you should be having "Kick! This! DA!" lecture flashbacks right now). A non-unique is not defense paired with a link turn, it's part of a straight link turn; and impact defense is not defense paired with an impact turn, it's a necessary part of the strategy. Let's go back to our impacts turns are DAs framing to really understand this. If the impact turn is your DA, the original impact is their advantage (it actually is). If you don't read defense to the original impact, you dropped the advantage. Now it's DA vs case but you dropped the case. You don't want to be in that position, so make sure you have impact defense to the impact you're turning! An additional note here, going back to offense first, is that the impact turn should be above the defense to what you're turning. Let's use an example to explain this. The 1AC has a disease impact. You impact turn with pandemics solve war and warming. The 1NC makes the following arguments: no disease extinction, disease solves war, disease solves climate / climate => extinction. Right? WRONG! You put the defense before the offense. This sets up the 2NC and 2NR for failure. Offense first!
4. Protect the goods!! It seems to me like mid-tier to good teams (not great teams) have a near-ontological drive to try and run away from straight turns and impact turns. Especially if you break a new impact turn against someone, they are going to try like heck to wriggle out of it. That means you need to make sure that there's nothing they can concede to get out of the impact turn, or that if they do, it costs them significantly. Let me break down what I mean by that. Let's say the aff has an industry advantage, and one of four scenarios/modules is about ag. The 1NC says "aff doesn't solve ag" and then spends 2 minutes impact turning the ag impact with high food prices good. The aff can concede "we don't solve ag" and moot 2 minutes of the 1NC with very little cost, since they have other impacts on that advantage they can go for. You need to be very careful with internal link and solvency arguments, since those are defensive arguments the aff can concede to moot the turn. However, I'm not saying don't make any internal link answers or solvency arguments in the 1NC. I'm saying make them higher up the value chain. If you say "aff doesn't solve industry", the aff can't concede that without a MUCH higher cost. In Scenario One ("you don't solve ag") conceding the defense only costs the aff one impact amongst many on one advantage. In Scenario Two ("you don't solve industry") you're attacking the solvency of the entire advantage, which means the cost to the aff is HUGE if they concede the defense to moot the impact turn. Most of the time, I'm happy to let my impact turn go in exchange for the 2AC narrowing to half the aff. And, in a third scenario, solvency attacks that take out the entire aff are almost universally safe. If the aff is kicking the entire aff to moot a 1NC impact turn, woof. That said, protecting the goods becomes progressively more important as the debate progresses. If you extend the impact turn, you're narrowing your strategy and your options. If the impact turn is the entire 1NR, and you've extended internal link or solvency arguments that let them kick it, the 1AR can moot the entire 1NR. Impact turn debaters need finely tuned "protect the goods" senses/alarms/radar. Finally, your opponents will often try to invent things to concede to get out of turns. They'll lie, wriggle, and make things up to pretend they had a way out. Call them on this when they do, don't let them get away with it.
   
5. Impact turn debates are about the (internal) link to a surprising degree! Part of this is because of the frequency with which the aff fumbles impact turns (especially new or novel ones) in the 2AC and undercovers them, forcing them to go for link differentiation in the 1AR and 2AR. The other part is because better and smarter debaters hone in on these things. For example, in a populism good/bad debate, how populism comes about is central to whether populism is good or bad. Populism good is maybe not as hot of a strategy when the internal link to populism is "immigration / refugee waves leads to populist backlash." The type of people who come to power by railing against immigrants are probably not the 'good populists' the neg wants to talk about with populism good. The key here is to think through the story, the narrative: the actual arg, how things really go down.
   
6. The case debate matters a ton in impact turn debates. Zoom out and think about meta strategy. If impact turns are DAs, your 2NR is probably (though not always) going to be DA + case, and your win condition is: "DA outweighs case." Now let's think about what most affs look like: probably 5/4 or 3/3/3. Meaning it's probably two advantages with 4-5 impacts each, or three advantages with three impacts each. That means you're fighting an uphill battle, on average, of 1 v 9 impacts. So just like any DA vs case debate, you've got to whittle the case debate down over time and crush what's left at the end. But for some reason, in impact turn debates, people forget to think about the rest of the case. So think about it like DA vs case and remember to take out the case debate- especially the OG impact that you're turning! You can't win Middle war is good if you let the aff say Middle East war causes extinction. Advantage counterplans can also change this equation in your favor. if you're impact turning advantage one, advantage counterplan out of advantage two. Then go further by advantage counterplanning out of every impact module you're not impact-turning, even on the advantage you are impact-turning. 
7. Impact turning on the aff. Most of this has been written from the perspective of being neg. What about impact turning on the aff? It can be strategic to have an impact turn against a DA in the 2AC, but not if it soaks up time. Offense vs DAs is good, and if you can't have a link turn an impact turn can be okay-- if it doesn't take too long. But think long and hard before straight impact-turning. When I was a debater, my coach's advice to me about that was: "don't". I won't go that far, but, the concern was valid: the negative block overwhelmingly advantages the neg in an impact turn debate against a DA, not to mention the aff is giving up some of their best args (the defense). Also, the neg gets escape hatch CPs, which some judges (probably wrongly) think are more legit against impact turns than link turns.

We want to hear from you! Disagree with something we said? Have a question? Feel free to jump in in the comments, we'll be sure to respond!
 
Do you have a topic you’d like us to address in a future post? Email us at [email protected]
 
Go Pokes!

This year's WFI had a panel of guest coaches gather together to talk about conditionality and the status of counterplans. Our amazing guests included:

• Jasmine Stidham, coach at The Kinkaid School and Dartmouth College,
• Mike Shackelford, director of the Rowland Hall debate team,
• Cody Crunkilton, coach at the University of Minnesota,
• and Michael Wimsatt, coach at the University of Houston.

Check it out here! 

The end of the year always leaves us mulling over the big questions in debate. This year, we invite you to join us in doing the same. We invited ​prominent debate coaches, judges, and college debaters to respond to any item that interested them from a short list of questions about debate. We tried to center the conversation around eternal controversies, contemporary controversies, or things people would want advice on, but we practically invited our guest writers to run wild with their hot takes on debate. 

Below the fold you'll find responses to these questions by Evan Alexis, Eliza Buckner, Cody Crunkilton, Nate Glancy, Lauren Ivey, Matt Liu, David Rooney, and Jasmine Stidham.

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! 

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!

We were very excited to welcome representatives from Harvard University, Georgetown University, Emory University, Kansas State, the University of Georgia, and Wake Forest University to speak with the students at the WFI about debate as a path to college and debating in college. 

We're also happy to share a recording of that panel discussion that you can view here. 

Dr. Mikaela Malsin, Director of Debate at Georgetown University, spoke about the differences between high school and college debate. 

Shunta Jordan, the head debate coach at the University of Georgia, talked about making the decision on whether to debate in college. 

Sherry Hall, the Director of Tournaments and Workshops for the Harvard Debate Council and Harvard debate coach since 1987, spoke about the academic and life advantages accrued from the portable skills generated in college debate. 

Dr. Allison Harper, Associate Director of Debate at Emory University, spoke about college debate as a way to make friends and connections in college. 

Dr. Jarrod Atchison, Director of Debate at Wake Forest University, spoke about the process of applying to college and navigating recruitment. 

The WFI's own Dr. Alex McVey, Director of Debate at Kansas State University, talked about developing healthy habits in debate and finding the right fit with a college debate program.

The WFI was lucky enough to welcome 5 all-star high school debate coaches to talk to us about debating on the national circuit. Panelists included: Mike Bausch (Kent Denver, Denver, CO), Maggie Berthiaume (Woodward Academy, College Park, GA), Lauren Ivey (Alpharetta High School, Alpharetta, GA), Tim Mahoney, (St. Mark's School of Texas, Dallas, TX), and Mike Shackleford (Rowland Hall, SLC, UT). 

We're happy to be able to share a recording of that panel with you all here.