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.
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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
A few months ago, before the college national debate championship, I screen-recorded my research and file production process for one of my NDT (National Debate Tournament) assignments. My job was to produce econ "thumpers", or arguments that economic decline is inevitable (this "alt cause" is a handy tool to answer any economy argument). I thought it might be a good example of my research process that I could turn into a research video-lecture. I'll be forthright that I'm not great with video editing software. I'm no Professor Graham! My editing is rough around the edges for sure, but I think this video-essay establishes a ton of useful concept for learning research skills. The econ thumper file I produced took me about 4 hours start to finish, and I had 3 hours and 20 minutes of raw video of that process that I collapsed down into 18 minutes by speeding segments up. I've never been satisfied with any research lecture (that I've given or seen), and I think part of the reason why is that seeing research and file production is the best way to learn how to do it, but it's an hours if not days long process. Time lapse is a partial solution to that problem. You can find the video here! I highly suggest downloading the video, not watching it on Dropbox. 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:
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:
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:
WYVA Round Robin Prep, The Sandy S. Patrick Championship Trophy, and the Future of Team Wyoming1/23/2021 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. (Screen-capture of us sketching out of what an insurrection aff could look like) 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 Sandy S. Patrick Championship Trophy & The Future of Team Wyoming
We named the championship trophy after Sandy Patrick because she already did everything we’re trying to do now. Sandy coached Wyoming’s first TOC qualifiers, several top 10 teams at NSDA, and established the Rocky Mountain Consortium, a multiple-school-endeavor through which she coordinated scouting, inter-team assignments, the production of as many specific case neg files as possible, cross-school file sharing, and, if the debaters didn't have a policy coach, on-site coaching at nationals. That’s what I wanted this award and this tournament to represent. As I said at the Opening Ceremonies: “The Round Robin is about competing against Wyoming teams, but the reason for that competition isn’t about beating each other. It’s about having the best rounds we can possibly have so we lift each other up. You’ve all prepared intensely for this tournament, and I want you to have amazing rounds with well-researched case negs, tricky new strats, and all the best last minute updates. If you see a debate slipping away from you I want you to fight against the dying of the light, to find a way back into the debate. But when the last round ends, no matter who wins, I want you to remember that the eight competitors you debated aren’t your enemy, they’re your allies. Your debates against them will sharpen your skills so that when you compete at national circuit tournaments and national championships, you’ll be the best versions of yourselves. Because policy debate can sometimes be too hard to go it alone. But it’s the hard things that are worth doing. And a united Wyoming policy debate could do some real damage when you turn outward together. The list of case negs you need to produce to compete at a national circuit competition looks a lot smaller when your squad is the whole state. If it’s Wyoming vs the world, things suddenly start to look like a fair fight.” After reading this article, our Round Robin prep might seem intense. However, we were fighting an uphill battle. Every team at the Round Robin had years more experience than WYVA. Riverton had two tournament wins, Hot Springs had outperformed us at UW, East had beaten us far more times than we’d beaten them (not to mention are returning State Champions), and Rock Springs was in the finals of or won every regional tournament they had competed in. We weren’t going to have a chance if we didn’t put in the effort. It would not be unfair to say that’s the situation that Wyoming policy debate faces at national circuit tournaments. If the prep we did for a tournament with five teams seems exhausting, the Peninsula tournament with 73 entries in varsity policy that WYVA is competing in as I write this is… something else. But it’s a glorious challenge and one we’re excited to face head on. As of round three, WYVA CC has already earned their first win at Peninsula. I don’t know where exactly Team Wyoming is headed. I do know we’re stronger together. So we’ll start with that, and see where it takes us. 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. The bios of our panelists can be found below the fold.
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