Information

Hospitality

Dinner (on Friday Night), light breakfast items (on Saturday), lunch (on Saturday), and snacks (all weekend) for students will be sold at affordable prices. Dinner, light breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided for coaches and judges throughout the weekend.

Fees

Checks should be made out to James Madison Memorial Debate. Fees are as follows:

Public Forum Debate - $50/team
Lincoln Douglas - $30/debater
Policy Debate (Open/Novice) - $40/team
Congressional Debater - $15/debater/day

Registration will close on Tuesday, November 7 or until we reach capacity. We are operating on a first come, first served basis. We expect registration to open on September 11.

Your fees will freeze on Tuesday, November 7. After this deadline, you own your full registration fees. Name changes can be made up until Thursday, November 9. You may make drops up until this time, but you are still obligated for any teams not dropped before Tuesday. ALL Judge names must be registered by Tuesday. Schools without judges will be charged a $300/missing judge. A limited number of hired judges will be available at a rate of $100/day or $200/tournament. Please contact Tim to hire judges. Do not assume that because you have a missing judge that it means that we are hiring one for you.

Please bring a check or a copy of the purchase order at registration. Compared to other tournaments, we are very lenient and flexible on this issue. Do not take advantage of this or we will need to change our policy in future.

If you send in a check or PO in advance, we will turn on the online, onsite registration so that you do not need to attend registration. If you are bringing a check or PO, you will have to attend registration in person. Don't want to attend registration in person? Send a check.

Judging Information

Because we have a single-flighted tournament, we need your judges. Your school must provide one judge for every two Public Forum Teams, every two policy teams, or every two Lincoln-Douglas debaters. Your judges are obligated in each division one round beyond your school's elimination. For example, if you cleared a PF team to quarterfinals, all of your PF judges are obligated to semifinals. Please bring qualified individuals.

You may split the obligation between Friday and Saturday (e.g. one person on Frida and a different person on Saturday). However, you may not split the obligation so that it is not evenly distributed (e.g. two people on Saturday and none on Friday).

We are not combining the PF and LD pools.

Because of the likely large field, we cannot hold your obligation towards the combined number of entries. For example, if you register 3 PF Teams and 1 LD debater - we have to hold you to three judges (two PF and one 1 LD) - not two. We may move your judges around between division to best suit the needs of the entire tournament. We will notify you if this impacts your judges. If we make a change that goes against your preferences, please let us know and we will fix it (or try our best).

Middleton is west-side suburb of Madison. Madison Memorial is on the south-west side of Madison. Both schools are pretty easy to get to from the highway, but not necessarily so for UW-Madison students without their own transportation. We may be able to make arrangements to transport judges to and from UW's campus. If your judges are interested in this, let us know and we will try to work something out.

Mentioned earlier, but worth repeating: Hired judges will be available at the rate of $100/day or $200/tournament. Yes that is high. We would rather have your judges than your money. If you need to hire a judge, please contact Tim directly. If you are missing a judge at the deadline, we will assess our even larger missing judge fee ($300). We have generous registration deadlines because we want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate in our event. However, we do need to impose some deadlines to continue to offer an excellent tournament.

Judge Preferencing and Judge Strikes

We plan on offering limited strikes in Public Forum. We plan on offering some kind of mutual preferencing in Lincoln Douglas. If there are adequate entries and judges, we will offer judge preferences in policy debate. Novice policy will have a random judge assignment.

We encourage all judges to post a paradigm to http://judgephilosophies.wikispaces.com or to the philosophy section on tabroom.

In elimination rounds, we will try to create panels with diversity goals in mind.

Tabulating Information

Rounds 1 and 2 in all debate divisions will have a random assignment. In PF and LD we will try to use a regional check to ensure that schools traveling are not meeting schools from their region in the first two rounds. Each round thereafter will be paired high-low in brackets. Unless something terrible happens, we won't lag-pair.

We plan on using our same operating procedures: We will post all results after round 2. We will also post PDF's of each rounds ballots during the tournament, as time allows. Generally speaking this means that round 1 ballots are available during round 2 - and so on during the duration of the tournament.

We will be using a warm room. We will not be using electronic ballots. Despite the fossil records, there are dinosaurs in Wisconsin.

We will not break brackets in elimination rounds. In elimination rounds, if teammates are scheduled to debate, the tournament will not assign judges unless you request to do so. We assume that you will coach over.

Division and Site Schools

Decisions about where registration will be held and which division will be in which building have not been made yet. Tentatively we plan on following last year's plan - PF CD and CX at Middleton and LD at Madison Memorial, but this may change depending on entries. We will let you know as the tournament approaches.