A Note Concerning Novice LD

Dear colleagues,

A point of pride for the MinneApple is that we offer one of the only novice divisions to feature national competition anywhere in the country. We think the opportunity for our youngest students to compete against peers from across the country has the unique ability to inspire a love for debate from the start.

Unfortunately, the division has been significantly shrinking over the past decade, and dramatically so in the last five years. After asking coaches why they're no longer sending novices, the most common response is that their students cannot successfully compete unless they are prepared for arguments that are far too advanced for their experience level. Indeed, we often hear coaches say that preparing novices for the MinneApple negatively affects their students by throwing off the pacing of curriculum, decreasing morale, and forming habits that are detrimental to success at most other novice tournaments. This is especially true of our local schools. Most Minnesota students have only debated for about 4 weeks by the MinneApple, and it does seem unreasonable for them to be ready to debate the full range of possible advanced arguments that exist in LD in such a short time.

So, in light of this feedback, we would love if teams prepare their novices with these problems in mind.  In the spirit of sportsmanship, we strongly request that when preparing novices for the tournament, teams focus on fundamental debate skills and core stock arguments that first-semester students should reasonably be expected to deal with.

Obviously, we understand that there are legitimate disagreements about what novices should be learning and when. We are simply asking that you use your best judgment and attempt to be as reasonable as possible when preparing your students. In other words, please play (Minnesota) nice!

We will be including ballot instructions to this effect. Those instructions will say something similar to the following:

"In the novice division, debaters are expected to make arguments that are appropriate for their experience level. Judges should consider only arguments that, in their best judgement, are explained and packaged in a way that a first-semester novice could reasonably be expected to understand and effectively engage.”

If you feel debating on these terms would not be in the best interest of some or all of your first-year debaters, we respectively ask that you enter those students in the JV or Varsity division.

We appreciate your support of our tournament, and we sincerely wish we did not feel it necessary to make this type of request. However, if there is not a change in direction, we will unfortunately no longer be able to provide a novice division at the MinneApple going forward.

Thank you,

The MinneApple Team