KESDA Senior Junior State Tournament
2023 — Georgetown, KY/US
Junior Congressional Debate
Event Description:
STUDENT CONGRESS
Junior and Senior Division
Current (at the time of KESDA) NFL Rules will apply during all Congress Sessions. Contestants are encouraged to bring a copy of the NFL Student Congress rulebook with them to the tournament. To reference rules and procedures, coaches and students should reference the NSDA Congress handbook and District Tournament Operations Manual at http://www.nflonline.org/AboutNFL/LeagueManuals. Students are strongly encouraged to submit new legislation for KESDA.
The following exceptions shall be applied to Student Congress at KESDA, and these exceptions supersede any rules in the NFL guidelines:
Each school has unlimited entries; however, only the top three scoring entries will count towards a team’s total sweepstakes points.
Each school may submit a maximum of four pieces of legislation electronically in Word format only. All bills/resolutions must be presented to the KESDA directors 2 weeks before the Forum. No bill will be debated if this deadline is not met. Please remember that all legislation should be submitted as appropriate for a National Congress, not state legislature.
The director will send a copy of each bill to member schools the day after the submission deadline. Bills should be sent via email as Word attachments.
For final session legislation, the tournament director will select five bills/resolutions submitted by schools. This legislation will be set aside for use in the final session only and announced ahead of time. The remainder of the legislation submitted will comprise the possible docket for preliminary chambers.
Judges/parliamentarians for Congress may be from schools with entries participating in the chambers; the Directors are to use their own discretion on the fairness/qualifications of judges for this event given its particular nature, understanding that the limited pool of judges available may necessitate schools scoring their own students in the event.
KESDA PROCEDURES:
Each preliminary chamber will have an adult parliamentarian who remains consistent for each session withrotating scorer(s) per chamber each round. Students will serve as presiding officers in prelims. The judges will rank the top 8 students in each session; the parliamentarian will rank only at the end of prelims, will rank all students in the chamber, and will be the tiebreaking rank for advancement into finals as needed.
A student may deliver an unlimited number of pro/con speeches.
For each of the three prelim rounds, students will receive the following sweepstakes points:
- Chamber rank of 1 or 2 for a session: 3 points
- Chamber rank of 3 or 4 or 5 for a sesssion: 2 points
- Chamber rank of 6 or 7 or 8 for a session: 1 point
The top fifteen or sixteen students in preliminary rounds (five or eight from each preliminary chamber depending on whether there are three or two preliminary chambers) will be advanced into the Final Chamber (see NSDA Rules for how students are ranked in each session). Each of these advancing students (up to three per school) will be given three additional sweepstakes points (the equivalent of Semifinal advancement); ifCongressnumbers are larger than 60, each Finalist will receive six sweepstakes points instead of three (the equivalent of Quarters and Semis). Additionally, each 1st through 6th place winner will receive sweepstakes points for these placements equivalent to the other events. Three judges will score the final round ofCongressionalDebate with one also serving as Parliamentarian; the three judges will determine if a student or adult Presiding Officer will serve in the Final session.