Southern Minnesota District Tournament
2018 — MN/US
Southern Minnesota District Qualifier
for the 2019 National Tournament
The Southern MN District Congress will be held on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 at the Minnesota State Capitol - State Office Building. New this year, we are excited to welcome our friends from Northern Lights to join both Southern and Central Minnesota NSDA at our District Congress. Our students will obviously be competing in three distinct tournaments, but this will be great for Minnesota Congressional Debate, as we will have access to judges and expertise from all three districts.
This year we will do all registration and tabulation using Tabroom.com. The website is now open for your team to register.
1. Preliminary Numbers Request. Registration is due on November 7th though early registration is always very helpful for logistical planning. For now, I need you to send me an email if your school plans on attending, along with the number of entries you think you may have -- an estimate at this time is fine. I am trying to determine how many judges we will need, and that number depends on the total number of entries at the tournament.
2. Chapter Dues/Membership Requirements. You will not be able to register on Tabroom.com unless your school has paid its annual chapter dues to the National Speech and Debate Association. Please take care of this promptly so that you have no difficulties in entering. In addition, all students must be on record as members of the NSDA seven days prior to the tournament (November 7th). These two items are non-negotiable as they are dictated by the national office. Please contact me ASAP if you need help with this.
3. Legislation. Each school that attends the Southern MN Congress may submit up to two pieces of legislation to debate at the tournament. The legislation should be emailed to chris.mcdonald@district196.org in a Microsoft Word document by 5:00 p.m. CST on Friday October 26th. Once we have all of the legislation Ross Eichele and I will put this together into a packet to send out to all participating schools no later than Monday October 29th, which will give your students two full weeks to work with the legislation. The order of the docket will be established separately by the entries in each chamber prior to Session I. I have attached NSDA-created templates for both bills and resolutions. Please feel free to share with your students.
4. Judges. As we are working in collaboration with both Northern Lights and Central Minnesota NSDA, each school is asked to provide one judge that can judge in another district. In turn, their judges will judge Central or Northern Lights NSDA. Please make sure to provide quality judges (not new or novice judges - experienced judges are preferred as they choose who goes to nationals). Coaches or regular, experienced judges are ideal for this; each judge must be in their fourth year out of high school or older. Each judge will be compensated $35 by Central or Northern Lights MN (a lower pay negotiated between our districts to help schools save money; your school can certainly supplement this judge fee on your own as well).
5. Schedule. This year we will be employing a modified schedule in order to run a more efficient and timely Congress we are staggering the start time of the chambers. This will also help make the lunch break and results processing go more smoothly.
NEW IN 2018: Southern MN NSDA will follow TWO DIFFERENT PATTERNS for scheduling. Two chambers will go under Schedule A, and two chambers will go under Schedule B. Schedules for each chamber will be released at registration the morning of the tournament. We are adopting two different schedules in order to accommodate the lunch break, as well as make final tabulation easier to process to ensure awards start on time.
8:00 - 8:15 Registration for all schools and entries
4:15 - 4:45 Unified Awards Ceremony
Schedule A (two chambers)
8:30 - 8:45 Seating Charts and Orders of the Day
8:45 - 11:45 Session I
11:45 - 12:45 Lunch
12:45 - 3:45 Session II
Schedule B (two chambers)
8:45-9:00 Seating Charts and Orders of the Day
9:00 - 12:00 Session I
12:00 - 1:00 Lunch
1:00 - 4:00 Session II
6. Qualification. The NSDA has announced that beginning this year we will now qualify 2 students our of each qualifying House chamber. Please take a look at the Congress Qualification Grid posted on the Tabroom.com website for Southern MN NSDA. We encourage everyone to try their best to maximize their registration numbers for Congressional Debate because the more students we have entered the more chambers we can hold which in turn means more students with a chance to attend the 2019 National Tournament.
7. Internet rules. This year Southern MN NSDA will be piloting a new set of rules governing the use of the internet during debate rounds, congress sessions and extemporaneous speaking preparation. Please see attached set of rules that show what is and what is not allowed under these new rules.