Welcome

The NYC Urban Debate League cordially invites you to participate in its second middle school tournament of the year! 

Registration is open to member schools only. 

Tournament Director's Survival Guide

Date & Location

The middle school tournament will take place on Saturday, November 14th on the online classrooms.cloud platform. 

Registration 

Registration closes at 5pm on Sunday, November 8th. Please be sure your registered students have linked accounts here on Tabroom.com.

Check-in will open at 7:30 am on Saturday, November 14th, the day of the tournament. Check-in will close at 9:00am.

You must check-in using the digital meetup form here to compete at the tournament. The form will begin accepting responses on Saturday at 7:30am. 

Waitlists

We are maintaining waitlists to ensure the quality of the experience for everyone. All entries are automatically placed on the waitlist. Waitlist clears will begin the week before the tournament. Entries will be removed from the waitlist that fulfill the following criteria: 

The school is a registered member of the NYCUDL 

The students in the entry have filled out their participation permission slips (see below)

The students are entered into the correct division according to their experience level (see below) 

You have provided or requested enough judging to cover the entries (see below) 

Permission Slips 

Each debater must fill out a permission slip to debate. The middle school form is here. A list of students who have completed permission slips will be posted this weekend. 

Please, check to make sure your students are on the list! If they're not, they won't be able to debate.

Divisions 

Beginner Workshops (Public Forum and Parliamentary Debate)

The Beginner workshops are for debaters who have never debated before and whose coaches are relatively new to debate. Entry into the Beginners division must be approved by the tournament, and they can only attend once. It is not a standard tournament division.

We will offer six divisions in Public Forum: Novice, Intermediate, and Open for both the league and national topics. 

1. The Novice division is for debaters who have never debated in a previous year, with allowance for one tournament in a previous year. 

2. The Intermediate division is for debaters who have debated at more than one tournament in a previous year, but for no more than one previous year. 

3. The Open division welcomes all debaters, regardless of experience. It is meant to provide good debates for those with two or more years' experience.

We will offer two divisions in Parliamentary debate: Novice and Varsity. 

1. The Novice division is for debaters who have never debated before, with allowance for one tournament in a previous year. 

2. The Open division welcomes all debaters, regardless of experience. 

Topics

The public forum resolutions are "Resolved: The United States should enact the Medicare-for-all Act of 2019" and "Resolved: Schools should remove School Resource Officers." 

 The MS Parli Topics can be found HERE. 

Judge Obligations

Please provide three rounds of judging for every two teams. That means if you have a judge who can only make the morning rounds, you still need to provide another for the afternoon. 

We will be e-balloting, so make sure your judges have linked Tabroom.com accounts (they also need a Tabroom.com account to enter the Classrooms.cloud platform). 

Judging is $100 / (uncovered) ENTRY if you cannot provide your own and get approval for help from Emily Moffa (emily.moffa@debate.nyc). 

To ensure that judges make their rounds, there will be a missed round fine of $100 (first round missed) and $50 (subsequent rounds) for judges who fail to make their round in a timely fashion after being pushed a ballot.