Colleagues,

Please consider this your open invitation to celebrate all that is Speech and Debate during the 9th Annual Meet Me at the Mound Swing!  The 2021 version of the Swing intends to build on past years by expanding into the virtual unknowns and beyond!  While we will miss meeting everyone on the Mound this year, we hope that our virtual offerings allow for far more competitors from all parts of the forensic universe to unite in a celebration of the joy and power of forensic competition!

The Swing is a TFA and NIETOC qualifier on both sides, so this is an excellent opportunity to earn those last legs and points!  We are also proud to kick of the UIL interpretation season by offering UIL category restrictions in Prose and Poetry!  Extempers will be challenged by being allowed to compete in both foreign and domestic extemporaneous events on both sides of the swing, providing up to 12 full rounds of competition over three days!  For Individual Events, we are also pleased to have asynchronous prelims and semis with our Friday and Saturday schedule filled with LIVE FINAL ROUNDS of single-member IEs!

We are also continuing our tradition of setting aside 10% of our entry fees to award in scholarships to top competitors at the tournament.  In addition to top prizes in CX, LD, PF, Extemp, Congress, and Individual Events, everyone placing in the top eight of any event will be eligible for scholarships given in a random drawing!  Over the past seven years, we have given away over $25,000 in scholarship money and we look to add greatly to that total this year!

Please review the information on these pages carefully as they are likely different from how other tournaments work--especially in the Wild West of virtual competition.  We look forward to hosting you and your team through binary, ASCII, and HTML code!

-Eric Mears (mearse@lisd.net)