We look forward to hosting you at the 2nd annual Dripping Springs TFA Tiger Tussle. It is our goal to provide you with a pleasant tournament experience. This year's tournament will be hosted in person at Sycamore Springs Middle School, which is located at 14451 Sawyer Ranch Rd, Austin, TX 78737. Since we are hosting at a relatively small middle school campus, we will likely have to set entry limits. Please sign up early to ensure entry slots for your students.

Key Details:

-Our tournament is a TFA qualifier.

-All rounds will follow TFA rules.

-Our tournament does not accept independent or unaffiliated entries.

-An adult affiliated with your school has to be present and available at all times throughout the tournament.

-Judge obligations cannot be filled with current high school students, even for novice events.

-We will use online balloting through Tabroom.com throughout the tournament. This means all judges will need Tabroom accounts.

-We intend to use mixture of paid and community judges for VPF and NPF.

-To encourage participation in World Schools, we are offering 1 free entry per school in that event (until we have 9 entries in the event). Fees will be manually adjusted to reflect this free entry as we get closer to the date of the tournament.

COVID-19 Protocols:

-All tournament participants will be encouraged to wear masks while not competing.

-Efforts will be made to provide adequate space for social distancing.

-Students, coaches, judges, or volunteers experiencing possible COVID-19 symptoms within 7 days of the tournament should not come to the tournament. While we will not likely be able to refund entry or judge fees, there will be no additional drop fees charged for drops related to COVID-19 symptoms or positive test results.

-Although not required by TEA, if a tournament attendee associated with your school does contract COVID after the tournament, please contact Davy Holmes so that efforts can be made to notify possible close contacts.

Resolutions/Legislative Items/Motions:

-Policy will debate the 2021-2022 water resources topic.

-Varsity and Novice LD will debate the November-December NSDA topic about the right to strike.

-Varsity and Novice PF will debate the November-December NSDA topic about cryptocurrency regulation.

-Congress competitors will debate items 6-10 in prelims and 26-30 in finals. Direct questioning will be used throughout the tournament.

-World Schools motions (UPDATED 11/16/21):

Round 1: Impromptu

Round 2: Prepared (This House would require governments to release information regarding encounters with UFOs.)

Round 3: Impromptu

Finals: Impromptu 

-The Novice Extemp topic area will be Asia.

Scheduling/Cross Entries:

-We will offer 3 prelim rounds in VCX, VLD, VPF, NLD, NPF, and WSD.

-Section A includes DI, HI, Duet, Duo, and POI

-Section B includes DX, IX, NX, INFO, OO, PO, and PR

-PF, LD, and Congress competitors will be allowed to cross-enter in Extemp.

-Policy competitors will not be allowed to cross-enter in Extemp or any other event.

-World Schools competitors will only be able to cross-enter in other events if they have enough members on their team to have 3 debaters available for all WS rounds. For example, if a team has 4 members, 1 of those members could cross-enter in something else because the team would still have enough members to compete in a scheduled WS round without the cross-entered team member.

Elim Procedures:

-We will not break brackets in debate elims.

-Panels for TFA qualifying events will start in semis. We will try our best to panel all events in finals.

-Except for novice events, we will not host debate elims that don't award TFA points. In the event that entries are too low to justify quarters, we will break straight to semis, which will take the place of quarters in the schedule. This means we will break to semis in LD, PF, and CX if there are only 10-15 entries. We will break straight to finals in World Schools if there are only 6-9 entries. Novice debate events will break straight to semis.

-We will only collapse Novice and Varsity divisions if collapsing is necessary to award any TFA points. We will not collapse the divisions if it simply means offering better points.

-IEs with 16 or fewer entries will break straight to finals after Round 2. In this case, Round 2 will take the place of Semis on the schedule.