Welcome to DSM Hoover's May Mini: Big Questions! 

We're hosting a "mini" tournament -- one day, after school, for a few hours to celebrate the year's end.  We hope you'll join us in exploring this event that is new to us.

Additionally, our May Mini allows a competition space for National Qualifiers in multiple events to use the Big Questions format to get a bit of practice with less than a month before Louisville.

Big Questions is a great opportunity for speakers of all debate events to hone their skills as it combines the philosophy-based topics of Lincoln-Douglas, a format similar to Public Forum, and questioning periods like Congress.  Whatever your regular event may be, Big Questions meets you there.

This is a FREE tournament sponsored by a NSDA grant --the only charges will be $75 missing-judge fees and nuisance fees of $10 for late drops or no-shows.

Recent district computer restrictions that disallow Chrome browsers -- and therefore competition via NSDA platforms -- force us to use Microsoft Teams as the platform for this event as a point of equity.  We are very sorry for this disruption.

Competition will be three rounds of 45 minutes per round with no elimination round; judges are expected to enter points ASAP after round is complete to facilitate a tight turn-around

Competition Schedule:

Round 1: 4-4:45

Round 2: 5-5:45

Round 3: 6-6:45

Plaques will be awarded to the Top 3 speakers based on total points and sent to schools Thursday, May 19.

--> Invite packet, including all resources uploaded into one document, will be posted Monday, 5/9

Preparation & Resources

We will be using the 21-22 topic -- Resolved: On balance, societies benefit from religious belief and practice. 

Debate is solo or in pairs -- solo ("maverick") competitors get double speaking points as they are essentially speaking both roles.

A variety of preparation materials on this topic are available from NSDA and are uploaded to this site (on the right, under "Tournament Pages and Forms") and included in the invitation packet.  We suggest using the resources in this order; this is how they will list in the invitation packet:

1) Format Manual and Topic Primer, then moving on to the

2) Evidence Packet,

3) Sample Aff & Neg

4) Review Lessons for Constructing and Refuting Arguments, as needed.

Format:

*Each team is entitled to three minutes of prep time during the round.