Updated: 11/27/2023

We look forward to hosting you at the 4th 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 Dripping Springs High School. This is a different location from the past two years.

If you have speech and debate experience and would like to be hired as a judge, please complete this form: https://forms.gle/hcpk82HQ38Bx7x6z7.

Key Details:

-Our tournament is a TFA qualifier and will follow TFA rules.

-Our tournament will award NIETOC bids in relevant events based on the criteria detailed at https://nietoc.com/details-and-rules/.

-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 without explicit approval from the tournament director.

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

-We think Public Forum debate should be accessible to the general public, so we intend to use a mixture of paid and community judges for VPF and NPF. We are charging a smaller fee for PF judges in support of this philosophy.

-To encourage participation in World Schools, we are offering 1 free entry per school in that event. Fees will be manually adjusted to reflect this free entry as we get closer to the date of the tournament. This also includes the cost of a judge. If you enter more than 1 World Schools team, you will be expected to provide a judge or pay for a missing judge.

-A novice is defined as a student in their first year of speech and debate competition. For example, a student who competed in PF as a freshman CANNOT compete in Novice Policy or Novice LD as a sophomore because that student is not a first-year competitor.

Scheduling/Cross Entries:

-We will offer 4 prelim rounds in VCX, VLD, and VPF. To make this possible, Rounds 1 and 2 of VCX, VLD, and VPF will take place Friday night via NSDA Campus. These events will be held entirely in-person starting on Saturday.

-We will offer 3 prelim rounds in NCX, NLD, NPF, BQ, and WSD.

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

-Section B includes DX, IX, NX, DI, Prose, Info, and OO

-Students in VCX, NCX, VLD, NLD, VPF, NPF, BQ, and Worlds will be permitted to cross-enter in Extemp. Debaters who cross-enter in another IE are doing so at their own risk. We will not delay rounds for cross-entries that are not Extemp-related.

Elim Procedures:

-We will not break brackets in debate elims.

-Panels for TFA qualifying events will start in semis. If possible, we will panel debate quarters, but no guarantees.

-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 CX, LD, and PF 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.

Statement on Disclosure Norms:

-Under new TFA rules adopted at the 2023 TSCA/TFA convention, judges in debate events will be instructed at this tournament to not decide rounds on the basis of whether or not preround disclosure took place. Disclosure of cases, while heavily encouraged, is at the discretion of individual competitors and coaches.

Home Rule Initiative:

-We will only enter students from Dripping Springs in TFA-qualifying events if those events fail to get enough entries to award TFA points. If this situation occurs, Dripping Springs students will be eligible to advance to elimination rounds and to compete for points.

-Novices from Dripping Springs will be eligible to advance and place in their respective events. Dripping Springs students will also fully compete in Big Questions.