Welcome to the first annual Rouse TFA Qualifier!

We are thrilled to invite you to our TFA (Texas Forensic Association) qualifying tournament, offering a full range of qualifying events. This is a great opportunity for high school students to showcase their skills in speech and debate and to compete for a spot in the prestigious TFA State Tournament.

It is our goal to provide you with a pleasant tournament experience. This year's tournament will be hosted in person at Rouse High School.

If you have speech and debate experience and would like to be hired as a judge, please complete this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScs5e3KbzJ4fy7-MTpqoC3oc9CbXYucQOUFqqBbjb7O5cD4kA/viewform

IMPORTANT GETTING HERE INFO:

Raider Way is currently under construction, which will delay your arrival time by at least 45 minutes. Please plan accordingly. Details for the traffic pattern and parking instructions will be posted soon.

Key Details:

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

-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 3 prelim rounds in debate events.

-Section A includes DI, INFO, OO, Duo, Poetry, and POI

-Section B includes DX, IX, NX, Prose, Duet, and HI

-Students in VLD, NLD, VPF, NPF, 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. Students in CX are NOT permitted to enter any other events.

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.

Topics:

Policy Debate

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

Lincoln Douglas (and novice LD)

Resolved: The United States ought to adopt a wealth tax.

Public Forum

Resolved: The United States should substantially reduce its military support of Taiwan.

Novice Extemp: Latin America

World Schools:

Rd 1: This House prefers conditional foreign aid to unconditional aid.

Rd 2:This House prefers conditional foreign aid to unconditional aid (opposite side from rd 1)

Rd 3: Impromptu

Finals: This House believes that the acquisition of startups by large corporations does more harm
than good.

Congress Docket (SET in the following order)

Prelims: 1,3,4,6,7

Finals: 15,17,19, 28, 27