Welcome to the Dulles Viking Classic, hosted at John Foster Dulles High School.

We are excited to invite you to our tournament at Fort Bend ISD's flagship campus. We are a TFA IQT, offering a full range of events, and we will be using the current NSDA topics in each debate event. The schedule and hired judge applications are available on the right.

Policy

Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly increase its exploration and/or development of the Arctic.

Lincoln-Douglas

Resolved: In the United States criminal justice system, plea bargaining is just.

Public Forum

Resolved: The United Kingdom should rejoin the European Union.

World Schools

Round 1 - This House regrets the decline of labor unions.

Round 2 - This House regrets the decline of labor unions.

Round 3 - Impromptu

Semis - Impromptu

Finals - This House regrets the rise of surge pricing.

Congress

We will be using the Region 4 scaffolding plan. Legislation can be found at www.txfa.org

Prelims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Finals 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Speech

Section A: DX, NX, FX, PR, OO, POI, DI

Section B: INFO, Duet, PO, HI, Duo

Important dates

Initial Entry Deadline 10/6/25 @5pm

Drop Deadline 10/8/25 @ 5pm (entry fees are set at this time). Day of drops/no-shows will face additional penalties.

Entry limits

Events are automatically capped at 10 entries but we will add entries from the waitlist until room limit is reached.

Each school will be capped at at 4 entries initially to ensure some degree of balance.

Entries are accepted on a first come, first serve basis until our facility is full.

Drop Off and Registration

Should you arrive before 3pm on Friday, please have the bus drop you and your students off in front of Roger's Auditorium, where we will hold until school has dismissed. Registration will be set up in the atrium. If you arrive after 3 or have Saturday only entries, you can register in the library. Our bus ramp is located in the rear of the building. Please instruct your bus drivers to park there.

Hospitality and Concessions

Hospitality will be provided by our parent booster club.

Friday Dinner - TBD

Saturday Breakfast - TBD

Saturday Lunch - TBD

Our concession stand will feature your standard tournament fare.

A plea regarding academic honesty

The TFA constitution contains multiple provisions about academic honesty in speech and debate events. Please ensure that your students are familiar with these. We will investigate and adjudicate violations of these provisions as laid out in the constitution. Unfortunately, the TFA Constitution does not have provisions regarding the use of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs). The tournament staff agrees with the NSDA that presenting arguments generated by LLMs as carded evidence is an issue of academic dishonesty. We are also skeptical of their utility as argument generation tools more broadly, believe that doing so is an academic honesty issue, and ask that students not use them to generate blocks; however, we have no recourse here, given the absence of TFA provisions. As such, we ask that you have a frank conversation with your students prior to the tournament about the academic value of their participation in speech and debate, the way in which utilizing LLMs takes away from the long term value they stand to gain from doing their own research, thinking, and writing, as well as the long term, detrimental impact that these technologies are having on the climate, our power grid, and potable water supply.

A note on judging, judges, judge fees

We want your judges, not your money. Please solicit alumni, parents, and other members of your school community to cover the entries you put in. If you do not bring enough judges to cover your obligation, you will be paying the cost to hire them out in order to offset the expense. We will not be negotiating about this. It costs money to hire judges, and we are hosting this event as a fundraiser to support our students. There are two exceptions:

Exception 1: Those programs whose coaches are providing substantial assistance to the tournament may have their judge fees discounted. If you would like to help the tournament, you should reach out to us sooner rather than later.

Exception 2: Programs currently affiliated with an Urban Debate League may request a discount on judge fees, provided all coaches are covering judging.

Miscellaneous Notes

There have been some issues with tabroom's flip for sides function at other tournaments this year. If two debate entries have not hit each other in prelims, they should flip for sides; however, if they have hit each other in prelims, they should be locked to the opposite side, even if tabroom says to flip for sides. Thank you for your assistance in communicating this norm to your students. We will do our best to communicate with judges.

A school authorized adult must be on site to supervise student entries. Schools found to be in violation of this policy will be dropped from the tournament and asked to leave.

We will have a belonging and inclusion station in the library should any tournament participant require those services.

Our schedule is an extremely conservative estimate. We will accelerate rounds whenever possible in an attempt to be respectful of people's time.

Any questions can be directed to

Eric Schwerdtfeger (esdebate93@gmail.com)

Nathan Fell (nfelldebate@gmail.com)