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Thank you so much for considering the Tall City Invitational Qualifying Tournament for your competition weekend of January 18th. This tournament is brought to you by the Rebel Speech & Debate Boosters of Legacy High School (formerly known as Midland Lee). This will be the 47th annual running of the Tall City Invitational and we are pleased to bring you a full slate of events for your teams.

Some our our highlights include:

Awesome Sweepstakes Trophies in both Large School (4A-6A) and Small School (1A-3A & TAPPS) as well our our Squad Efficiency Trophy given to the team with the highest sweepstakes point per student entry (minimum 5 students across 10 events). We will have 1st, 2nd, & 3rd place trophies in all events and Finalist medals for 4th though 6th place.

Food! We will have our awesome Culinary Arts program providing us with hospitality for coaches and judges as well as a concession stand for competitors.

Service!! We know that you have a lot of choices on where to spend your travel budgets and we appreciate you choosing to come to our tournament. It is our goal to make sure that you leave Midland with a smile on your face knowing that your students have gotten the chance to practice their craft and get good feedback early in the season. Our judges will be trained on what to look for in their events and they know how important it is to provide good ballots to the participating teams. While we will be running registration through Tabroom we plan to utilize traditional paper ballots to make sure that coaches have a physical copy of each round's results.

UIL Academics: We are excited to host you at our campus! This will be a full UIL Academics Invitational Meet, using Set A Materials. This includes the hands on programming portion as well. Schools in attendance will be expected to have coaches help grade ALL events with student entries. This includes Ready Writing and Journalism.

If there is anything we can help with please let me know. We are very excited to be offering a live in-person tournament experience and we want you to be a part of it!

Because we depend on the expected provisions of judges by attending schools we can not guarantee that elimination rounds or finals rounds will be paneled. We will do our best to provide panels in finals but it can not be guaranteed. (TFA Constitution p. 88 'Requirements' Section 19.) That being said, we encourage each school to bring as many volunteers to judge as they can. Everyone knows that no tournament director has ever complained about having too many available judges!! We ask that you send our judges sign up to your judges that you are bringing, https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0A4FAAAE22A1FCC34-60932799-tall

The 3rd round of debate will be power matched when possible in accordance to TFA preference. (TFA Constitution p. 91 'Pairing of Preliminary Rounds' Section 2.)

We will break brackets where possible in debate rounds. In the event a school has a closeout on a bracket the head coach has the option of deciding which of their teams will advance or if the teams will debate each other and let the judge decide.

Lincoln-Douglas Debate will be using the NSDA January/February Topic

Congress Docket: TFA Spring 2026

Prelim: 12, 15, 14, 7, 18

Finals: 3, 1, 9, 20, 19

Conflict Patterns:

Pattern A - Persuasive Domestic Extemp, Dramatic Interp, Duet Acting, Informative Speech, Poetry, & Impromptu
Pattern B - Informative Foreign Extemp, Humorous Interp, DUO Interp, Prose, & Original Oratory
Pattern C - Congress and all Debate events are locked. There is NO Cross-Entry with the other patterns or the Academic Events

Link to event pattern schedule: Tall City Rebel Schedule Google Sheet

Sweepstakes formula is as follows:

Individual Events and Congress

1st - 15 points

2nd - 10 points

3rd - 5 points

Finalist (4-6) - 3 points

Debate Events (including CX, LD)

1st place - 15 points

2nd place - 10 points

Semifinalists - 5 points

Quarterfinalist - 3 points

If you have any questions, please feel free to email liam.henson@midlandisd.net or call/text me at 432-813-1038

For UIL Academics, please feel free to email erika.cooke@midlandisd.net.