Greetings,

The Ridge High School Debate Team cordially invites you to the eleventh annual Ridge Debates on December 9th and 10th in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. We hope to provide you and your team with an exceptional day of competition. We will be offering two divisions in Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Policy Debate and Public Forum,and featuring one division of Congressional Debate! 
 
We will be awarding TOC bids to the semifinalists in Public Forum Debate and finalists in Lincoln-Douglas Debate.
 
All students attending MUST have the approval of their school principals to attend and must be accompanied by a parent or pre-approved authorized adult FOR THE DURATION OF THE EVENT.  If a student is requested to present an adult, and the student cannot do so at that point of time, the student will be immediately withdrawn from the event and charged the appropriate drop fees along with initial registration and any hired judging fees. Important notes: Only teams officially representing bona fide degree-issuing high schools are eligible to to register. This statement should be self-explanatory. No independent entries, no camp entries, no mix-and-match entries from across school districts.  No mavericks.  Any special consideration requests must be directed to David Yastremski at dyastremski@bernardsboe.com prior to the registration deadline.  Any independent entries must provide principal-approval, along with the name of adult who will supervise them, by the registration deadline. 

All judge names must be finalized by Monday, December 5th to afford time for strikes.  Any changes in judge names after December 5th will be fined $25 in order to allow teams the most accurate and fair opportunity to rate.   Varsity Lincoln-Douglas Debate will feature a mutual preference system for judge placement. Schools must have their judges post paradigms on the JudgePhilosophies wiki (http://judgephilosophies.wikispaces.com) one week prior to the tournament in order to participate in order to have preferences honored for their debaters.  There is no judge obligation for Congress entries; however, if you have an unaffiliated congress judge, we will credit you an LD/PF judge in place.  We will originally limit this to one per school. 

The tournament will use the 2016-2017 Policy Debate topic, the November/December Lincoln-Douglas debate topic and the December Public Forum topic.  In Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Policy Debate, and Public Forum, five preliminary rounds will be held with an appropriate number of outrounds (entry numbers permitting).   Awards will be presented to all outround participants in all three events, along with speaker awards.   

Until we receive more information from attending schools, we will cap the entry numbers to 8 entries in each event. If you would like to add extra students on a ‘waitlist’ basis, feel free to indicate that in your registration. We will contact you as soon as more information is available.

We hope you and your team will consider attending the tenth inception of this tournament!  We eagerly await hearing your feedback and hope to see you and your team in December.                                                          .
 

David Yastremski
Ridge High School