Hired and School Judging Information

If you would like to signup to be a judge for our tournament, please visit the Judge Signup link.

All judges must have a Tabroom account, which will be used to send ballots out throughout the tournament.  Ballots for synchronous events will contain a room link that takes you too Zoom which will host the live round.  (A Zoom Room Manager will place you into the appropriate breakout room.)  Ballots for asynchronous events are not attached to a competition room, but will contain each video link with them.  

Asynchronous (Speech) Judges

We will release prelim ballots by 9am on Wednesday morning.  Judges will have until 6pm on Thursday to complete judging.  Semifinals judging will take place on Friday (again, roughly 9am until 6pm) with finals judging occurring on Saturday (from roughly 9am until 4pm).  We encourage all judges to complete their rounds as early as possible to avoid submission errors.  All ballots that are not received on time will result in a fine and could result in your competitors being removed from competition.  Our goal is to limit speech judges to about six rounds.  (Remember that because rounds are asynchronous, that judges could judge multiple preliminaries or even multiple semis/finals.)

Synchronous (Debate/Extemp) Judges

School and hired judges who do not receive a round should report to the judge pooling room, which will be sent out privately and wait to be cleared by the tournament.  Judges who fail to report may miss a round that they are substituted for, which could result in a fine and, if continuous or egregious, removal of your teams from the tournament.

***All speech/extemp judges are expected to be available for the duration of the tournament.***

***All debate judges are expected to be available for one round past your team's elimination.***

 Judge Training

The NSDA and NFHS have created some valuable resources for judging.  Implicit bias and cultural competence training are super important.  We encourage all judges to familiarize themselves with these concepts, which you can do at this website: https://www.speechanddebate.org/judge-training/