About the OPDL

The Online Parliamentary Debate League is an organization that aims to expand access to Parliamentary debate. We offer a series of free online parliamentary debate tournaments for middle and high school students as well as scrimmages and a class.

Link to our full calendar: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mwIlj5z1GKQYrMxW1QuCkiD8y-2PgBj0nNgW0Pm2Wyg/edit?usp=sharing

Why Parli?

Parliamentary debate is a unique format of debate that rewards thinking on your feet and general knowledge. It gives students an opportunity to practice real world skills like argumentation, speaking off the cuff, and collaborating with a partner. Parliamentary debaters get to research and debate about a wide variety of subjects, preventing stale debates and allowing them to leave the activity with knowledge about a wide variety of things.

Tournaments

The OPDL runs a couple of online Saturday-Sunday tournaments a semester.

The Fall 2023 tournaments will be held on September 30th-October 1st, November 18th-19th, December 9th-10th. Spring 2024 tournaments are TBD.

Classes

The OPDL runs a free online parliamentary debate class on our Discord server roughly every other Tuesday at 4:00 PM Pacific time. The class is designed for people with no parli experience. The first 40 minutes of class focuses on learning the structure of and skills needed for parli debate while the second half focuses primarily on content that comes up often in parli debate. While the content does build on itself, students can skip classes or just go to one portion of a class.

Scrimmages

Roughly every other Tuesday, OPDL holds a scrimmage on our Discord at 4:00 PM Pacific time. Scrimmages are designed to be causal, low stress opportunities to practice that are primarily judged by students.

OPDL Points Race

The OPDL point race is a low stake competition designed to foster friendly competition amongst competitors in the league. The winner of the point race will receive bragging rights and a low quality printable digital certificate. All percentile ranks are calculated separately for each division.