North Texas Longhorns District Qualifier

for the 2018 National Tournament

Big Questions National Qualifier

We invite the member schools of the North Texas Longhorn NSDA District to participate in the second Big Questions debate competition. The winner of the competition will qualify for the national speech and debate tournament in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.  The paragraphs below should help schools prepare and compete in the tournament. 

TOPIC

The topic that will be debated is: 

Resolved: Humans are fundamentally different from other animals.

DATE AND LOCATION

The Big Questions debate tournament will take place at Colleyville Heritage HS located at 5401 Heritage Ave in Colleyville, TX 76034. You may use that address on any search engine to find directions to the location. The date of the competition will be Thursday, April 5. 

SCHEDULE

We will begin the day with registration and check in at 4:00 pm. Mandatory judge training will take place at that time. Because of the time constraints, we will most likely single flight the competition.  You may find the format for the debates on other parts of this website. Preliminary rounds will begin no later than 4:30 pm. We will have three rounds of preliminary competition at 4:30pm; 5:30pm; 6:45pm. An appropriate elimination round will follow at 8:00pm with subsequent rounds to follow.

Dinner will be the responsibility of individual schools. However, we will follow past practices and procedures for that meal. A member of the district committee will take orders from individual schools for pizzas that will be delivered to the school during the dinner break. The cost is nominal and we usually get a great deal. More details will be provided as we get closer to the contest. 

Entry fees and judge requirements

The entry fee will be $10 per entry. Schools are expected to provide one judge for every four debaters or fraction thereof. You must provide a judge where required; we will not offer opportunities to hire judges for this event. You may not enter the tournament without providing judge(s) for your entries.

As stated earlier, the winner of this event will be eligible to compete at the NSDA national speech and debate tournament in Ft. Lauderdale. We strongly encourage you to enter. We look forward to seeing you on April 5.