Details

Hospitality

Dinner (on Friday Night), light breakfast items (on Saturday), lunch (on Saturday), and snacks (all weekend) for students will be sold at affordable prices. Dinner, light breakfast, lunch, and snacks will be provided for coaches and judges throughout the weekend.

Fees

Checks should be made out to James Madison Memorial Debate. Fees are as follows:

Public Forum Debate - $50/team
Lincoln Douglas - $30/debater
Policy Debate (Open/Novice) - $40/team
Congressional Debater - $15/debater/day

Registration will close on Wednesday, November 7 or until we reach capacity. We are operating on a first come, first served basis.

Your fees will freeze on Wednesday, November 7. After this deadline, you own your full registration fees. Name changes can be made up until Thursday, November 9. You may make drops up until this time, but you are still obligated for any teams not dropped before Wednesday. ALL Judge names must be registered by Wednesday to allow for preferences/strikes. Schools without judges will be charged a $300/missing judge. A limited number of hired judges may be available at a rate of $125/day or $250/tournament. Please contact Tim to hire judges. Do not assume that because you have a missing judge that it means that we are hiring one for you.

If we may be coming to each others tournaments, we are happy to discuss a fee trade/swap. If you are traveling from outside of Wisconsin, please bring a check or a copy of the purchase order at registration. If there are difficulties, contact us and we can see how we can be flexible on this issue. Do not take advantage of this or we will need to change our policy in future.

Judging Information

Because we have a single-flighted tournament, we need your judges. Your school must provide one judge for every two Public Forum Teams, every two policy teams, or every two Lincoln-Douglas debaters. Your judges are obligated in each division one full elimination round beyond your school's elimination. For example, if you cleared a PF team to quarterfinals, all of your PF judges are obligated to semifinals. Please bring qualified individuals and be sure they have a paradigm posted if they are judging PF, LD, or CX.

In novice CX, junior/senior debaters in their 3rd+ year of policy debate may be used as judges. (IMPORTANT CHANGE)

You may split the obligation between Friday and Saturday (e.g. one person on Friday and a different person on Saturday). However, you may not split the obligation so that it is not evenly distributed (e.g. two people on Saturday and none on Friday).

We are not combining the PF and LD pools. Any judges who are shared between divisions (on a Fri/Sat split, or used for elims) will be explicitly labeled as such.

Because of the likely large field, we cannot apply your obligation towards the combined number of entries. For example, if you register 3 PF Teams and 1 LD debater - we have to hold you to three judges (two PF and one 1 LD) - not two. We may move your judges around between division to best suit the needs of the entire tournament. We will notify you if this impacts your judges. If we make a change that goes against your preferences, please let us know and we will fix it (or try our best).

Middleton is west-side suburb of Madison. Madison Memorial is on the south-west side of Madison. Both schools are pretty easy to get to from the highway, but not necessarily so for UW-Madison students without their own transportation. We may be able to make arrangements to transport judges to and from UW's campus. If your judges are interested in this, let us know and we will try to work something out.

Mentioned earlier, but worth repeating: Hired judges will be available at the rate of $125/day or $250/tournament. Yes that is high. We would rather have your judges than your money. If you need to hire a judge, please contact Tim directly. The WDCA maintains a facebook group for coaches and judges to connect. If you are missing a judge at the deadline without contacting us, we will assess our even larger missing judge fee ($300). We have generous registration deadlines because we want to make it as easy as possible for you to participate in our event. However, we do need to impose some deadlines to continue to offer an excellent tournament.

Judge Preferencing and Judge Strikes

We plan on offering limited strikes in Public Forum. We plan on offering some kind of mutual preferences in Lincoln Douglas. If there are adequate entries and judges, we will offer judge preferences in policy debate. Novice policy will have a random judge assignment.

We encourage all judges to post a paradigm to the philosophy section on tabroom.

Tabulating Information

Rounds 1 and 2 in all debate divisions will have a random assignment. Each round thereafter will be paired high-low in brackets. Unless something terrible happens threatening to blow up our schedule, we won't lag-pair.

We plan on using our transparent operating procedures: We will post results as the tournament progresses to the extent that tabroom allows.

We will not break brackets in elimination rounds. In elimination rounds, if teammates are scheduled to debate, the tournament will assume that you will coach over.

Division and Site Schools (IMPORTANT CHANGE)

We've base our decisions as to school sites on registration numbers. In the past, we've used Middleton as our primary building and JMM as our second site for LD prelims. This year our logistics demand that we use JMM as our primary site. We hope to offer the same excellent experience, though Middleton has a newer and far superior cafeteria space. For that we apologize in advance.