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Link to our tournament invitation- please see the message below with an important tournament update. You also should have received an email from us earlier this afternoon with the same information.

IMPORTANT WEATHER UPDATE

Good afternoon, Thank you for your patience with us as we worked through the uncertainty of this weekend's inclement weather and its impact on our tournament this weekend. We have been lucky to not have to deal with inclement weather in the past and were navigating new waters. We were hoping to get this email out to everyone sooner, but we had an unscheduled evacuation drill that delayed our email. What a day!

Unfortunately, we just received word from our building administration that we need tomove this weekend's tournament online. Given that we have schools travelling from across the state, the uncertainty of heavy rains and winds affecting transport, and the risk of power outages all complicated our ability feel like we were making the safest decision for all attendees by hosting the tournament in our building tomorrow. We also have had several area counties already call off their ability to attend in person and want to do our best to accommodate. Unfortunately, our hybrid options are limited by a lack of access to online debate platforms so we will have to move the entirety of our tournament online.

We are currently in the process of acquiring the necessary NSDA campus space to host the tournament online. As of now, we would still like to follow as close to the posted schedule from our invitation, but we may need to make some adjustments to best accommodate an online format.We will do our best to get Round 1 pairings out to everyone by the listed 8:30 AM start for PF/LD and the 9:00 start time for Speech events.

We understand that moving online might not be the preference of all of our attending schools or individual students on your teams. To accommodate for this shift online, we are going to extend the fees deadline so that schools can drop entries without cost either as a team or as an individual competitor. We will refund fees as necessary for schools that have already sent checks.

In the meantime, if you know you have any drops that need to be entered, please email those drops to me so that I can record them prior to tomorrow's pairings. I will be sending out several more emails tonight with additional information as we make this transition. Above all, thank you for your patience with us as we worked through this and for caring about student safety and access to pedagogically valuable after school activities like debate.

Sincerely,

Matt Cekanor and Wes Tanner