I’m really excited to get to work on this. I think there’s a few primary areas for us to emphasize when we try to determine what NPDA is or will be.
1. Curricular focus. We need to figure out what we teach, why, and how. Having that in writing is going to help sell what we are to outsiders, solidify our core, and give us something to build around.
2. Novice focus. We don’t have novice debaters for the most part. Most tournaments don’t offer novice divisions and the ones that do don’t make. Most teams can’t field true novices because of that. We need students to do the activity if we want the activity to grow and one easy pathway is by increasing team sizes by including more students.
3. Student-run focus. We have a few excellent student-run teams and could be an activity designed to support them more fully. I’m no expert in the needs of student-run programs, but I think a subcommittee of our conference should focus on what these teams need and how we can meet those needs as an organization.
4. Service/professional focus. The NPDA circuit has an abundance of excellent coaches and educators and we need to tap those resources more effectively and get people doing professional debate work, whether that is service, publishing, or any other thing that raises the quality of our work as a collective. This is going to make our institutions more supportive, make our CVs better, and help us draw attention and resources that let us grow. One of the easiest ways for us to win programs to NPDA is to send good coaches out into the world with good CVs to get hired at new institutions.
5. Collaborative focus. This group is broadly willing to work together and we’re going to need to do that to make this work. While we compete in rounds, I think we need to structure this circuit around a collaborative, cooperative mindset that should be ingrained in the NPDA learning process. I would like to see more scrimmages, sharing of or interacting with each other’s social media, co-writing, file sharing, or anything else that can make this format more communal and less siloed by institution.