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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.Hi all,
Topic votes have been tallied.
The selected topics are UTT’s Lithium, Pacific’s Space and Syria, PDB’s East Africa, and Whitman’s Bolivia.
This link will allow you to view this year’s Topic Committee discussion.
If you have any comments, please feel free to share them with any member of the committee or to post them here or in the NPTE/NPDA Tournament group on Facebook.
Re-posting this from Tabroom email for anyone who didn’t see it:
We’ve had to make some changes to the Mound High schedule for a couple of reasons. First, it is looking very likely that we’ll have a partials double round for both halves, which requires us to add two rounds to the schedule from last year. That is a good problem, and we’re really excited for what it means for NPDA and NPTE.
Second, there was a space availability issue on Thursday morning due to another campus event. We will have to start day 1 at noon, meaning day 1 will have only four rounds with a dinner break.
The big takeaways are 1. No changes to the Sunday schedule – you do not need to change travel plans because of this. 2. Our friends in the Midwest can hopefully drive out a day later. 3. It’s going to be busy on days 2 and 3.
I’ve updated the Tabroom schedule and uploaded the new schedule to tournament websites, so you can see the whole plan.Looking forward to hosting y’all in a few weeks!
BrentHey y’all, quick follow-up. Topic half will be the second half! I misremembered the invitation when I typed this up.
BN
The Mound High Swing will be hosted at McKendree University January 9-12. Looking forward to hosting y’all quite a bit this year!
There’s a mistake in this language that we want to clarify. First, a round robin group (or pod) will have 6 teams in it. Second, to create these pods, we need to create “pots” – I’m sure now you see how this mix-up happened.
Each pot has 4 teams who are sorted by rank, 1-4, 5-8, etc. Then they are randomly assigned to a group. That means each group will have one team from each pot, spreading out the seeds among each group with some variance created by the random assignment.
I’d also like to add that we’ve considered a deterministic system that places teams in a “snake” pattern, where 1-4 are placed, then 5-8 in reverse order. That means groups have some pairs of seeds, but it also spreads out the seeds evenly in every group. So, for instance, 1 would be in a group with 1, 8, 9, 16, 17, and 24. 4 is in a group with 4, 5, 12, 13, 20, 21.
I’m curious what the community thinks is a better model. We’re really excited about the chance to use a group stage and we’ve already gotten some excited feedback about it, but we’re still refining, so feel free to make your concerns known.
