EPTIn case you missed my last blog, I'll mainly be talking about my experiences competing in high school level speech/debate this year. Maybe some other general IRL stuff too at times. Don't expect it to be great, don't expect it to be pretty. But maybe you can relate or something. Who knows :D
*Note- we're in CPF, debating the september topic "resolved: congress should renew the federal assault weapons ban"
We got to the tournament Friday afternoon. Instantly, I saw a ton of people I had met last year. This is one of my favorite things about debate- when you're in round, everything's on the line. It's you vs your opponent for the win. But when the round's over, no matter how much animosity existed just a few minutes previously, everyone's friends.
My partner and I check the postings- we have a round soon. At this tournament, there were 3 prelims, then breaking to Octos (Ro16). We run to the room, only to find that they're running 3 hours late. Sigh....
Our opponents are two black girls, the judge is a UH judge. (Meaning that he knew what he was doing)
the girls are really bad. I mean REALLY bad. They take Con, we take second speaker to warm up. though my partner went to debate camp at stanford over the summer, I couldn't afford it so I haven't actually debated since February or so. their first point is about how guns would be replaced by tree branches and newspapers. we were like O_O wat.
And that pretty much set the pace for the rest of the round. We had no idea what they were doing, and I have a feeling they didn't either. At one point, they complained that we were untopical because we were discussing the federal assault weapons ban (the topic is basically do we renew the ban). Yup.
We pretty much won by default, I think.
Round 2 is vs a guy girl team. The round is decent by both sides, but we pretty much stomp on them in evidence/impacts. They didn't really do their research, so they were unaware of all the intracacies of the ban.
Round 3 was actually really good. Our opponents qualled for state freshman year, meaning they were about a billion times better than us. We're lucky enough to have an amazing judge, who we had heard of before the tourney. In the round, we get scared. The other team is REALLY fuckin good. By the end of the round, we have no idea who won. Judge tells us he's gonna have to go down his flow and weigh the winners of each round to figure out the winner.
By the time we get home, it's midnight. By the time I'm done rewriting our cases to account for what our opponents have said, it's like 2. Sigh....Thenkfully, joyoftournaments has the results of prelims up, we went 3-0 and are seeded 6th coming into break rounds, meaning our round is at 11.
Our round starts at around 11:30. We're up against juniors from an ultra legit debating school.
shit. We flip con first speaker. Our judge won state PF last year, so he's legit.
They pull out an observation that basically says as long as they save one life, they win the round.
Fuck.
We try to prove that constitutionality outweighs their benefits,
We win a couple of big arguments, and are close to winning the round. But the problem is, they keep misquoting us. We give them a printed out article from the LA Times, and they say it's a book by the same author published 4 years previous to that.
We give them evidence from Scalia's statement, they misquote it and lie about it. double uh-oh.
I'd say it's 50/50, but then I give a garbage final focus (aka the last speech, supposed to provide voters). I'm so worked up about how they've been debating dirtily that I'm unable to drive in the constitutionality argument which is the only way we can really win.
They misquote us even more in their last speech, and the round is over.
Sigh.
Judge discloses, telling us that we won the round, but essentially we were unable to disprove the observations, and they proved that they saved 1 poor mexican.
So he downs us.
Sigh.
Ah well, there's another tournament this Friday, so we'll go and hope for better results.
Honestly, I'd be happy with our performance (3-1 overall, destroyed prelims).
But it turns out this tournament, they only gave state points to teams that made quarters rather than Octos. Sucks mang.
To those of you who read my last blog, thanks :D
Keep up the comments, they're always fun. For example, we learned that djWHEAT was a state champion policy debater!
I'll post again on Wednesday or Thursday about our upcoming tournament
