Middle School Tournament Two Schedule and Registration Available, Due Monday 12/6

The schedule for competition at CMSDL Tournament Two takes place on December 11th, 2010. The MS T2 Registration Form is due by 5 pm Monday, December 6th, so please confirm with your students by that time.

The location is at Chicago High School for the Agricultural Sciences, which is at 3857 W. 111th St.

Divisions are as follows:

Varsity – debaters entering their third or fourth year of competitive middle school debate, regardless of grade. If a student attended a tournament last year or in a previous year and competed, that would count as a prior year of experience.

JV – debaters entering their second year of debate, regardless of grade. If they debated at a tournament last year, they’re JV (or Varsity, if they’re more ambitious, or have debated in a tournament in two previous years) this year.

Note that since neither Varsity or JV are large enough to be separate divisions, they’ll be combined at T2 as they were at T1, meaning both the JV and Varsity will debate the two affirmatives as well as Topicality this year. The CMSDL Argument Limits explain which arguments are allowed in which division’s debates. We’ve also updated the CMSDL Core Files Strategy Guide to make it easy for debaters to find which pages they’ll need to use – one page for Novice, one for JV/Varsity, including where to find the 1NC Topicality violations and 2AC affirmative Topicality responses.

Novice – brand-new debaters entering their first year of debate, regardless of grade. First year schools joining the league could start all their debaters in Novice, for example.

Debaters may move up in level, e.g., second-year debater who wanted to debate Varsity or Novice who wanted to debate JV to get more of a challenge later in the year, but may not move down a level in eligibility – we don’t want students who are more experienced competing against Novices, for example, since they wouldn’t be progressing and learning after a previous year of debate.

Support school judges:

Coaches of support schools should e-mail Forrest Sumlar by 5 pm on Tuesday, December 7th with the names of all committed, confirmed student judges who are available to judge at Tournament Two. He will let you know by 6 pm on Wednesday, December 8th which students can be hired to judge.