Two Misc Questions

Got these from different coaches recently and thought they may be of broader interest.

(a) Does the Tournament Reporting Notebook count debaters twice per tournament — once for Friday and once for Saturday?

No, a “tournament debater” is counted once for the tournament. So if your school has 5 teams (10 debaters) at a two-day tournament, you have 10 tournament debaters, not 20.

(b) Is it allowable for an affirmative team to run Harms in the 1AC and save the plan and Solvency for the 2AC [apparently a few JV teams did this at T1]?

No, the 1AC must make a prima facie (i.e., “on its face”) case for adopting a topical plan. That means they need to identify Harms and present a plan that can solve them. Affirmatives that deliberately delay running the plan until the 2AC are highly vulnerable to negative teams arguing that they are being unfair, abusive, and uneducational, since they are giving themselves the option of making all 1NC arguments irrelevant and inapplicable by running a different plan in the 2AC than their Harms had suggested they would run. They are choosing to dodge and evade argumentation and clash, which makes debates more superficial.

If, on the other hand, the affirmative team is especially inexperienced and merely runs out of time reading their 1AC, they would normally be allowed to finish it in the 2AC (in most instances, this would mean that they would finish reading the Solvency contention), but of course they should be asked by the negative in the cross-examination after the 1AC exactly what plan and case they are running and will be defending, so that the 1NC can fully “apply.”