Tournament Report: Binghamton and Rochester in US

Tournament Report

Two BP Tournaments in the USA:

The Northeast Regional Season Opener at SUNY Binghamton

The Brad Smith Debate Tournament at the U. of Rochester

by P. Kipp =:)

I attended two more BP tournaments in the USA—this time sponsored by the University of Vermont (UVM), whose head coach, Alfred Snider (a.k.a. “Tuna”), helped Professors Jason Jarvis and Kyong Ho Heo get debating started at Kyunghee University in the early 2000s.  Both tournaments were part of the Northeast Regional circuit for both Policy Debate and Worlds style debating, with the two tournaments running side-by-side.  They are attended by teams from New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—with some schools in the region going to only one or the other, but most attending both.

  

Binghamton Clock Tower and City

Outline of the Binghamton Tournament

Sept. 22 – 23

44 teams

6 preliminary rounds; break to quarters

CA: James Hardy (UVM Worlds’ Coach), DCA: Paul Gross (Cornell Worlds’ Coach)

James Hardy, the CA

Motions:

R1: THW allow the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sports.

R2: THW offer shortened prison sentences in exchange for military service.

R3: THW abolish the minimum wage during recessions.

R4: THB that women’s rights groups should not campaign against abortion.*

*Note: This confused everyone because it is essentially a statement of status quo in the U.S.; the CA apologized and said he had intended something like the motion without the “not,” but was playing around with wording & forgot what he had written.

R5: TH regrets the strong social norms in favor of lifelong monogamy.

R6: THW link development aid to the existence of free and fair elections.

QF: THB the media should substantially limit time spent reporting on shooting incidents.

SF: THB the U.S. should pay war reparations to North Korea.

Final: THB western foreign policy should seek to prevent China’s acquisition of Africa’s land and resources.

The Champions, Allan and Dan from Grove City PS

Results:

Break: 4 teams each from Vermont and Kings, 3 from Cornell, 2 from Colgate, and one each from Grove City, Rochester, and HWS

Champion: Grove City PS (Allan and Dan – 4^th seeds after the break)

Finalists: Kings HC (1^st seed), Kings DG (2^nd seed), Vermont GA (7^th seed)

Novice Finals: none held, due to a lack of qualified judges without conflicts

Best Speaker: tie between Shrigar Velasky (not sure of spelling) of Colgate and Greg Dubois of Kings College

Outline of the Rochester Tournament

Sept. 29 – 30

60 teams

6 preliminary rounds; break to quarters

CAs: Ken Johnson (U. of R. Coach) & Alfred “Tuna” Snider (UVM Head Coach)

Motions:

R1: THW not use retribution in sentencing convicted criminals.

R2: THW oppose gender-specific prizes and awards for professional achievements.

R3: THW require training in debate as part of a university’s core curriculum.

R4: THW only allow hydraulic fracturing in areas that approve it through referendum.

R5: THW launch an international human mission to Mars within 10 years.

R6: THB that an Arab League military force should implement regime change in Syria.

QF: THW prosecute media outlets that publish nude photos without the subjects’ informed consent.

SF & Novice Final: THB that municipalities should regulate high-sugar foods and beverages.

Final: THW not allow strikes in essential services such as education and medical care.

Results:

Break: 4 teams each from Vermont and Kings, 3 from Cornell, 2 from Colgate, and one each from Grove City, Rochester, and HWS

Champion: Cornell KR (Kirat Singh and Srinath Reddy – 5^th seeds after the break)

Second Place: Vermont SW (4^th seed)

Finalists: Grove City SM (6^th seed), Cornell YB (7^th seed)

Novice Champion: Patrick Henry MS

Best Speaker: Srinath Reddy from Cornell

Best Debate

These tournaments produced several interesting debates, but nothing quite on the level of the debate over gladiatorial mortal combat in the HWS tournament semifinal.  The best debate in either of these two was in R5 of the Binghamton tournament, where I was lucky enough to judge in the top room when the teams debated the motion “TH regrets the strong social norms in favor of lifelong monogamy.”

The debate could be broadly characterized as a struggle between GOV bench—to center the debate on individual liberties and happiness—and the OPP bench, to center the debate on broader social patterns.  The OG, Kings DG, took first in the room with a strong all-around case by framing the debate in the context of people’s aspirations for individual freedom and questioning the social utility of monogamy as an overall social system in today’s world where there is a changing definition of family.  Kings HC in CO, which took second, was a bit sloppy in rebuttal of specific Gov. Bench arguments but made the most brilliant strategic move in the debate when it asserted that a social norm can’t be treated as an isolated phenomenon but, instead, must be looked at in comparison with alternatives.  The team then made detailed arguments comparing the way parents act as role models for future generations under monogamy (which they supported) and under several alternative family models they opposed, such as single-parent families, a “hookup” culture, polygamy, and live-in boyfriends.

          

Grove City PS, in OO, was third, laying groundwork for what CO managed to do, but getting too involved in specific scenarios and statistics to look at the big picture.  CG (St. John’s FG) was last, with good rebuttals and interesting, but undeveloped, ideas about the disproportionate impact on women in the status quo of double-standards in monogamy.

Funniest Line

           

This was from the novice final of the Rochester tournament, on the motion “THB that municipalities should regulate high-sugar foods and beverages.”  From the MO: “The situation we have here is like me and my pet goldfish.  If I’m irresponsible and I feed it too much, it’s going to explode.  That’s why we need the government to tell people what to do.”

           

Note: Funniest, not necessarily most effective...

Tournament Efficiency

          

US tournaments pack five rounds of debating into one day (Saturday), and do it pretty efficiently.  Both of these tournaments had check-in at 7:30 a.m., and the R1 pairings were scheduled for 8:00.  The Binghamton tournament was a bit behind schedule all day because of some tab problems (no surprise there...) but the Rochester tournament ran on schedule.  How do they do that?

           

The main point that I noticed was that everything was centered on the briefing room, including the tab, so there were no communication problems between coordinators.  Breakfast and lunch at the Rochester tournament were also served in a large foyer right outside the briefing room, which meant that no one had to leave the area and come back late.

          

The tournament’s casual atmosphere helped too.  There was a quick briefing in the morning of each tournament, the main points of which were that judge deliberations and feedback should each be limited to 15 minutes, and that everyone should go back to the briefing room after every round.  There weren’t any formal roll calls, just a quick check before each round: “Anybody not here?  If so, call them.  Two minutes until the pairings go up.”  The awards ceremony at each tournament was also very casual and took place after the quarterfinals—with individual speaker awards and quarterfinal awards all given out at that time.  No individual certificates, t-shirts, or long speeches to complicate things.  Semifinalist and higher awards were simply given out after those rounds in conjunction with the announcements of who would advance.

           

At the Brad Smith Debate Tournament in Rochester, Brad Smith himself (a former U. of R. library director who supported the debate team) came out to make a brief speech that took about 30 seconds: “Thanks for inviting me here.  I love debate because it makes you look carefully at both sides of an issue.  I’ve always enjoyed working with debate.  Congratulations to the winners.”  All other briefings and announcements were similar, and this kept things moving along quickly.  The whole thing on Sunday (R6, quarterfinals, semifinals & novice finals, finals, champion’s announcement) started at 8:00 a.m. and was done by 5:30 p.m.

Miscellaneous Observations

• Just as at the HWS tournament I attended before the regular season began, these tournaments both lacked judges, and there were a lot of teams from Cornell and Vermont (about 10 – 12 from Cornell, 6 – 8 from Vermont), so some rooms just had one or two judges and most judges saw the same teams several times.  People didn’t worry too much about that; though there were some complaints about the quality of judging.  No worrying about judge tests and so on—just a look at judge feedback by the adjudication core on Saturday night.

• North American teams, on average, seem pretty comparable to Korean teams.  They’re a bit more stylish, maybe, in terms of one-liners and mastery of technical vocabulary (as might be expected since their native language is mostly English).  They’re definitely weaker on signposting and giving case outlines, however, so their speeches are sometimes hard to follow.  Level of analysis seems about the same, as does strategy—with some teams focusing on the big picture of the debate, but many of them just getting caught up in the details of individual arguments.  At the very top level (semifinal/final), there may be a slightly higher level of debating going on, on average, than in Korea—but the gap is not large.

(Courtesy: Peter Kipp)