John Edie Holiday Debate Tournament

Working on getting everything on the tabroom website. But, we did post our COVID plans -- they are on the tabroom site and I will post them here.

COVID Plans for the Edie Tournament 2021

Here is the narrative for our hopes and why we are doing this as a hybrid tournament by division NOT hybrid divisions. We have asked for the Marriott to give us all of their meeting rooms and suites. These include the Bi-level suites and the executive suites. The goal is to spread out the two teams to either side of the room, with a speaking location in the middle and the judges/coach observers in the back of the room. We feel we can increase the space and can handle a single flighted PF division in person. Additionally, we can spread out Congress in the Marriott ballrooms or large conference rooms.

Our earlier survey indicated that there was about 30% desire for in-person opportunity, about 30% that can't attend in-person, and about 40% that didn't really know what they would be allowed to do. Because we are an invitational, we decided to try and provide at least a portion of the debate community with the experience of an in-person opportunity. We felt that the PF division was large enough that at 50% we could still run a fairly significant division. The other divisions either were smaller and going in-person would result in the division being too small. Or, we felt that we didn't have enough larger rooms for multiple people.

We recognize this won't make everyone happy but we are trying to provide some opportunities for travel to those folks and teams that really are looking for this.

So, here is the plan.

1) We recommend vaccines and masks for all students, judges, coaches, and chaperones. We cannot mandate vaccines nor track this. We cannot develop a system for tracking this.

2) We will allow one coach-observer from each team in the room. We will also use NSDA level 2 for observers for the online divisions. We require that the judge and any coach-observers stay masked through the entire debate.

3) Students and masking:

--We will ask that the judge poll the students at the beginning of the round. If the students agree that the speaker can unmask while speaking, then the debate will proceed in that manner.
--If someone prefers a speaker remain masked, we will allow the speaker to take off their mask and switch to a face-shield to speak. So, speakers should bring face shields with them if they want to speak without a mask.
--To summarize: at this time, we will allow someone in the room to veto speaking without a mask, but they cannot veto speaking with a face-shield. We will do all cross-fires with masks on.
--In Congress, the same situation, only the speaker at the front could potentially speak without a mask. We will work to create as much distance as possible between the speakers and the other students in the round.

4) We ask that everyone wear a mask in other parts of the hotel and especially in the elevators. We will likely determine a cap on the number of people in the elevators.

Hope this helps answer some questions. More details coming.

Just a quick update on the plans for the John Edie Holiday debate tournament. I plan to post more on they why later this week. This is our plan and we have finished the new contract for this year with the Marriott. First, we will be moving the tournament to Saturday-Monday Dec 18-20, 2021. The Public Forum round robin will be Friday Dec. 17. We are still thinking about the Congress Round robin in relation to if it is Friday or Monday. Public Forum debate will be in-person. We will be using the 90 or so suites at the Marriott to get a bigger room for the debates in Public Forum. We will do LD, Worlds and Policy online. Congress we are still deciding and my plan is to finalize all items by Sept 1. Hope that answers some of the questions I've been getting.

The importance of diversity and equity has never been more important. As an opportunity to further community discussions, we are pleased to host the 5th Annual Diversity in Debate Conference on Tuesday, December 22nd. The focus for this conference is tournament equity practices, including training (pre-tournament) and committee practices to deal with equity and rules concerns (brought up during a tournament).

We will begin at 10:00am CST with short presentations and discussions with Nicole Wanzer-Serrano, Ed Lee, Cobin Szymanski, and Byron Arthur.

After lunch, we will break into working groups to discuss best practices. We plan to end by 5:00pm CST.

The conference is open to any coach and debater. To help us plan, please complete this short form.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRFY1zAJ6m7vM59dDXutsWTcpcRvxhgAoz-oO1JF6KJmGfsw/viewform

We will provide a zoom link later for the actual conference which will directly to those registered.

We hope you will join us for these important conversations and work.

Blake Diversity Conference 2020 To help the planning for the Diversity Conference, to be held on Tuesday, December 22, please complete this form.

The Blake School Tournament which is Dec. 18-20 is going to offer a "College Debate Program Chat" on Friday December 18. Our plan use our competition rooms after the debates are done to allow College directors or College Student representatives who are officials of a student run college debate program to meet with interested students. There is no charge (but we would not turn down a round or two of judging). We are still finalizing the details but plan to run these 7:30 or 8PM until 9PM on Friday Dec. 18. If you are a college director or a student leader from a college debate program that would like to host a session then please email me at sstafford-at-blakeschool.org. The goal is to get interested college programs to sign up by Sunday night Dec 13. Then we will create a signup form for interested students that would be released Monday Dec. 14 and would close probably Wednesday Dec 16 so we can create a schedule for rooms and let you know how many and who to expect. We know that many of you have come in the past to our tournament and wanted to give you an option to meet interested students.

How about worlds debate? Our division is solid and about 35 teams presently. Still time to join us. Excited to have returning CA Miha Andric joined this year by Reja Debevc of Masstricht University, Netherlands and Geetha Creffield of Team Singapore helping us out with judging and impromptu motions. There are going to be some excellent debates and to the extend the students will allow us, we will do some streaming and posting of recordings of some debates. 14 days and counting to the John Edie Holiday Debate Tournament.

So, we are getting close to another John Edie Holiday debate tournament. The tournament has always had a special commitment to inclusion and diversity. Our judge hiring, our elim panels and the post tournament inclusion conference have always attempted to create awareness and growth on these critical issues.

This year, we have taken a new move in relation to our public forum round robin which will be held Monday Dec. 21st to allow for a more humane three day format for the public forum division. So.... everyone one of the public forum teams this year in the Twin Cities Round Robin will include someone who identifies as a woman, a gender minority, or BIPOC.

I want to thank Sandy Berkowitz, Ellie Singer and Darren Chang for helping us achieve this goal. They did an amazing job. If the participants are willing we will try and stream as many debates as possible so young PF students all over the nation can see excellent debaters who they can identify with.

We will post this on tabroom soon, but the twelve teams are from:
Blake (MN), Bronx (NY), Carmel (IN), Charlotte Latin (NC), Edgemont (NY), La Salle College Prep (CA), Mountain Brook (AL), NSU (FL), Marist (GA), Richard Montgomery (MD), Taipei American School (TW), Walt Whitman (MD)

More tournament news tomorrow.

Tournament is open for registration

Tabroom.com

Happy to say that while we will miss our partners at the Marriott, they have let us out of the contract for 2020. So, we are going online. Dec. 18-20.

Tabroom.com We just got the ability to exit our Marriott contract for 2020.  Much to do here.  My goal is to work on this and get it open next week. 

So, wanted to alert everyone who is around Monday morning that we will run our annual Inclusion and Diversity in Debate conference. Running from 9AM-1PM in the Minnesota room on the 6th floor -- everyone is welcome. We have had some great discussions. We hope to look at tournament best practices for promoting inclusion for all. But that said the discussion moves in the direction the group wants it to or the keynote suggests.

Excited to announced that Elijah Smith - Director of Debate at Rutgers-Newark (RU-N!!!) will be our keynote in the morning. Can't go wrong there!

See you Monday! 9AM

21 days, how about a tabroom post? I have the best tab people. Let's start with policy. We have the amazing trio of Shunta Jordan, Daryl Burch and Brian Manuel. These three always get it done! Thank you to all three.

22 days! Have a great Thanksgiving.😀