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Welcome to the McNeil Speech and Debate Tournament!

Date: January 17th, 2024

We are thrilled to invite you to our TFA (Texas Forensic Association) qualifying tournament, offering a full range of qualifying events. This is a great opportunity for high school students to showcase their skills in speech and debate and to compete for a spot in the prestigious TFA State Tournament.

It is our goal to provide you with a pleasant tournament experience. This year's tournament will be hosted in person at McNeil High School.

If you have speech and debate experience and would like to be hired as a judge,please complete this form: https://forms.gle/9aqQHnsWTAP243v2A

Key Details:

-Our tournament is a TFA qualifier and will follow TFA rules.

-An adult affiliated with your school has to be present and available at all times throughout the tournament.

-Judge obligations cannot be filled with current high school students without explicit approval from the tournament director.

-We will use online balloting through Tabroom.com throughout the tournament. This means all judges will need Tabroom accounts.

-A novice is defined as a student in their first year of speech and debate competition. For example, a student who competed in PF as a freshman CANNOT compete in Novice Policy or Novice LD as a sophomore because that student is not a first-year competitor.

- We will allow McNeil students to compete in novice events, and limited numbers in varsity events.

Scheduling/Cross Entries:

-We will offer 4 prelim rounds in debate events.

-Section A includes DI, INFO, OO, Duo, POI and Poetry

-Section B includes DX, IX, NX, Prose, Duet, and HI

-Elim Procedures:

-We will not break brackets in debate elims.

-Panels for TFA qualifying events will start in semis. If possible, we will panel debate quarters, but no guarantees.

-Except for novice events, we will not host debate elims that don't award TFA points. In the event that entries are too low to justify quarters, we will break straight to semis, which will take the place of quarters in the schedule. This means we will break to semis in CX, LD, and PF if there are only 10-15 entries. We will break straight to finals in World Schools if there are only 6-9 entries. Novice debate events will break straight to semis.

-We will only collapse Novice and Varsity divisions if collapsing is necessary to awardanyTFA points. We willnotcollapse the divisions if it simply means offering better points.

-IEs with 16 or fewer entries will break straight to finals after Round 2. In this case, Round 2 will take the place of Semis on the schedule.

Topics:

Congress Docket (SET in the following order)

Prelims: 14, 19, 2, 17

Semis: 6, 9, 13, 5

World Schools:

Round 1: This House believes that charter schools have done more harm than good to the education system.

Round 2: Flip Sides

Round 3: Impromptu

Finals: This House believes that the African Union should prioritize strengthening regional alliances as opposed to continental unification.