Dear Colleagues,

The Silicon Valley Urban Debate League (SVUDL) presents:

The SVUDL Ryan Mills Memorial Invitational. February 21-22, 2026

All proceeds from this tournament will go to the Silicon Valley Urban Debate League, a local non-profit organization whose mission is to empower Silicon Valley students, regardless of their race or socioeconomic status, to reach their full potential to become professional and community leaders by teaching critical thinking and communication skills through speech and debate programming.

Ryan Mills was a volunteer with the Silicon Valley Urban Debate League (SVUDL) since its inception more than 10 years ago, through and until his untimely passing in March of 2021. Ryan was the consummate professional and a model volunteer, judging hundreds of rounds of competition for SVUDL over the years. He was one of the most sought after judges by our students, for not only his expansive debate knowledge, but also for the care in which he gave constructive feedback and shared resources, all with the idea of helping them grow as competitors and young adults. He was also an advocate for SVUDL in the wider community, building bridges that let our students access deeper coaching and opportunities to aid in their professional growth as well.

This tournament will be held online via NSDA Campus for all events.

TENTATIVE PENDING APPROVAL - New for this year, the Ryan Mills SVUDL Invitational has been granted speech bids for the University of Kentucky TOC. Speech bids will be awarded based on entry limits, as per TOC requirements.

All tournament registration will be on Tabroom.com. Information regarding online platform use for the tournament will be released in the coming weeks.

If you have any questions regarding the tournament or registration, please email Tournament Director Mariel Cruz at cruznmariel@gmail.com or contact SVUDL at info@svudl.org

Deadlines

The system will accept new entries until Feb 18th at 8pm PST. Make drops and name changes through Tabroom after that up until Feb 20th. Fees will be frozen on Thursday, Feb 19th at 8pm PST. All space in debate and speech will be allocated on a first come, first served based on the tournament caps listed below; register early!

Tournament Caps and Waitlist

In an attempt to balance school distribution in each event, each school will be allotted 6 entries per division per debate event. All entries over the caps will be waitlisted.

Entries may also be waitlisted if the tournament reaches capacity. Schools will be moved off the waitlist as space opens up. Schools that have not already taken up their allotted slots in each event will be moved first, and schools with completed judge entries will also be given preference. Remaining waitlisted entries will be moved on a first-come, first-serve basis.

TBA Entries

All TBA Entries will be waitlisted until names are entered. Any TBA entries without names after Feb 18th will be removed from the tournament.

Judging Requirements

Schools are required to fulfill at least 50% of their debate and events requirement when fees are assessed on Thursday, Feb 19. That means, you can’t buy out more than 50% of your judge commitment. Please see the list of fees for uncovered judge fees. Judge hire requests must be submitted by Friday, Feb 14th at 8pm PST. After this date, schools will be responsible for providing their own judges.

Schools will pay a judging penalty fee per speech slot, Congress entry, Lincoln Douglas/Duo Interp or debate team not covered by school judges. Please note, Congress judges may be asked to also judge speech since they will be in the same pattern and judge pool.

All debate entries are required to have judges for all prelim rounds, and for Debate Elim 1 and Debate Elim 2. Beyond that, all debate judges from a school are obligated until one round past where the last student from their school is eliminated. Judges are assumed to be experienced and prepared to judge their assigned events or debate formats. Debate judges are free to determine style questions at the beginning of each round. Debate judges must have properly linked Tabroom accounts for online ballot entry.

Speech judges and Congress judges are committed for all rounds of the day they are assigned to judge.

School judges who fail to check in to their rounds online when assigned may have their team fined the aforementioned penalties per round. Please contact us if you're unsure of your judging commitment, or have any other questions regarding judging.

Topics:

L/D Debate Topic: NSDA Mar/Apr topic AND NSDA Jan/Feb - Novice and Open divisions of both topics will be offered, pending enough entries register for the event

Policy Debate Topic: National topic on the Artic

Public Forum: NSDA Feb AND March Public Forum Topic - Novice and Open divisions of both topics will be offered, pending enough entries register for the event

For parli, one topic will be provided for each prelim; for elim rounds, teams may be given three topics and will do strikes to determine the topic.

Divisions

All Speech and Debate events will offer a novice and open division. We reserve the right to collapse divisions if entry size is too small for two separate divisions.

Novice is defined as a student’s first year of competition, or not advancing to an elimination round in your first two years of competition, regardless of debate format.

Double entries in Speech Events and Congress are allowed. Debate entries may not double enter.

General Tournament Rules

The tournament will consist of five preliminary debate rounds for varsity, five prelims debate rounds for novice, and the three preliminary rounds of varsity and open events. We reserve the right to combine divisions if the entry warrants.

Persuasive will include both advocacy (Original Advocacy) and other "persuasive" speeches (Original Oratory). Extemp is combined national and international. Semifinals will be held in individual events with 50 or more entries or the discretion of the tournament director. Undersubscribed events may waive finals. Due to scheduling, we will only be breaking to Double octos for debate, events, entries permitting.

Speech Elims

Speech events we will break the top 6 to finals in events that have up to 30 entries. Divisions with more than 30 entries will have the top 12 advance to Semi-Finals, divisions with more than 51 entries will have three sections of Semi-finals with 6 competitors advancing to finals, and divisions with more than 85 entries will break to a quarterfinal. We will award trophies up to the top 6 in all speech events, and medals to Semifinalists and Quarterfinals. Placement will be determined by cumulative ranking. Events with 30+ will have a semis and a finals. Non-TOC NIETOC events above 51 contestants will have a Semifinal with 6 entries per section.

Bid levels for TOC Speech events will be determined by entry size, as dictated by TOC entry requirements.

Congress

Please designate the PO's with a 'po' for every ten entries via email to cruznmariel@gmail.com.

Bills will be posted on the tournament webpage on Tabroom.com a couple weeks prior to the start of the tournament. To submit bills for consideration, please email cruznmariel@gmail.com, with the subject line - Congress Bills, SVUDL tournament.