Welcome to the McNeil Speech and Debate Tournament!

Date: January 18th, 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/3wTC1fmh8zbsKC3o7

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 to help make events/point thresholds happen. Any students that end up competing will be able to break.

Scheduling/Cross Entries:

-We will offer 3 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

-Students in VLD, NLD, VPF, NPF, and Worlds will be permitted to cross-enter in Extemp. Debaters who cross-enter in another IE are doing so at their own risk. We will not delay rounds for cross-entries. Students in CX are NOT permitted to enter any other events.

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 award any TFA points. We will not collapse 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:

CX - Resolved: The United States federal government should significantly strengthen its protection of domestic intellectual property rights in copyrights, patents, and/or trademarks.

LD - Resolved: The United States ought to become party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and/or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

PF -Resolved: The African Union should grant diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Somaliland as an independent state.

Congress Docket (SET in the following order)

Prelims: 1, 3, 5, 9, 11.

Finals: 6, 8, 10, 13, 17

World Schools: