Disclaimer: The following is probably more than you ever really wanted to know about how I decide who goes to nationals...Which is in Birmingham, Alabama June 18-23. Students who qualify MUST attend a prep camp that runs from June 10-14 and June 17 from noon to 4:00 p.m. at Lanier.
Nationals is an open tournament but there are restrictions on what events students can cross-enter in and we can only have up to 8 in each event. When I arrived at Lanier in 2007 this was how you "qualified" for Nationals:
1. If you won 1st in a National event at any tournament, you qualified
2. For everyone else, a try-out day was scheduled around April. This was basically an in-house mini-tournament judged by the alumni.
This system worked but as our team grew and the national tournament increased in its level of competition, I began to see some problems with those criteria. For starters, winning 1st place in a tournament, while a great achievement, shouldn't really be the ultimate factor in determining that someone is Nationals worthy. There are those rare occasions where winning 1st is, for lack of a better word, a fluke. I don't mean to diminish people's accomplishments, but our debate history has proved this to be true. It was unfair to qualify someone who won 1st and never broke to finals ever again, while other students who consistently got to finals but didn't win first had to wait for the try-out date.
Another flaw with the "1st Place automatic bid" criteria is that I noticed there were a lot of students on our team who consistently made it to finals and just never placed first. Making them try-out fell just short of an insult in that I knew they were deserving of competing at the National level. At a lot of tournaments, we have an overwhelming majority of the finalists in certain events and so from tournament to tournament there's a rotation of people who win 1st. But some students never have things fall into place for them even though they were always getting to finals.
Finally, there were problems with the try-out day. Students on our team are busy with other weekend activities. And then there was this problem: During the try-out day, we would be looking for an alumni judge for an event and were stuck using an alumni who had no experience with the event. We had judges who had never done Dramatic Interp. judging DI and judges who had never done debate judging debate. This was counter to the whole reason we had a try-out in the first place.
All these things considered, it seemed we needed a system that rewarded consistency in breaking to finals and put the whole process in the hands of our local tournaments. So I adopted the system they use at the high school level for debate. In Texas, high school debaters earn points for breaking to elimination rounds in debate and to final rounds in individual events. Here is our scale:
Debate Individual Events & Congress
1st Place - 10 points 1st Place - 10 points
2nd Place - 7 points 2nd Place - 7 points
Semifinalist - 5 points 3rd Place - 4 points
Quarterfinalist - 2 points 4th Place on down - 2 points
Octofinalist - 1 point
I've used this point scale since I came to Lanier as a way to encourage friendly competition. I never intended it to be a system we would use for determining who went to Nationals. But one year, I looked at everyone who went to Nationals and drew a line at 15 points. Nearly everyone who competed at Nationals that year (with a few exceptions) had at least 15 points. So that became the cutoff. I made exceptions for certain events that weren't offered at every tournament, like Congress and Declamation. Despite the fact that our local tournaments always have that
rogue/incompetent judge, my belief is that ability over time shows
itself.
This summer, after talking to alumni, I raised the point cut-off to 20 points since our team is smaller and the point share is more per student than it had been in previous years. I'm anticipating that between 35 to 40 students will qualify, as opposed to the 50+ we've taken in recent years. As of today, after five tournaments, 22 students have qualified. We have five more tournaments. If we reach 40 qualifiers before we're done going to tournaments then the points will close. When we prep for Nationals and our alumni show up to coach various students, it's a lot easier for them to reach 35-40 students instead of 50 or more.
This is not a perfect system and it's something I'm willing to change as needed. It's truly heartbreaking to watch students who have given everything they have for 2-3 years in debate and not qualify, but unfortunately there are always one or two for whom this is the case. But the ultimate goal is to take a group of students who give our team the best chance of doing well at Nationals. Over the years, the National tournament has provided a field of competition that has gotten remarkably tougher each year.
If you have questions/suggestions please email me at franzfredric@yahoo.com or leave it in the comment section. Thanks!
