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THE OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF
THE UNIVERSITY INTERSCHOLASTIC LEAGUE

Debate Season Underway in New Year

By Jana Riggins, Speech and Debate Director | Thursday, January 24, 2013 11:13 AM

The dawning of a new year begins a fresh semester. Some of you will get a whole new crop of students in your classrooms. The anticipation of spring just around the corner brings with it zeal to polish those oral interpretation pieces, attack the recently-released Lincoln-Douglas Debate resolution with fervor, beef up your extemporaneous files and design new CX plan attacks.
At the League, it means the beginning of Cross-examination Debate district meets and heavy preparation for the state debate tournament. Deadlines loom just around the corner.

Your district entries are due no later than 10 calendar days prior to the scheduled meet. You must input those entries into the UIL Spring Meet Online System. There’s a link to the system conveniently located on the home page of the UIL speech/debate section of our website.

In the excitement of competing at district, if your teams place, don’t forget to pick up your winning coach packet from your district contest director. This large white and red envelope contains details about the state tournament and reminders about critical deadlines and responsibilities you as a coach have if your teams advance to the state tournament.

Three hundred and twenty winning teams are eligible to debate at State. That means we’ll run over 700 rounds and that takes a great deal of judges. If you qualify a team, you must bring an experienced judge with you to cover obligated rounds. What defines an experienced judge? It should be an individual who not only is educated in debate theory but also someone who has been out on the circuit judging on this year’s CX topic.  We ask that you not submit a judge for approval who has zero rounds. You would not want a basketball referee to call the state tournament if s/he had not officiated a single game this season. Debaters deserve the same respect.

Coaches are allowed and encouraged to serve as your school’s judge. If you qualify two teams, you need to call me immediately following your district meet. Judging forms are submitted online. There is a link placed prominently on the speech home page of the website.  Fill in the “required school judge” form (Option I).

You must complete all of the required fields on the form. These are noted with an asterisk. If you attempt to submit the form without doing so, you will receive an error message. That means that your form has not successfully been submitted and you must complete the form again.

Before clicking “submit my form,” we ask that you review your paradigm for ambiguities and typographical errors, as the debaters and their coaches will receive copies of your writing in the exact manner you wrote it. We do not correct misspelled words or restructure sentences before posting your form online.

If you have completed the form in its entirety, your form will be processed, and you will receive confirmation that it was successfully transmitted to the State Office. I advise you to print a copy of the confirmation. If you do not see confirmation, it means your form is missing something and you must go back and review the form to resubmit. Forms that are not submitted successfully by the deadline are considered late and incur a $100 late fee.

Deadlines for contest directors to submit results are within 10 calendar days following the meet, or for those meets held at the end of the approved CX contest window, the final deadline is Feb. 11. When you input the results into the online system, be certain you read the screen for instructions, continuing to click until you are told that your results are certified. Once the results are certified, you have one more step and that is to go to the “Update Meet” screen and change the status of your meet to read: “Meet results are posted and available for review.” If you fail to make this change, your district schools cannot check results to confirm they are correct.

Deadlines for coaches include the required judging forms (due within 10 calendar days following your meet or the final deadline of Feb. 14.) If you are involved in a district meet where the winners must be certified (see C&CR, section 1001), the deadline for the certification form to be received by the State Office is Feb. 14.

Hotel rooms in Austin during the week of the state debate tournament are at a premium. If you registered this fall in the speech coach database to receive announcements from our office, we notified you to get your rooms reserved at that time. Austin is also hosting South by Southwest, an International Film & Music Festival, so most of the hotels in Austin proper are already booked or available rooms come at a high price. Surrounding suburb hotels may be your best available accommodations, at this point.

UIL negotiates hotel rates for our schools each year, but with the revenue that some events such as the Formula One race and the music/film festival bring to the city of Austin, hotels cannot always honor the “UIL rate.” Because our state debate tournament is Texas-sized, it requires the use of nine buildings on the University of Texas campus. Therefore, we schedule the tournament when university classes are not in session (spring break). Moving the tournament to a date that does not conflict with South by Southwest doesn’t help matters because of our room requirements. To improve hotel issues for schools, the only options would be to host the tournament when UT is not in session such as early January, or move the tournament to another university site in a city that does not have the venue conflict. We are interested in your feedback on this issue.

Information about the CX Debate State Tournament is already posted on the website. I invite you to share that with your parents whose students qualify and with your school administration. Our staff looks forward to hosting you for this grand event!