Without debate tournaments we do not have debaters! At the debate tournaments debaters meet and debate against each other, they meet debaters from different schools, regions, countries … 

Tournaments are usually organised at schools, because you do need a lot of classrooms. Can be local, regional, national, international. 

 

The tournament should not be understood as the final goal of a debater, but should be seen as an educational event, where debaters through intensive debating learn and develop their critical thinking/debating skills.  That is why the big number of teams should be encouraged to participate at the tournament – should never be just one team for debate club, especially not at the local and regional tournaments.  That is why each debate program should plan a lot of debate tournaments, would be great debaters have an opportunity to participate at the tournament at least once per month. 

 

Here are a few guidelines about what you need to take in consideration when organising debate tournament. 

 

Each debate club  register several debate teams (each team being composed by 3 debaters when they debate Worlds Schools Debate or Karl Popper Debate Format). Sometimes the number of teams are limited because the tournament venue does not have enough space, but this should be an exeption not the rule.

 

In addition to debate teams, debate club should register also the judges. We have the practice that all debate coaches are also judges. However, if you have a lot of debaters you also need  additional judges. Judges can be former debaters, parents, any other adult who goes through initial training and it is interested in debate. 

 

Tournament can be one day, two days, three days … Especially at the international level there is a tendency that the tournaments are long almost a week. We strongly discourage such a practice, it is very difficult to miss the school for a week and in addition to that long tournaments are also more expencive and because of that also less inclusive. Debate is great and it really helps develop students very important skills, so the tendency should be that as many students as possible participate in this great activity.  

 

The tournaments are beneficial if they are organised on the regular basis and giving the opportunity to a lot of debaters to participate not only once per year, but as many times as possible.  It is  far better having 5 one – day tournaments when everybody debates 3 or 4 times, than having one tournament per year which is attended  by a small number of people. Debate is a skill and repeatition is a key to success. 

 

Depending of the length of the tournament all debate teams debate all pre-elimination rounds. Should never be only one round per team. Everybody needs to have an option to debate several times. Than the best teams break to the elimination rounds. Depending of the lenght of the tournament you can break teams to the octofinals or quartefinals or semifinals or even to the finals only. 

 

The fairest way to pair debate  rounds is the power pairing which is extensively used at the majority of the tournaments globally. The principles are  the following: in the pre-elimination rounds the teams do not debate teams from their own debate club and they do not debate a team twice; each team changes the position  being proposition and opposition;  the first round is paired randomly, after that the teams are paired on the basis of the results in the previous rounds, teams with similar results meet each other. You can find more about power pairing in the part about Tabbulating debate tournament. 

 

All debate rounds are judged by judges. You should have minimum one judge, three is best, but usually is very difficult to provide 3 judges per round in the pre-elimnation rounds. Each judge makes their own decision, that is why you avoid having two judges per round – you should have 1, 3, 5 … 

 

There is a lot of literature about how to organise the tournament  so I will stop here. I wish everybody a lot of fun with tournaments. 

 

 

Further readings: 

Tournaments at http://idebate.org/about/debate/tournaments

 

How to organise international debate tournament at 

http://idebate.org/sites/live/files/HT%20Organize%20A%20Debate%20Tournament_final.pdf

 

Alfred Charles Snider, Sparking the debate: How to create debate program,  published by International Debate Education Association, New York, 2014 

 

 

Prepared by 

Bojana Skrt 

 

Organising debate tournament