Wisconsin Forensics Daily

Spring Meeting Discussion Items

I have submitted the following items to the WDCA for discussion at the spring meeting. The intent is to host most of our discussion online, so the meeting can focus more on action rather than discussion. (Read: I have a Brewer game to go to later that day. Tangent: Information about the Second WFD Sorta Annual Brewer Game will come at the Spring Meeting).

Items follow below the break.

1.) Best Practices Guidelines for invitational tournaments

There is often a confusion among tournament directors among how to operate their tournaments and what is the best way to handle particular situations. It would be nice to have a document that recommends how tournament directors should ideally run the different divisions. This would also make it easier for people to begin to host tournaments, because the procedures are explained in the document. For example, if tournaments use the one day switch side model for all policy divisions – should they clear to highest elimination round possible (e.g. octa finals) or rather should they clear to the lowest elimination round (finals) so that people can go home faster?

2.) 2 Day v. 1 Day tournaments

More than just our best practices guidelines on how to run these kinds of tournaments, we need to have a serious discussion about how we should design our schedule with these kinds of tournaments in mind. Should there only be three or four big two-day tournaments with more one-day competitions? Or should there be more two-day competitions?

3.) Public Forum Novice

Public Forum was the largest division at last year’s WSDT. This was the case at many invitational tournaments last year as well. At some invitational tournaments (but not the state tournament) it might make sense to split the public forum pool into a novice division and an experienced division. If tournaments do that, how do we handle those novices for the state tournament?

4.) V4 Contingency Policy

Last year at the WSDT the V4 division was the smallest division at the tournament (yes – there were more people participating in middle school policy than there were in V4). It’s the opinion of many coaches that a small division should not constitute a state championship. There was also a problem last year that in theory, the tournament could not run (3 Cedarburg + 3 other teams doesn’t make for a workable division). We need to develop a contingency plan to allow those teams to move into the V2 division should V4 become unviable. A possible solution would be to add a requirement for that division to run, something along the lines of what was needed for LD and PF to be an individual event. I suggest that there must be at least 8 teams from 6 different schools in order for the division to run.

5.) Combined WDCA/MUDI/MDL Evidence Packet

It would be sweet if the MUDI/MDL evidence would correspond to all of the Novice Topics so that kids in the MDL could have information on all of the novice topics. This would allow more MDL integration into WDCA events.

Tags: wdca

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