While many programs have decided not to attend the Grand Nationals in recent years, it remains a difficult test of adaptation and an invaluable preparation opportunity for squads hoping to go deep at NFL Nationals in June. Albany marked my seventh trip to CFL in the past eleven years. In what follows, I will offer five lessons any team can learn from my experience at this year’s tournament. Whether you will be competing in Birmingham in a few weeks or not, the CFL Tournament can provide some invaluable insights into our activity that any debater should appreciate.

5. Five Minutes Of Preparation Time Will Expose Your Weaknesses

On some circuits, five minutes of preparation time per side is standard operating procedure. On other circuits, the norm is eight minutes or even ten minutes. For teams that are used to having more prep time at their disposal, debating with only five minutes available can be difficult to handle.

With limited prep time, it becomes even more crucial than ever that debaters not waste this scarce resource on things that could have—and should have—been done before the round. If you’re the 2A, you need to have 2AC blocks written and organized for all the positions you’ve anticipated or encountered earlier in the season. If you’re the 2N, you need to have 2NC blocks written and organized for both the generic and specific strategies you are planning to go for. In some cases, you can answer an argument extemporaneously. But if the lack of a block will cost you even 15 seconds of prep time, it is better to spend the time to write it before the tournament.

Ideally, prep time should be spent thinking about the debate and discussing it with your partner, making decisions, and critically evaluating your opponent’s evidence and arguments. If you have to spend precious preparation time creating your response to an argument, you won’t have time to do the higher-level work that can make the difference between a win and a loss.

4. When Civilizations Collide, Debate Is A Race To The Middle

Every year at CFL Nationals, I judge at least one debate between two relatively competent teams who subscribe to entirely different philosophies about debate. This most typically occurs when a slow, professional, “stock issues” team debates a fast, casual, “national circuit” team but it can also involve two conservative teams from different regions. In these situations, the two teams can barely communicate with one another: their experiences in debate have been so different that they do not share even the most basic expectations about evidence, argumentation, delivery, and behavior.

Almost without exception, both teams in these debates give off the impression that they are clearly winning and that the other team is off the rails. When asked about the round by their coaches later in the day, I have no doubt that both teams will laugh about how terrible the other was and how the judges would have to be idiots to vote for them. In reality, both teams debated poorly and neither team deserved to win.

When confronted with a situation where your opponents are approaching the debate from a different background, do your best to engage them. There is nothing more frustrating than an hour-and-a-half charade in which four high school students ignore one another while posturing for the judges. If you think your style of debate is superior, prove it: make good arguments and explain them in ways that challenge those of your opponents. If you disagree with something your opponent does (doesn’t hand-over evidence, for example), get over it — don’t draw attention to yourself by having a temper tantrum or by insulting them for being “backward”.

If you find yourself in a clash of civilizations debate, think of it as a race for the middle: find common ground, respect your opponent’s style, and do your best to make your arguments in a way that engages with your opponent. Your judges—no matter their preferences—will appreciate the attempt.

3. Never Underestimate The Persuasive Appeal of the 2AR

After this year’s double-octafinals, Ben Schultz made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that CFL Nationals move to a 32-team coin-flipping contest in place of the debates on Sunday. After all, almost every team that won the flip chose to defend the affirmative, and rightly so: the persuasive appeal of the 2AR is amplified when teams are forced to debate in front of judges with divergent preferences. The 2NR is hard enough when the negative needs only to win over one “audience”: effectively winning two or even three “audiences” can be nearly impossible. And that doesn’t even account for the inherent affirmative side bias among many lay judges. Suffice it to say that the affirmative has the upper hand—decisively.

So what is a poor negative debater to do? First of all, don’t give up — an aff win certainly isn’t a fait accompli. You know that the affirmative has the upper hand, so acknowledge that from the beginning and account for it when creating and implementing your strategy. Strive to find the common denominator that will be accessible and persuasive to all of your judges: instead of relying on winning a separate argument for the “fast judge” and another for the “slow judges,” build a strategy that relies on winning only one major thesis. You’d be surprised at how many arguments can be packaged persuasively for conservative judges, especially if you spend the time to construct them in the appropriate style (include an explicit thesis, for example).

Finally, control the framing of the debate by making explicit arguments about the affirmative’s burden. This is something that I’ve seen several California teams do quite well: instead of taking it for granted that the 2AR will get to wax poetic about their case, hammer away early and often that they have to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt or without a significant question. In this way, you can coopt some of the affirmative’s persuasive appeal by making the debate less about the failings of the case and more about the failings of the affirmative team. This framing of the debate seems to resonate well with lay judges because it incorporates language and assumptions from the legal system that are familiar to most people (Law & Order has been around since 1990 for a reason).

2. Sometimes You Lose Debates You Should Have Won… But Not As Often As You Think

This should be obvious, but it is an important lesson to remember: sometimes judges make objectively bad decisions and the wrong team wins. This happens a lot less frequently than most debaters seem to assume, though, even at a tournament like CFL Nationals. In the vast majority of cases where one team feels slighted, it is not because the judge was wrong but because the winning team did a better job of adapting to the judge than did the losing team. Some things just can’t be adapted to, for sure. And sometimes you just don’t have much of a chance in front of a certain judge. If that’s the case, there’s nothing to feel angry about — you did your best, now move on.

In the vast majority of rounds where judges make the “wrong” decision, though, the losing team could have done more to secure a victory. It is the sign of a mature intellect to learn from these decisions instead of casting them away as the result of unqualified idiots whose opinions about debate are beneath you being given a ballot. Policy debate is decidedly not Public Forum debate, but that doesn’t mean that you should avoid opportunities to improve your public advocacy skills. Be honest about how you packaged your arguments: could you have done so differently? Did you rely too much on jargon or implied explanation? Did you anticipate the best common-sense responses to your argument and account for them—even if your opponent did not make them? Did you present your argument with professionalism and passion?

At a tournament like CFLs, there are dozens of factors that go into a judge’s decision—almost all of which are ultimately more important than the text of the argument itself. If you find yourself reading ballots and chalking up your losses to bad judging, you need to rethink the way you approach the debate. For many judges, the debate is not won and lost on The Flow—even if the judges flow, they do not immerse themselves in the line-by-line and decide the winner of the round based exclusively on the interactions of the blue and black squiggles on their sheets of paper.

You: (reads ballots, lost 2-1) How could we have possibly lost that round? That team was terrible!
Partner: Yeah, they totally sucked. We went for LOST and their only answer was that the political process was irrelevant to the plan?!? C’mon!
You: Yeah, and I five-pointed that. And the 1AR just repeated their argument, if you can even call it that. I mean, what kind of idiot doesn’t have answers to the politics DA?
Partner: I’ve heard of people who don’t like politics, but c’mon — they basically dropped it!
You: Yeah, those judges were idiots. At least we picked up the good judge. I can’t wait till our next circuit tournament.

Until you can start to understand debate from different perspectives, you will never truly excel—even in fast, flow-centric, national circuit rounds. The faster you come to grips with that, the more wins you’ll rack up and the more fun you’ll have at tournaments of all kinds.

There’s nothing wrong with preferring a certain style—I’ll take the judging pool at the NDCA Tournament over the judging pool at the NCFL Tournament in a heartbeat, obviously—but even the best judges in the country are a lot less robotic than many debaters probably think. Learning to appreciate the human element of debate judging and to take advantage of it in order to win more debates is what separates those teams that are merely technically proficient from those that are truly exceptional.

1. Good Teams Can Be Successful In Front Of Any Audience

Bishop Guertin’s Katryna Cadle and Chris Power finished the regular season in second place in the Baker Award standings and have since reached the finals of the NDCA and the quarterfinals of the TOC. By winning CFL Nationals, they have become just the latest in a long line of successful national circuit teams who have triumphed at the Grand Nationals while adapting to a very different style of debate. The lesson? Good debaters tend to come out on top regardless of the circumstances.

When coaching students at CFL and NFL Nationals, I use a simple explanation for how to approach each debate: The National Final Round Test. For many judges, these tournaments are the national championships and the only chances their students have to see national-caliber competition. When judging a round, they are either explicitly or implicitly asking themselves a basic but complicated question: does this team seem like a national champion? Is this a team that I would want my own debaters to watch and emulate? If this team makes it to the final round, will I be able to brag to my colleagues about how great they were when I judged them in the prelims?

Everything you do, from the time you enter the room until the time you leave it, affects the judge’s answers to these questions. Are you well-prepared? Are you confident in your arguments? Are you a good speaker? Do you interact with your opponents professionally? It turns out that most of the qualities that teams develop while debating on the national circuit are the same ones that everyone looks for in a “national champion” debater. While your ability to speak fast and discuss Lacanian political theory will not be impressive, your thorough preparation and knowledge of the topic will be. Slow down a bit, keep your arguments squarely in the middle of the topic, and use the skills you have developed debating on the national circuit to impress your judges. Other teams might be more persuasive speakers, but you’re playing the game on “easy” — expose the pretty talkers for their sophistry and wow the judges with your knowledge and refutation skills.

It is no coincidence that the best teams in the country tend to be the ones that win at CFL and NFL Nationals. Once you get rid of the stylistic and ideological baggage and just debate, the better debaters almost always prevail. And that’s how it should be.

1. Slow down- most judges will want you to go slow, and not slow to you- slow to them. At CFLs I was on several panels where the debaters were like “whats your paradigm” (an insanle stupid question btw) and the other 2 judges said something like “i’m not very experienced… stock issues… persuasion…i’m old…” all of which translates to go slow. Then the teams went “fast”  (for them). The other two judges would stop flowing 2 seconds into each speech and the debaters would never notice or care. You are basically rolling dice at this point. Some quick guidelines

-default to the slow side- PT Barnum once said no one ever went broke betting against the intelligence of the american public, likewise, no one ever lost at NFLs for going too slow. It’s pretty simple to see why- if you go fast and the judge doesn’t like  it, you’ve auto lost. If you go fast and they are ok with it, you then still have to win the debate. 75%+ of judges aren’t going to like it- so by going fast you have a partial shot at winning 25% of judges (generously)- does that sound like a winning strategy to you?  But furthermore, you rarely NEED to go fast in these debates to win. You are not debating the top 10% of national circuit teams at NFL’s, you are debating a lot of smaller regional teams who don’t take debate as competitively as many who would read the 3nr. They will have mediocre cases/evidence, not be very experienced etc. What they will be good at is talking “persuasively”- I put that in quotes because I personally do not find some idiot fluff talking and using folksy wisdom while dropping the politics disad to be particularly “persuasive” in getting me to vote for their plan, but I am no tthe majority judge at these things. So you don’t need to go fast, and it is more  likely to hurt you.

-Bad habits- if you do any of the bad speaking habits like stuttering, double breating etc. these are magnified when you try and go like moderately fast for the most part- they stand out more because there is not as much quick recovery like when you go super fast. This makes you sound really terrible. You should be really practicing on having a smooth rate of delivery. If you sound really really good and are smooth judges won’t KNOW when you are actually going reasonably fast because none of the warning signs are there- and lets be clear- many of these judges are about style over substance- so if you can trick them (not hard to do) then you are in good shape.

-Overviews and summaries- actually work well here. For each contention of your case you should have a short introduction that explains the general concept so that your judges hear it before they fall asleep or stop flowing. Same with a disad- a short explanation of the thesis at the top. In later speeches- don’t go for hyper technical overviews, its story time. Very many of your judges will have a predominanlty speech background (or some other background) meaning they don’t know a lot about the topic. This should also lead you to mainstream/simple arguments instead of obscure complex ones. Now some will say “but some judges will be smart” and yes, some will. They will be in the minority however, and adapting doesn’t alienate smart judges because they know you are playing the game, whereas dumb judges will be alienated by you not adapting.

2. Professionalism

-no tag team cx- even if they say its ok, they are lying. They expect you both to be involved in asking and answering questions and really how hard is this

-Dress nice- you may think it sucks that you cant wear your flip flos, lip ring, and slayer t-shirt but are you going to this thing to make a fashion statement or win 10k? This one is a total no brainer, you can make your “im a unique rebel” statements later.

-Be nice- more so than at any other tournaments judges at these things care about decorum, so no matter what the other team does kill them with kindness. All jokes should be double checked that they couldn’t be misinterpreted as mean spirited.

-Minimize prompting – if your partner is about to drop a disad say something, but other wise STFU when they are speaking, this isn’t public forum and its not grand crossfire (thank god)

-Know what your evidence says- you should be able to answer cx questions intelligently without having to constantly reference your evidence or get it back to read it. Particularly if you are the 1A- you should be able to sail through any CX about your case.

3. Realize they aren’t going to call for 100 cards and sort it out- most judges call for zero and at CFL they can’t call for any- so reading 10 link cards is meaningless- read 1 or 2 and then explain them /re read key parts out loud etc.

4. Focus on qualifications- you should always read them in your 1AC/other speeches and emphasize when the other team does not have qualified evidence. Add a little style to this, don’t just say

“economic decline causes war-mead 92″

say “Economic decline causes nuclear war, this is Mead, a Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, writing in 1992″

5. Look up- watch the judges to see if they are flowing/paying attention. Make eye contact. Also- note if they are flowing sideways- this is a pretty good sign no matter how fast you are going you are going to fast (esp if your judge is Ross or Dallas).

6. Don’t freak out about disclosure- if the other team doesn’t disclose they probably suck and its not a big deal.