Because of the unusual dates of this year's event—and because the Director of Forensics at Hen Hud has the attention span of a flea—much of what follows is new. Please read the invitation carefully, since registration on your part indicates acceptance of its terms.
We invite you to the 46th annual Malcolm A. Bump Memorial Tournament, November 12-13 (Saturday and Sunday), 2011, at Hendrick Hudson HS, Montrose, NY. We are not beginning on Friday out of respect for Veterans' Day.
We will again be offering Varsity and Novice Lincoln-Douglas Debate and Varsity and Novice Public Forum Debate. We hope to once again offer strong competition, efficient tab rooms, good food for both debaters and judges, and a decent place to hang your hat for our student housing, all those things that got Bump honored as the NDCA's 2011 Tournament of the Year. We usually break to double-octos in Varsity LD, and either partial octos or quarters in the Varsity PF division. Bump is a TOC qualifier at the Semis level in both LD and PF.
This year we will not hold break rounds in the novice divisions. Given that these events are about as early in a student's debate career as is conceivable, we have decided that it makes sense to offer as many rounds as possible over the span of the two days rather than go into elims. Hence we will have all debaters debate from 7 to 9 rounds, depending on time and numbers. We will honor approximately the top ten with awards, again depending on numbers.
Varsity LD will debate the November-December NFL resolution; the PF divisions will debate the November resolution. Novice LD will again debate the "Modest Novice" resolution, "Resolved: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified." (If this is new to you, visit http:// www.modestnovice.org/ for details and discussion of this topic and its rationale.)
For both PF and LD a novice debater is defined, at this tournament, as a student in his or her absolute first year of debate. Any previous high school forensics experience negates a student's novice status. Novices who happen to be in their sophomore year, but with no previous forensics experience, are perfectly acceptable. Novices in their junior or senior year, on the other hand, should set their sights higher and enter the varsity division. Students with pre-high school debate experience (i.e., middle school), may enter either the Novice or Varsity divisions, at the best judgment of their coaches.
Important note: No teams will be accepted into the tournament without a responsible adult chaperone for the duration of the tournament, unless other plans are made in advance with the Tournament Director, which is bloody unlikely. Showing up without a chaperone with a stunned expression on your face will not suffice. Neither will telling us that your parent was just here a minute ago, don't worry, they'll turn up...sometime. An adult, for these purposes, is defined as a college graduate twenty-one years of age or older. Also, no teams will be accepted except as official entries from their schools unless, again, other bloody unlikely plans are made in advance with the Tournament Director.
REGISTRATION:
All registration is at www.tabroom.com, beginning 10/1.
There is an initial limit of 6 Varsity Lincoln-Douglas debaters, 8 Novice LD debaters, and 5 PF teams per division per school. If you would like more slots, we will waitlist them. If you are Jon Cruz, you already asked for extra slots seven years ago, so, yeah, we know. Note: we have historically filled up weeks before the deadline; waiting till the last minute may mean we can't get you in; we have just so much space, and once it's filled up, we're done.
Pre-registration will close at 9:00 p.m. on Monday, Nov 7. There are no steps in registration, no pre-pre-registration, no this-time-we-really-mean-it-registration. Once it closes, it closes, and it's only closing once. If slots remain available after 11/7, they will be assigned from the waitlist on a first-come, first-served basis via tabroom.com, going first to schools totally shut out; extra slots will only be given after all locked-out schools have their chance.
Drops and other changes will be not be accepted via tabroom.com after 9:00 p.m., November 7. Fees will be fixed at that time, payable at registration. We are continuing our simplification of late fines again this year. Anyone with registration changes at the table will simply put $25 cash into the donation box for each change; total donations will be given to a suitable charity. Over the last two years we raised (with matching funds from my day job) over $1400 for the Grameen Foundation. Not bad!
FEES:
Same as last year. $90 per PF team (including novice), $60 per Varsity LD debater, $45 per Novice LD debater, $25 general school fee (for judge lounge amenities, etc.). Fees are fixed 11/7/11 at 9:00 pm. All fees are due at registration: please make checks payable to Hendrick Hudson High School Student Activities Fund.
We will once more have a few judges for sale in all divisions. First come, first served, $160 a pop, one per school unless there's extras, request them through tabroom.com. No fractional judges are available, and judges may not be shared. You will be notified via tabroom.com if your requests are accepted. (Please note that Bump does not sell arithmetic: if you buy a judge from us, it is a real, live person. If we have no real, live persons of the judge persuasion available to us, then we do not cross our fingers and sell them anyhow.)
We continue to note the growing trend in tournaments of judges not being available for the entire tournament. "So-and-so will show up for round 3," we are told, or has to leave before round 5, or whatever. At Bump, every team must cover all its rounds of judging. A surcharge of $25 per missed round will be charged. If we know your judges are out for certain rounds prior to registration, that fee will be added to your registration invoice. If you inform us during the tournament, or rounds are missed without warning us in advance, then we will bill you during the last preliminary round for all your missing judges. Schools not paying these fines by the end of the final prelim round will not be allowed to enter elimination rounds, and will earn no awards, and will be barred from Bump in the future. Judges not showing up for elims will be dunned the same $25 as the usual fine; if not paid before the round starts, their school's teams will be dropped from the tournament.
UPDATES: The tournament will be updated in the days leading up to the event (and occasionally during the event) via @DebateTab on Twitter. Visit http:// www.jimmenick.com/twitter.html for overall details on tournament twits. Updates will also be posted on this website, http://www.jimmenick.com/bump. The link is over there on the left.
POSTINGS:
We will post all round result sheets as soon as possible after inputting the information. Our goal with this is to minimize and correct errors. We will also publish the elim brackets when break rounds are announced, to make fair the knowledge of who might hit whom when.
FOOD:
Dinner on Saturday will be provided at the tournament. Once again we intend to offer a spread of various six-foot-long heroes, including non-meat options for people who are vegeterrible. Housing families will provide light breakfasts on Sunday. Lunch Sunday will be provided by the tournament; this will prevent the famously dreaded "debater drift" of tournament participants disappearing into the various dens of iniquity--performance art exhibitions, Disney princess cat fights, high end shoe stores and day-old sushi joints--that surround the high school, making the place a virtual Pleasure Island of future donkeys for the students who actually attend there.
HOUSING:
We can house up to 150 students (high school students only) who travel a considerable distance; bring a sleeping bag. All housing requests must be requested through tabroom.com. We can offer no more than these 150 housing slots, on a first-come, first-served basis.
A number of motels are available nearby for coaches and adult chaperones; please keep in mind that it is a drive to all of these motels.
JUDGING:
As noted above, judges missing rounds will be immediately fined and their teams blocked from the tournament until the fine is paid, as described above. If the fines are not paid, the school will be barred from future Bumps.
Public Forum: The ratio in PF is 1 judge for every 3 teams. in each division. That is, you need to cover your varsity separate from your novices. For example, if you have 2 varsity and 1 novice, you are required to provide a judge for the 2 varsity (it's a 1-3 ratio), and a judge for the 1 novice (a similar 1-3 ratio). Experienced Junior and Senior PFers are acceptable as judges in the novice division (and will be housed by us, if you request it in time to include them in our 150 slots), but please note that if the novice division is really tiny, we may have to funnel some of them out into judging novice LD to provide adequate judging for the contestants. If necessary, we will augment the varsity pool slightly with LD judges off and on. For the sake of consistency, and because schools often send new PF judges, we will have a short training session prior to the PF round one. Of course, coaches should also see to informing their PF judges in advance of what they should expect. All PF judges must remain available for the first elimination rounds, even if their own teams do not break, and must subsequently remain available for one round after their own teams' elimination.
LD: In LD, as with PF, schools are also asked to provide one qualified LD judge for every 1-3 LDers in each division. That is, you need to cover your varsity separate from your novices. For example, if you have 2 varsity and 1 novice, you are required to provide a judge for the 2 varsity (it's a 1-3 ratio), and a judge for the 1 novice (a similar 1-3 ratio). Experienced Junior and Senior LDers are acceptable as judges in the novice division (and will be housed by us, if you request it in time to include them in our 150 slots). There are no strikes or rankings in the novice division.
Keep in mind that a qualified judge understands the activity, speaks English, and is either experienced sitting in the back of the room with a flow pad, or else has been carefully trained by the team he or she is accompanying. A qualified LD judge knows how to assign speaker points, and knows how to fill out a ballot. If you need some instructional materials in advance for your lay judges, feel free to use ours (visit www.jimmenick.com/mhl/judge.html), but please do not try to sneak in a ringer. When you provide an incompetent judge, we usually find out about it only after a number of competitors have been, in a word, shafted, while you have been basking in the glow of judging by trained or experienced judges. This tournament is happy to provide a dozen reasons why we love lay judges in LD, but by that we mean a lay judge who knows what to do, even if just starting out, as compared to a seat-filler used by you to gain entry to the tournament.
Important note: We reserve the right to assign judges to whatever division we see fit. What this means, for the most part, is that if you are a good citizen newcomer judge who has been fairly blocked from judging VLD because of MJP (see below, if you don't know what that means), we'll nicely ask you to either judge novice LD or one or the other of the PF events. This will keep you from going crazy doing nothing all weekend, and it will help us provide better judging to those areas.
All judges must remain available for the first elimination rounds in their divisions, even if their own teams do not break, and for one round after their teams are eliminated thereafter. In the novice divisions, all judges are obligated through the entire tournament, since there are no break rounds. We will do out best to insure rounds off, of course.
This year we will offer Mutual Judge Preferences in Varsity LD. Any Varsity LDer registered by 9:00 p.m., November 7, with proper judge coverage (yours or hired), will be able to adjust preferences. If you do not have your judges by then, you will not be allowed to preference, because no one will be able to preference your judges, and we don't wish to force everyone attending the tournament to keep readjusting their rankings because you are inefficient. Similarly, if you drop a judge after preferences begin, we will remove all your preferences. Again, this is for the obvious reason that by dropping a judge after someone has preffed, your dropping a judge throws everything off. Preferences will open on the morning of November 8 and close at 9:00 November 10. You have from the moment you are reading this until November 7 to get yourself some judges. Should be plenty of time...
Other judging issues: Judges may or may not publish paradigms as they see fit, but they should be willing to indicate to competitors before a round a general sense of their vision of the activity (if any) or a sense of their experience, to aid competitors in choosing how best to make their arguments. To make things clear, Bump follows the rules of LD as set down by the NFL, including standard use of CX time, equal burdens (i.e., no presumption for either side), etc. If you do not know the rules of the NFL, we would suggest that either you give up judging immediately, or else learn them. They're available at http:// www.jimmenick.com/henhud/LD_description_NFL.pdf.
As Bump does award speaker prizes for most divisions, the concept of speaker points at this tournament should be clear. The points are from 20-30, which means, in effect, a scale of 1-10.
Our varsity LD paradigm (also elaborated over on the left) is this: 30, which you are unlikely to assign, means that, compared to the other debaters at this tournament you think this person should win the tournament. If you assign two 30s, that means that you don't understand the concept of winning the tournament. 29 means that you think this person should be in late outrounds. 28 means that you think this person should probably break. 27 means that you give this person a 50/50 chance of breaking. 26 means that this person is below average will be lucky to have a winning record. 25 means substantially below average, a person who should be at the bottom of the tournament.
Our PF paradigms, for novices and varsity, are similar to one another. Since we will give individual speaker awards, points allow you to rate the debaters as individuals, whereas their win or loss ranks them as a team. 30, which you are unlikely to assign, means that, compared to the other debaters at this tournament you think this person should win top speaker. If you assign two 30s, that means that you don't understand the concept of top speaker. 29 means that you think this person should be in the top 5. 28 means that you think this person should be in the top 10. 27 means that you doubt if this person deserves a speaker award based on this performance. 26 or less means that if this person wins a speaker award you will write a letter of protest to the Times.
Although there will be no speaker awards in novice LD, since there are no breaks, we will of course use points to sort the brackets. For assignment's sake, we will use a more general approach than above, where the points are analogous to grades: 29-30 is an A (excellent), 27-28 a B (good), 25-26 a C (average), less than 25 a poor performance that needs work.
In all divisions points should reflect the debating skill of the competitor in the round, and need not reflect the actual win/loss (i.e., low-point wins are acceptable, as are half points). This will be true in PF as well as LD; in other words, low point wins are acceptable in all divisions.
DIRECTIONS:
From points north, get from Rt 84 to Rt 9 South. Stay on Rt 9 past Peekskill and exit at Welcher Avenue. Go straight off the exit. This will put you on Route 9A. The school is about 2 miles south on your right.
From points south, get to Route 9A north. 9A becomes Rt 9 in Croton. Exit Rt 9 at Montrose and turn left on to 9A (again). The school will be about 2 miles north on your left. We are half an hour from Stewart and Westchester airports, and an hour or so from the metro New York airports.
ARRIVAL:
The following will make everyone's life easier. On the morning of the tournament please text 914-471-6351 as soon as you have collected your team and boarded your bus or other vehicle of choice, with either a confirmation of no changes, or a list of ($25) changes. This will speed registration enormously. (The reason we prefer texts to regular phone calls is that data transmission of texts is 100% accurate in our limited-service area, whereas phone calls from the bus all sound like you're being attacked by werewolves, which, in fact, may be an accurate description of your bus ride, but we don't want to know about it.) Plan on arriving no later than 11:00.
Remember: only adult chaperones/coaches will be allowed to register teams. Teams that misplace their adults will be sent packing. But you will still owe us your fees, because we held space for you that others could have taken. Important note for those in the novice pool: you will be back and forth between the high school and grammar school often over the two days of the tournament. If the weather looks iffy, do yourself a favor and bring an umbrella. You will thank me for this, I promise you.
Tentative Schedule
Monday, Nov 7
Registration closes at 9:00 p.m. All fees are set.
Tuesday, Nov 8
LD Judge preferences begin. Actual time will be announced via tabroom.com.
Thursday, Nov 10
LD Judge ranking ends 9:00 p.m. on tabroom.com
Saturday, Nov 12
As soon as you leave your school please text 914-471-6351 en route to
report: A) all is fine, or B) any registration changes. This will speed
everyone up at the registration table.
10:30-11:30 Registration Schools not registered by 11:30 may forfeit Round 1.
12:00 Round 1 LD: Varsity LD preliminary rounds in the high school, Novice LD rounds down the hill at the grammar school.
12:15 Introductory session for PF in the high school cafeteria
12:30 Round 1 VPF in the high school, NPF in the grammar school.
2:30 Round 2
5:00 Round 3.
600 Dinner in the high school, all divisions. (Note: There is a 6:00 Mass in the Roman Catholic church directly next door to the high school.)
8:00 Round 4
10:00 Housing assignments in the cafeteria
Sunday Nov 13
8:00 Round 5 (forfeit at 8:15)
No, Virginia, we're not starting at 7:30. This is so Cruz can get his beauty sleep.
10:30 Round 6 (possibly beginning of elims in VPF, depending on numbers)
12:00 Lunch served in the high school, all divisions
1:00 Elimination rounds begin in Varsity LD (and, perhaps, PF). Further number of novice rounds will be determined by this time.
We will target an award ceremony around mid-afternoon. Given that it will be Sunday and people will wish to hit the road at a reasonable time, plus we'll be paying double-time by the hour for our custodians, the sooner this fiasco ends, the better. -->