Crichton,+Sam

I debated at Wake Forest University and I am now a coach at Emory.

Overall, I tend to resolve issues as they happen in the round and I will try my best not to intervene. My flow will always anchor my decisions and I tend to generally defer to technical issues more often than not. However, debate is inevitably subjective and the big picture is very important. Debaters have to be able to see the forest through the trees. More importantly, arguments have to make some sense to me for me to generally evaluate them – a warrant has to be there.

Clarity is more important than speed – the fastest debater is the person that can do the most arguments per minute, rather than the most words.

I pay attention to cross-x. It’s important so make it count. It’s particularly important in regard to the points I give.

Evidence – its extremely significant and debate is a research-based activity. If you don’t like to work hard and be creative, then you picked the wrong activity. Qualifications are always relevant.

Counterplans/Disads/Case – talk about them.

Kritiks – these have to be specific and grounded very well in the aff. My familiarity with this literature is not the best.

Performance – I am not the guy for you. Sad to say, I think teams generally need to talk about the resolution in some topically relevant way and should probably have a plan text.

Theory – I tend to give the negative a good amount of leeway on issues like counterplan status. It takes a good bit of work to persuade me that proving the counterplan is bad means the aff gets to win. Generally the remedy for most of the common theory arguments seems to be to reject the argument, not the team – unless there is an in depth, detailed discussion of why the ballot is key – and why jettisoning the counterplan is not sufficient to deter, etc. Dropped theory arguments are not always game changers, i.e. multiple perms bad, when it doesn’t make sense to me why that has shifted the debate so much to justify a ballot. Logic is good lens for how I evaluate these concerns and good metric that has been drilled into my head has been that illogical education isn’t good education, and illogical rules aren’t predictable. The team that can master this impact calculus and relate it to their theory argument are probably going to be ahead in my book.

T – Topicality is generally a voting issue and is never genocidal, etc. Ever. However, reasonability is pretty convincing sometimes, and I don’t think that just because an interpretation limits more means that it is better. The limit has to be predictable, not arbitrary, etc. This is easy to do, and a good tech’d out T debate with nuanced impact claims is great to watch.