Garrett,+Ross

Debate Experience: Currently Coaching Kent Denver School Prior Coaching Samford University, Mountain Brook High School, and New Trier High School. 4 Years of Policy Debate at Liberty University

To start I work for a debate team and have for the last three seasons since graduating college, and I would say still have an extremely high level of involvement in the activity. You should always read the argument you are best at in front of me, executing an argument well (even one that goes the opposite of my personal bias) will usually work out. What follows is a list of personal bias, but I will try to explain my criteria for using these biases. When debates are either messy or both teams win a particular claim but there is little comparison between those claims I usually end up having to make a judgment call. Frankly, in many rounds when neither team compares the argument they win to the argument their opponent wins (or they falsely compare like comparing winning an advantage to the neg losing a DA rather than winning it) I have to make an intelligent decision about which is better, IF this happens I will probably default to biases listed below. I would advise teams to debate well and the rest of my philosophy will be largely irrelevant.

Topicality—AFFs should be topical, at a minimum you have to talk about the topic area. I tend to default to competing interpretations.

Theory—I liked theory debates as a debater, I enjoy most new justifications or warrants that I’ve never heard before. I won’t reduce your points for going for theory over substance. I will vote for theory but below are listed things I think are reasonable, so expect to execute at a higher level if you are trying to convince me they are unreasonable.

Conditionality—One conditional position is probably fine. Two is maybe an even debate on both sides. Three or more I lean AFF.

PICs—always fine.

Condition/Consult—Any CP resulting in 100% of the plan makes little sense to me, although in many debates the neg wins because they have more coherent and better developed arguments defending these.

Perms—Mostly they are tests of competition, voting on perm theory instead of rejecting them is a tough sell.

2NC CPs—if they read a dumb add-on please feel free to CP around it, I don’t think this falls into my multiple conditional positions because you didn’t know until the 2AC you needed it. I will probably bump your points for a smart 2NC CP around an add-on.

CP amendments—might be ok I’m probably split on this issue 50-50, but if your CP has a major flaw you might as well correct it.

International actor—on the transportation topic I'm not really sure how this would be implemented. . CPs that make a reasonable change to get around an advantage probably OK.

K debates. For me there are two barriers to a lot of Ks. First, I don’t understand why your K means I should not look to the consequences of either your plan or the other team’s. You have to explain this in terms that make sense, a lot of the time it comes down to looking at consequences actually results in worse consequences than ignoring them, you should break it down that simply. Second, if impacts matter it will be very hard for me to vote for a K if there is a conceded extinction scenario. The group all the DAs and reading a few K cards strategy is probably worse than just reading a few defensive answers and just making a few less K arguments.

Case + DA debate—I can be convinced of zero or low risk of case, advantages are often very contrived. In the scenario where Neg wins a DA but AFF wins a very small risk of case, I will probably vote Neg,

Performance—I have seen good non-traditional teams debate, however, usually I have not understood the arguments fully the first time through. If the style of your argument is designed to make an argument more obscure or abstract I am not a good judge. If your argument is clear (like traditional debate bad then a list of reasons) I will probably follow.

Last thought is I like to start rounds on time and run rounds efficiently. I’ll try to remain in the room the entire time and decide the round as quickly as I can to give teams as much time as possible. Additionally during the debate I will try to type some comments to provide as a guide to what I thought could be improved to both coaches and debaters.