Dilger,+Jeffrey

Experience: 3 Years Policy Debate, Rosemount High School (MN). 4 Years Head Coach of Lincoln Douglas, Eden Prairie High School (MN). Though I am a crossover into the world of LD debate, I am largely not a fan of Policy debate argumentation in LD rounds. As a result, off-case, topicality, and heavy theory argumentation do very little for me in terms of voting. That is obviously not to say that I will not vote for them, but they are not preferred. On a related note, speed. While, I can mostly understand everything that is coming out a debaters mouth, that does not mean it will make it to my flow if a debater goes their top speed. For most top level debaters, 80% of top speed represents the approximate speed I prefer. A Value and Criterion is preferred, but not an absolute requirement. The only real requirement is providing links between arguments to an ultimate value. If a debater wishes to take a critical position, I will, as always, listen. However, cases which make no sense or violate rules of common sense, will be forced to climb a severely uphill battle with me. It also should be said, in my opinion, that not enough debaters take time to point of the absurdity of many critical positions. In front of a judge like myself, taking time to poke holes in the lack of logic is well worth it. In the end, my ballot is about telling a clear story and impacting arguments from the first link to the final impact. I prefer that the rebutals spend a fair amount of time (though not all) crystalizing on a global level. Depth of argumentation is key to my ballot. Spending time developing a few well reasoned impacts will do far more than going for a spread and extending dropped one-liners. Finally, too many rounds, even at top levels, end with multiple unimpacted abstract arguments and/or, just as importantly, uncompared and unweighed impacts. When we're talking about competing ideologies and "worlds", I want each debater to create a clear picture that pits the Affirmative v. Negative concepts