Bentley,+Josh

Josh Bentley Juan Diego Catholic Asst Policy Coach 11 years policy experience

I debated policy all through high school, and I debated policy for the University of South Carolina, Weber State, and Missouri State. I have judged and coached high school debate for 8 years.

Here are some of my preferences:

Affirmative I prefer teams to attempt to be topical. Along these lines I like aff’s that are more policy based or at least make some attempt to defend USfg action. I am not completely opposed to performance but it needs to be articulated and impacted well.

Negative

Topicality- I prefer Topicality debates to be quantified in ground even if it is a competing interpretations debate. It is important to check ground and to set up the negative strategy. If I am going to vote on a topicality argument I think it needs to be a clean debate on the negative side. I prefer to vote on T when the case really is untopical and not so much when a team knows they can just technically beat a team on the T argument and that is their 2nr strat every round.

Kritiks- The Kritik should have some form of alternative. I enjoy a good kritik debate that explains how the kritik interacts with the affirmative.

Disads- I am a big politics hack, I prefer disadvantages to be ran with a counter plan or attacking all of case.

Counter plans- Counter plans are generally good for debate, I lean toward the negative on dispositionality and PIC's theory. I feel good counter plan/ net benefit debate is the easiest way for negative to win my ballot.

In general I vote for the team that gives the better impact analysis. I like to hear the phrase “even if you don’t think we are winning this, then you still vote for us because…” I really try to do the least amount of intervention possible. I try to not call for too many cards after the round, if I do call for cards I don’t try to make arguments that were not in the debate round.

Speaker Points- I don't give low points wins ever. Even if the losing team speaks better that will usually just mean I give the winning team higher speaks than I would have given.

27 Average, young team makes mistakes, or super rusty. 27.5 Average, makes some good arguments 28 Good, good enough to break. 28.5 Good, no doubt will break 29 Excellent- I probably think you are one of the best debaters at the tournament 29.5 Awesome- Potential winner of the TOC 30- Near Perfect

Paperless Debate- I coach a squad doing it for the first time this year. I am not going to time the transfer of evidence as prep. I would prefer that when someone says stop prep that they are pulling the flash drive out of their computer at that time.

TOC LD spiel. I have very little LD experience as far as debating or judging. I have watched enough rounds to generally get the differences. I judged frequently on the national circuit in policy this year (60 rounds). Policy is my background and if I am given no other framework to evaluate the debate round on then I will default to a policy framework. I have extensive knowledge on this current topic because I debated on the college level and have worked much with my debaters on this topic. I will vote on theory if debated well. RVI's are nearly a waste time to run in front of me. The only way I would consider voting on one is if it was completely dropped and made some shred of sense, which I generally don't feel RVI's make any sense.