Minutes from the September 21, 1996 National Debate Tournament Committee Meeting

The meeting was held at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA.

Those present at the meeting:
Arnie Madsen (AFA Central and Chair of the Committee)
Ede Warner (AFA South)
Tom Jewell (AFA West and Secretary of the Committee)
John Fritch (District III)
Brent Brossmann (District V)
Ross Smith (District VI)
Ken Strange (District VIII)
Becky Bjork (District IX)
Brett O'Donnell (proxy for AFA East and 1997 NDT Host and ex-officio member of the committee)
Steve Mancuso
Scott Deatherage

The meeting was called to order by Arnie Madsen, Chair of the Committee, at 4:45 P.M. at the University of Northern Iowa.

Issues Discussed at the Meeting:

1. Brett O'Donnell announced that he will soon release specific information about special plane and van rental fares and the tournament hotel. U.S. Air is the official airline of the NDT and if the US Air Gold File is used, then participants will receive 5% off the lowest fair. In addition, if the Gold File is used, the NDT will reveive a lump sum payment for every 40 tickets so purchased, for flights to Lynchburg or Roanoak. A local van company will also offer exceptional rates for vans and will deliver them at the respective airports. The final hotel rate (at a Holiday Inn Select) is not set but will probably be in the range of $50-$55 for up to four people in a room.

2. Amended standing rules will be forthcoming, which will include the changes voted on at the NDT.

3. The NDT Home Page is up an running. Any program that is a member of NDT can request to have links added to the NDT home page to their own home page. The URL for the NDT home page is: //www.uni.edu/ndt

4. The Ranking Secretary for the NDT is David Cheshier. David is seeking instruction as to which tournaments to count in the ranking system (see discussion below).

5. CEDA has officially applied for AFA affiliate status. If their application is accepted, CEDA will be a parallel affiliate to NDT.

6. A discussion ensued regarding what tournaments count for ranking under the NDT ranking system. Arnie Madsen, without endorsing any, suggested three alternatives:
A.only tournaments hosted by NDT subscribers would count
B.any tournament using the NDT topic (the same as the CEDA topic) would count as long as there were 5 subscribing schools with at least 10 teams attending.
C.only tournaments that use "NDT Norms" (time limits, etc.) would count.

Since this was an unofficial meeting, no proposal was made or vote taken, but it was pointed out that:
A.The Fall ranking includes all debate programs, whether NDT subscribers or not.
B.The Spring ranking includes only programs who have subscribed to the NDT by the end of December.
C.To attend the NDT National Tournament, a school or its director must be an AFA member.

The sense of the body was any tournament which meets the 5 school, 10 team threshold should be counted in the rankings and that there is no such thing as "NDT Norms" that would distinguish one tournament from another in terms of the ranking system. It was suggested that Arnie Madsen instruct David Cheshire to cooperate with the secretary of CEDA (Greg Simerly) to exchange records of tournaments meeting the 5 school, 10 team requirements for the ranking system. It was further recommended that District Chairs coordinate with schools in their respective districts and encourage them to become NDT members and to share the tabulation sheets from their tournaments with David Cheshire.

Becky Bjork announced that at the Utah Scrimmage an open meeting would be held to discuss any concerns or questions that schools within the District IX boundararies might have about NDT issues.

7. The history and fate of District II. District II dissolved for lack of active NDT programs at the only time for which NDT Committee minutes are not available. Arnie Madsen pointed out that there are two hypotheses about what happened:
A.Schools in District II stopped competing in NDT so the district was abolished.
B.Since no schools in District II applied to attend the NDT, the bids were reallocated to other districts on a percentage basis.

The discussion which followed suggested that if schools in District II who subscribe to the NDT wish to participate in the NDT National Tournament, that bids will be allocated using the same formulas that are used now--that the number of district bids will depend on the number of subscribing schools which have teams who have competed in at least 3 tournaments and have completed at least 24 rounds of competition. Each district which has subscribing members is guaranteed 2 district bids to the National Debate Tournament.

8. Arnie Madsen informed the committee that a proposal was going to be made at SCA to break all teams at the NDT with 5 preliminary wins regardless of the number of ballots. Several issues were discussed, including:
A.it would only add 1-3 teams per year to the partial double-octas B.it is not only a small school/big school issue, since debate teams from large programs have ended up with 5-3 records and insufficient ballots
C.the original 13 ballot requirement was based on the sense that a team ought to be able to win a majority of their judges' ballots
D.that there might be a contradiction between allowing a 5-3 team with 13 ballots to break and not allowing a 3-5 team with 14 ballots to participate in eliminations or allowing a 6-2 team with 12 ballots to break

It was suggested that this issue be discussed within the districts to get a sense of what the community felt about the issue.

9.The issue of how many high-high debates should be scheduled was also discussed. Currently, there is one high-high debate during the fifth round. All other power matched debates are high-low. The controversy is whether there should be two, three, or no high-high matches. Those in favor of one or fewer high-high rounds argue that high-high pairings skew the elimination bracket at the expense of the better teams, who continuously knock each other down into a lower bracket. District Chairs should discuss the issue with their constituents before the SCA meeting.

10. Arnie Madsen requested that members of the NDT committee contact him regarding their preferences for subcommittee work.

11. District tournament deadlines have not yet been announced, but are likely to be the last two weeks of February and the first week of March.

12. There is an AFA hotel for SCA with AFA rates available.

The meeting adjourned at 6:30 P.M.