WHAT IS A "TYPICAL" TRAVEL SCHEDULE LIKE?
College tournaments are generally longer and more distant than those one might be accustomed to in high school. Tournaments typically last three days: Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
A maximum of four tournaments in the fall semester is typical of any college debater, at Wake Forest or elsewhere. We encourage freshmen to debate at three or four tournaments in the fall, since their most important priority is to get adjusted to college. We seldom ask a debater to attend tournaments two weekends in a row. The fall tournaments begin with Northern Iowa/Georgia State the last weekend of September and end with Wake Forest's Dixie Classic, mid November. In the spring, tournaments start with the California Swing/Kansas City Swing and ends with the NDT & CEDA Nationals, the last weekends of March, leaving five weeks before final exams.
JV & Novice Squad
at ADA Nat 2003 - Boston College
WHAT DEBATE OPPORTUNITIES ARE OFFERED?
Wake Forest provides competitive debate opportunities at all levels of competition plus public debate opportunities for students wishing to develop skills in front of "real world" audiences on campus and in the community. In competitive debate, students set their own goals. We have hosted visiting teams from Great Britain, Russia, Japan, the Baltic States, Romania/Bulgaria
NDT/CEDA debate is the primary competitive outlet for Wake debaters. We are in NDT District Six, one of the strongest district in the country, comprising North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Half of the strongest national tournaments are held in our district, so we can afford to give even our younger and less experienced teams exposure to national caliber competition. Any Wake Forest teams who are at all competitive in national competition will also travel to such tournaments as Harvard, Cal Berkeley, the California "swing," Northwestern, etc. All freshmen who do a full year's work on the topic get to attend Novice (Freshman) Nationals at Northwestern in March. Wake has qualified teams for the National Debate Tournament in twenty six of the last twenty-eight years. The American Debate Association is a league of tournaments that also debates the national topic, with the proviso that debaters debate "comprehensibly" and read full source citations, etc. Since many of these tournaments are only a few hours away, our less experienced, and experienced, debaters have found these tournaments to be an excellent opportunity to debate the policy issues, use Wake's extensive research files, and hone their speaking skills.