Friday, October 30, 2009

Episode 4 — Defining the divisions: novices, jv and varsity

In episode four, Les Trois Critiquers discuss who should debate at what level, when. Get it here.

On the tech side, we discuss how we're using Twitter, successfully and otherwise. For the record, we are @jimmenick and @debatetab (for official tournament business), @bietz and @joncruz1138.

And Bietz predicted something, but it's been a couple of days now since we recorded (I had a high time trying to get this one up) so I can't remember for the life of me what it was.

1 comment:

  1. Just a couple of comments.

    Most of what Bietz said about Minnesota is similar to Wisconsin used to do.

    Wisconsin used to have JV divisions because for one of our state tournaments you used to be able to only qualify one team. So JV was where everyone else went. However, that was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away where each high school at least has a policy debate team.

    We just got rid of our JV division at our state tournament. The problem was that only policy debate was using the Varsity/JV/Novice distinction and the numbers in debate have declined so much that a division somewhere had to collapse.

    Divisions only make sense to me when you have two things: 1) a clear definition of what it means to be novice or jv 2) a large pool. This is what pools like the Glenbrooks have - a clear definition and a large, competitive pool.

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