Dear Friends,

You are cordially invited to attend the annual Alan Nichols Debate Tournament to be held on January 3-5, 2009 at the University of Southern California. We invite you to join us for temperate weather and very good competition in the first days of 2009.

There are some new wrinkles with the California swing, most notably that we have shifted away from our traditional time surrounding New Year's Eve. We hope that our new schedule will both reduce your travel costs and improve the quality of lives of all of our guests.

This year we will be inviting teams to enter in open, junior varsity and novice divisions of policy debate.

We will offer seven preliminary debates. The open division will clear all teams with a winning record, up to a full double octofinals. We will work to maximize the experiences for JV and Novice teams and will provide elimination rounds commensurate with entries.

We are committed to offering a tournament that provides good hospitality and some of the best competition of the year.

We are also happy to continue a long-standing tradition, the California Swing Award. Cooperatively with California State University – Fullerton we will be providing an award to the team with the best preliminary record at the two tournaments. Elimination round wins will serve as the tiebreaker for the award.

We hope you will enjoy the opportunity to have quality competition in a friendly winter climate. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Warmest Regards,

Gordon Stables, Ph.D.

Director of Debate & Forensics

stables@usc.edu

Tournament Information

Registration: All registration will be handled through: http://www.debateresults.com All entries must be received by December 20, 2008.

Format – Debates will use the 2008-2009 CEDA topic and employ a 9-3-6 time format with 10 minutes of preparation time per team. Eligibility for the divisions is determined by CEDA rules. We will offer seven preliminary debates and provide elimination rounds for all teams with a winning record, up to a maximum of 32 teams in any division.

Teams – Entries are unlimited per division. Each team must consist of two students formally representing their university. Individual students are not allowed to enter, qualify for, or compete in elimination rounds. Individual debaters can win preliminary debates, but unless the team is intact for more than half of the preliminary rounds that team cannot quality for the elimination rounds. Hybrid teams are not eligible to participate in elimination rounds, unless the hybrid involves an inactive program.

Guest conduct at the tournament – We are very excited to have you as our guests in Los Angeles and to our campus. At the same time, it is important that we remind everyone that you are representatives of your university or college when you are at the tournament. All participants debate at the invitation of the University of Southern California according to its tournament rules as well as any rules of their sponsoring institutions. The tournament abides by the rules and norms of the American Forensics Association, the American Debate Association, and the Cross Examination Debate Association.

If our guests engage in destructive, threatening, violent, or harassing behavior we are obligated as university employees to report it to our appropriate campus office, including the Department of Public Safety and the Office of Equity and Diversity. Those offices will provide specific guidance which may include the decision to report specific actions to your college or university. We trust that no such actions will be needed, but we wish to alert you of this requirement.

Pairings – Brackets will not be broken in elimination rounds. Sides for elimination rounds will be determined by reversing the sides from preliminary rounds or allowing the teams to choose sides based on a coin toss.

We will employ a mutual preference judge system for all divisions using ordina rankings. Judge preferences will be made available via www.debateresults.com on December 29 th and due no later than noon on January 2nd. Adam Symonds of ASU will be primarily responsible for the operation of the tab room, along with the USC staff.

Round 7 – Round seven will be a flip for sides debate. Tournament staff will verify that 25 minutes after the pairings are released, teams have chosen sides. If teams have not chosen sides at this point, tournament staff will conduct a coin toss and will assign sides based on the result. This procedure is necessary to ensure that the tournament runs on time, even though we prefer that the competitors make this decision.

Scouting - Participating teams and schools are expected to contribute to http://opencaselist.wikispaces.com/ as a precondition for entry and should provide their most recent affirmative and negative information by January 1, 2009 (at the latest). This should include an outline of the arguments sufficient for novice comprehension as well as full citations.

Judging – Schools are required to provide qualified judging. One team requires four rounds of judging obligation and two teams require seven rounds of commitment. As a normative rule, all coaches are expected to make themselves available for at least some judging and will be on the preference sheet. Judges must have either completed their bachelor's degree or rescinded their eligibility. Anyone who judges in the open division at the Nichols will not be allowed to subsequently enter as a competitor in future Nichols tournaments.

If you are hiring judging from outside of your school's staff/alumni, and the tournament cannot place your judges into the required number of rounds, the tournament reserves the right to: 1) adjust the judging obligations of your other judges (adding rounds of commitment to those of your judges who are easier to place), and/or 2) charge your school $30.00 per round of unmet obligation.

We will have a very limited number of hired judges available at $120 per uncovered team. We are also committed to providing generous compensation for those judges who would be highly preferred critics in the late elimination rounds. If this is something that might interest you please contact us.

All judges are obligated through the octafinals on the morning of the 5 th . Judges are asked to support a healthy educational environment in each debate and to provide a judgment on that debate. All debates must be decided with only one win and only one loss. The tournament will provide a judgment if the assigned judge is unwilling to complete this request. We will also be following the lead of the NDT and Wake Forest University, by requiring that all decisions be rendered no later than three hours after the start time of any round.

Speaker Points – We are very concerned that the current speaker point scale and system doesn't help differentiate the quality of individual speakers. Specifically we are worried that the norm has evolved to giving most debaters the same points with only a few judges willing to vary from that norm.

To that end we are going to provide additional options to judges and in exchange we ask you to consider your points as part of the larger scale. We will be accepting speaker points with any tenths place value (i.e., 28.1, 28.2, 28.3, etc.)

Our goal is encourage judges utilize speaker points to differentiate between the performances of individual debaters in each round. We ask you to use the following scale

The determination of how these points should be awarded still obviously resides with individual judges.

We do ask you to consider two additional guidelines:

• Speakers should be differentiated in each debate. It is certainly conceivable that debaters would earn similar points, but we would ask judges to refrain from awarding more two speakers with the same points in a given debate. The extra options on the points scale should provide you with a means of reflecting differences in performances.
• We ask that judges not regularly award the bulk of their points at or below the ‘below average' (27) standard or at or above the ‘very good' (29) standard. In order for speaker points to have some sense of meaning individual judges must feel comfortable providing evaluations across the range of items.

These are guidelines that we are requesting your assistance in implanting. We feel it is in everyone's competitive and educational interests to have a meaningful speaker point scale.

Awards – We will provide a nice selection of awards for all teams participating in elimination rounds and for the top speakers in each division.

Fees - Fees are $$40.00 per person attending the tournament. These fees include entry, trophies, several meals, and our general hospitality. Transportation fees are optional and $25 per person. All checks should be made payable to the Trojan Debate Squad. Hired judges are $120 per team. We will seek to accommodate schools with financial difficulty. Please let us know about the number of vegetarians and vegans in your group so we can accommodate their dietary needs.

Ground Transportation – LAX and the downtown area provide a wide array of rental vehicle options. We realize, however, that the costs of renting vehicles for the entire swing can impose a heavy burden on programs, as well as requiring the presence of a 25-year old driver. The cost issue is especially true for the Nichols tournament. Hotel parking at the Sheraton is valet only and is approximately $20 per day. School parking is also fee-based at $8 per day. If you park on campus, you should enter through the gate at Jefferson and McClintock (Gate #5).

In order to provide a remedy for this problem, we will do what we can reduce the need for rental vehicles. You can easily take cab service from LAX to the Sheraton. We are also offering a transportation shuttle to and from the hotel each day. We ask that when you register you indicate how many people from your school will require transportation and we will charge you $25 per person. We ask that this information be provided in your online registration so we can effectively plan for the number of people who will be transported. We can only guarantee ground transportation for those requests made by December 20, 2008.

We have traditionally offered vendor options if you need a shuttle service to the second half of the swing at California State University at Fullerton, but we don't usually have any takers. If you need to arrange ground transportation on the 6th please let us know.

Tournament Hotel - We have secured a block of rooms at the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown Hotel. This is the same property that we have used in previous years. We are pleased to have secured a $109.00 per night rate for up to four guests per room at this property. We realize this is an increase over past years, but the changing nature of downtown hotel properties has made our historical rate structure difficult to maintain.

Contact the hotel at (213) 488-3500 to make reservations. Ask for the block for the 'USC Debate Squad.' We strongly encourage you to use this option. New Year's in Los Angeles can be very expensive. Making reservations outside the block with the Sheraton can cost you at least $199 per room over those dates.

The block is available on a first-come, first-serve basis to our guests. The block typically fills so please reserve as early as possible. You can access the Sheraton's website to find more information about the property or contact them.

711 South Hope Street, Los Angeles, California 90017 Phone (213) 488-3500 Fax (213) 488-4110

Campus Internet – USC has an open guest wireless network for public use.

Audio and Video Recording : All rounds (defined as the speeches of the participants) are open to registered tournament participants and may be electronically recorded for private educational use by tournament participants (registered coaches, debaters and helpers, and USC tournament staff) only. Public distribution of such recordings is expressly prohibited unless prior written consent of all people on the recording is obtained and unless prior written consent of USC is obtained. Private sharing for educational use is permitted.

Questions – We are very interested in making your trip enjoyable and a great competitive experience. Please don't hesitate to contact us with any questions. If you have any tournament related questions, please contact Gordon Stables at (213) 740-2759 or stables@usc.edu

Tournament Schedule

January 2, 2009:

7:00 – 9:00 PM Registration and Coaches Reception - The Sheraton Hotel

Pairings released at 9:00 pm

January 3, 2009:

7:00 am Shuttle Begins from Tournament Hotel

8:00 am Round One start time

11:15 Round Two start time

1:00 pm Lunch Break

2:15 pm Pairings released for Round Three

3:00 pm Round Three start time

6:00 pm Pairings released for Round Four

6:45 pm Round Four start time

January 4, 2009:

7:00 am Pairings Released for Round Five @ Sheraton & Campus

(Shuttle Begins from Tournament Hotel)

8:00 am Round Five start time

11:30 am Lunch (provided)

12:00 pm Round Six start time

3:45 pm Round Seven start time

7:45 pm Double-Octofinals start time & Elimination Round Bracket Released

January 5, 2009: All Events at the Sheraton

7:00 am Octofinals Pairings @ Sheraton

8:00 am Octofinals start time

11:30 am Announcement of Speaker Awards and panels for the Quarterfinals

12:00 pm Quarterfinals start time

4:00 pm Semifinals start time

8:00 pm Final Round Start Time