We seek our students to engage in preparing, practicing, and debating and speaking with a constant effort to improve. In doing so, our students develop argument and presentation skills. Our students gain knowledge about public policy, argument theory, and political philosophy.

Tournament Travel Goals

We seek to travel together as a squad to a substantial number of regional and West Coast tournaments. This involves sharing good times; in helping each other; in helping the team and the coaches. In doing so, our students are committed team members with, hopefully, a committed group of friends and supporters.
We also seek to travel especially hard working, invested, and successful team members to national circuit tournaments.
We seek to break as many teams and speakers as possible into elimination rounds at tournaments.
We seek individual teams to excel by meeting or exceeding realistic expectations for their performance at tournaments including toward first place!

Sweepstakes Goals

NPDA sweeps for Parli Debate are garnered by the results at our four best tournaments (best tournament determined by four best performing teams at the tournament).
CEDA and NDT sweeps for Policy Debate are garnered by the results at our six (CEDA) or eight (NDT) tournaments (best tournaments determined by two best performing teams at the tournament).

The culmination of our Policy year is CEDA Nationals (for most of our open division policy teams) and the NDT (for teams that qualify). At max 3 teams qualify to the NDT but only six schools in the country get to qualify a third team. Most teams qualify by getting bids from their district; in our district that happens by getting ranked by your performance versus other teams in the district over the course of the year. If you are one of the top 16 teams in the nation, you skip the district ranking process, and get a first round bid.
The culmination of our Parli year is NPDA Nationals (for most of our open division parli teams) and the NPTE (for teams that qualify). At max 4 teams qualify to the NPTE. 54 teams get to qualify for the NPTE and this occurs by earning points at each team’s five best tournament showings.
The culmination of our IE year is NIET Nationals (for our individual events competitors). To qualify for the NIET, a student needs to advance three times in an event in open division and place in the top spots with a total of 8 or less placings (or “legs”) (e.g. 1^st, 3^rd, 2^nd, is a total of 6 legs).

In this section, we’re going to talk about things you are probably wondering about at the beginning of the year: