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I have so much experience you wouldn’t believe it!

Let’s see if this is the category for you, since people from different parts of the US have very different ideas of what this would mean. The first test is for you to download this small mp3, which is me talking sorta fast, if you can understand me the first time you hear it, then this category is probably for you, otherwise, you may want to go back to the 2^nd category.

Listen to this now.

Ok, if you got through that ok, then this is the low down:

The team is in its infancy in a big way, this means that it doesn’t have the backfiles, it doesn’t have the politics updates churned out by a million workhorse army, its doesn’t have the teams backing it up, and it doesn’t have the coaching staff or budget. What it does have is almost no rules, no paid coaching staff, no obligations, and no limits. How well you do here if you debate here will be more directly yours than anywhere else you could possibly go. If you were at Emory you would know that you are successful in part because you went to Emory, of course you would also succeed because you worked more in a month than you slept in a year, but here it is all us. A small group of folks with varying levels of commitment to debate, and varying degrees of aspiration.

If you want to just beat bad local teams, its been done before, and you can do that here. If you want to get to the NDT as a sophomore, you’ll have to do a lot of work, but it certainly is achievable, that was my goal coming in here and I still think I can accomplish that, but at Chicago that takes dedication on your part of a kind greater than elsewhere. It’s simply more that you put in and more that you get out, but with no strings attached. You can be on the A team as a first year, or you can kick it and just go to half the tournaments.

I debated at Bellarmine, in California, for 2 years seriously. Our school didn’t let us go to the TOC that year, so our last tournament was Berkeley, where my partner and I went 7-1 and closed out a semifinals bracket, our other team was a higher seed and won finals. This year we had a few other very experienced people show up to a debate meeting, but they felt burnt out and didn’t want to do it anymore. O-week makes even old annoying habits seem like attractive future careers.

That’s basically the deal, contact me if you want to know more.