Dear Debate Community,



The TOC recently announced that it will relocate to an online platform in light of coronavirus concerns. We, as a community, should have major problems with this.



1. There will inevitably be major technical difficulties. If someone has poor wifi or a judge or competitor has trouble understanding how the system works, it could set the tournament back a lot of time.

2. Cheating is incredibly easy - if someone has their camera off claiming that their laptop doesn’t have one, they can have a coach in the room making their doc. If they need extra prep, their “computer crashes”, and they can take an extra 10 minutes of prep time.

3. How would they communicate with their partner during prep? Do they have to message? That takes a long time. If they have to call, then the cheating issues still remain.

4. There will be a major speed cap. With the lagginess of computers, kids cannot go as fast as they want in rounds, which poses issues in every debate event.

5. No matter who wins, it will certainly not be seen as legitimate by the community because of the format of this tournament.

6. Part of the reason students do debate is to see friends from the community who come from all over the country. Them sitting in their bedrooms staring at laptops all weekend is not an acceptable replacement to this tournament environment.

7. Debaters without computers / quality, stable internet connection literally cannot compete. Let's not make this activity be more exclusionary and elitist than it already is.

Debaters have spent thousands of dollars out of pocket to travel all over the country to qualify for the most prestigious tournament all year. Seniors should not have to end their year with an online tournament with a myriad of potential issues after working incredibly hard for this tournament.



We propose that TOC be postponed so that it can occur in person sometime over the summer. While we are aware that this could be a logistical burden, it is certainly possible. UK has not even shut down their school yet. We think that these actions by the TOC are rash and do not account for the fact that transmission rates in China have slowed significantly, and the US rates could likely do the same. There is still over a month until TOC, so we think that they should at least hold off on a final decision until closer to the date.