After Decade-Long Hiatus, New Jersey Debate Association Relaunches Statewide Competition with Lincoln-Douglas Tournament

Afresh start for high school debate throughout the Garden State is underway. The New Jersey Debate Association (NJDA) will make its return after a 10-year hiatus since its dissolution in 2014, highlighting a premier focus on Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Founded in 1988 by Joseph Clinton in an effort to consolidate the scattered leagues in the various county leagues, the NJDA served as one of the top arenas for high school forensics until the organization was forced to close down due to internal problems. Now, in an attempt at revival through a new digital mandate, the league will return to life with a grand tournament aimed at testing the fortitude and values of thousands of Lincoln-Douglas debaters across all 21 counties of the state.

Creating a new debate circuit from scratch took an extended outreach campaign that lasted eight months. Contacting prospective Lincoln-Douglas debaters in New Jersey required months of reaching out to 1-3 students in all the state’s high schools.

Through an outreach sprint conducted by volunteers, many hundreds of calls, texts and direct messages have been sent to current debate teams, mock trial teams, and Model UN teams to create a list. To complete the push, thousands of personally tailored invitations were sent to each prospective competitor to ensure eligibility.

Not like any traditional weekend invitationals, the future competition will consist of a true fire drill. Competitors will deal with high stakes value proposition through three unique rounds, all of which will be conducted fully online through Zoom servers:

Round 1: Each participant, upon registering, will be handed an unpredictable Lincoln-Douglas policy and ethics resolution at midnight on a Friday night. Competitors will have only 72 hours to research, construct and record their 6-minute Aff/Neg constructive speeches and 4-minute rebuttal, uploading raw video files along with a 15 page annotated bibliography. In excess of 80 percent of the entire field will be knocked out in one single round, all judged automatically by a panel of 16 judges.

Round 2: The remaining debaters enter a continuous high speed round robin where they are assigned live virtual rooms every two hours without any breaks, constantly changing positions from Affirmative to Negative and back, all while facing intense cross-examination protocol.

Stage 3: The last 16 participants will compete in a single elimination bracket tournament. This stage includes tough rounds of crossfire, live philosophy and evidence audits done by college policy experts, and brutal point-by-point cross-examinations.

All registrations will be handled through the centralized intake process to ensure the legitimacy of New Jersey resident students. Interested debaters who wish to participate in the tournament should communicate with the regional registration representative for NJDA as follows:

NJDA Sign-Up Rep: morettiartie@gmail.com