Kesling,+Michelle

I have been coaching and judging Michigan High School debate for the past 7 years and have judged college debate for the last two. I consider myself to have a pretty good, clean flow. I don't have a preference between "straight-up" debate and "critical" debate. I feel that the debate should be about the debaters and I want you to do the things that you feel you are better at. I do have a preference for well thought out strategies that take the entirety of the debate into account however. Good debaters, in my mind, evaluate the entire debate and make strategic choices that win them the round.

Small preferences/ default paradigms I guess:

-Tag teaming and prompting is fine as long as it stays to a minimum. Tag teaming and prompting is a question of speaker points in my mind. I am hesitant to pull the trigger on these as MIFA violations without a well explained and TRUE abuse story.

-I generally default to competing interpretations on Topicality unless a team wins a warranted reason to switch to reasonability.

-Theory is generally a reason to reject the argument, ie. severance perms bad means reject the perm. The only time I think its a reason to reject the team is like in a conditionality debate where the fundamental argument is that too many conditional arguments makes the debate unfair enough the aff cannot win. Again, these are just defaults, you can persuade me otherwise.

I guess the only things I cannot stand in a debate round is rudeness to your partner or the other team and prep stealing. I will start prep immediately for speeches like the 2AC and the 2NC and I will not stop it until you are ready to go. Talking to your partner is considered prep time so if your partner has to tell you one more thing before you start, that counts against your prep.

ADDENDUM FOR PAPERLESS- I understand the reason for switching to paperless debate systems and think that it is a good switch if it means your program can run on a tighter budget. The only thing I dislike about paperless debates is the wasted time between speeches spent jumping them and the fact that many teams use this as a way to steal prep. If you are a paperless team, please make the process of jumping speeches as quick and efficient as you can. When speeches are being jumped, no prep work should be done. If I catch a team prepping while speeches are being jumped, I will start the prep clock and it will be taken out of your prep time.