To the Debate Community of Connecticut,

The Yale Debate Association is pleased to invite you to attend the 35th Annual Rollin G. Osterweis Debate Tournament on Sunday, April 17, 2016.

For those of you unfamiliar with the tournament, the Osterweis is a free tournament for Connecticut high school students to experience the collegiate style of parliamentary debate.  The Osterweis will feature both a novice and a varsity division. Novice participants should be debaters who competed as novices in their league in the 2015-2016 season.

Novice participants will have the opportunity to learn about parliamentary procedure in the morning with a demonstration round, and then debate with a partner for three preliminary rounds, before breaking to semifinals and a final round. Varsity teams will compete in four preliminary rounds, breaking to semifinals and then finals.  

Debates will focus on issues familiar to the average student, including American and international politics, ethics, and justice.  Students will be given a free lunch and breakfast, and Yale debaters will judge and offer feedback.  Coaches will have the opportunity to participate in coaching workshops during the day if they wish.  Awards will be given the top varsity and top novice teams and speakers.

Registration opens March 28, 8:00AM and closes April 8, 6:00PM.

You can access a set of helpful instructions for registering your team using Tabroom’s online manual under “Help/About” on the main menu.  However, should you have difficulty registering, please contact us and we will personally enter your teams. We intend to cap the size of our tournament this year, and will therefore set a soft cap of three teams accepted per school. All entries should be registered before 6:00PM on April 8.

We highly encourage schools to register at least one novice team for every two varsity teams--we feel it is important to give younger debaters a chance to participate. We also encourage you to register as many as five teams, because if we do not reach our cap, we will be admitting additional teams, with final notification sent out after 10:00 PM on April 10th. We will try to accommodate any changes made to registration prior to this deadline, but ask that you notify us as soon as you can.

All updates will be posted on our website, http://www.yaledebate.org/osterweis/ . Please feel free to email us at osterweis2016@gmail.com with any questions or concerns. Feel free to pass this information on to other schools who might be interested.  (You may also download a pdf version of this invitation using the button to the top right of the page.)

We look forward to seeing you in April!

Best,

Kyle Hietala, Tournament Director

Walker Mayer, Tournament Director