Junior Debating League 2003/2004

The semi-finals and finals took place on Sunday, 10th October at 2pm at Königin-Olga-Stift Stuttgart.

Winner of 2003-2004 Junior League: Max-Born-Gymnasium, Backnang

Final:
"This house prefers books to computers."
Max-Born-Gymnasium - Taus Gymnasium 4:1

Semifinal:
"This House believes that the Olympic spirit is dead."
Max-Born-Gymnasium - Königin-Olga Stift 5:0
Taus Gymnasium - Hegel Gymnasium 3:2

10 schools had participated in this experimental first year.

draw / motions / results (preliminary rounds - pdf, 63 KB)

Hallo all!

Thank you for your interest in helping to create a debating "league" for our beginners. This will be a challenge and will require some effort to get the whole thing off the ground, but if we all pull together, we should get there!

This year (2003/2004) will be a trial run of the system, to see if it works. If it does work, and of course we hope it will, then we shall reconvene in September to start the thing properly. To that end, we shall need a meeting of the schools involved, but that will take place probably in October and so need not concern us at this moment.

So, let's get down to details. For this trial period, we would invite you to put up one team of 5 "juniors" (Years 8-9). Some schools have also shown interest in holding "senior" tournaments (Years 10-12). I would be grateful if you could let me know what pupils would be involved, so that we can see if a "senior" league would also be viable. However, primarily, we shall be concerned with the "juniors", at least for this first trial run. Could you let me have your team members by 1st April, so that I can arrange the team lists? Why not give your team a name, e.g. "Parler Panthers", or something like that? That would be beneficial for later years, when we hope to have multiple teams from individual schools.

In addition, we really need judges. Ideally, these would be the more experienced pupils, or, for example, the chaperons from the WSDC. Again, could you please let me have names by April 1st as I will need to allocate judges to the different "matches". I hope that you appreciate that, although we wish to keep this as decentralised and informal as possible, a certain amount of organisation and administration is required. Of course adults would be welcome as judges, but they should have judged before. Again names to me please by 1st April.

The schools currently interested are KOSt (Stuttgart), Lessing (Winnenden), Parler (Schw. Gmünd), Max-Born (Backnang), Taus (Backnang), Geschwister-Scholl (Tübingen) & Albert-Einstein (Böblingen). Also Dresden and Chemnitz are interested in joining in, but for this trial run, it should, in my opinion, be kept local to Stuttgart, particularly if we have pupils travelling about. That is not to say that we wish to exclude other areas (particularly Dresden!) in the future, and they will of course be taken into account should this trial run work.

So how will the debates look? We could have one prepared debate and one impromptu debate (with 30 mins. preparation time). Speaking times would be 5 minutes and 3 minutes. This would give teams a chance to get to grips with the different styles (prepared and unprepared), giving them a definite head start when it comes to later competitions. There would be 3 judges in each debate, which would take place in the standard WSDC format. Participation will cost €2 per debater per debate to cover administrative costs and costs incurred by the judges in getting to the schools.

We would have a predefined motion, so that there is a constant for all the debates, meaning that everyone taking part would be measured on the same level (e.g. not one debate talking about nuclear warfare and another about Dieter Bohlen). The prepared motions would be provided 2 weeks before the debate was due to take place and the impromptus obviously just before the debate.

The debate results should be phoned through or e-mailed to me, with the mark sheets posted soon after. I will try to create a website, on which everyone can access the results.

To this end, it would be good if we could co-ordinate the debate dates so that everyone is debating in parallel (to stop teams getting the same debate twice in different places). Ideally, we would try to have 5 rounds by, let's say June, i.e. each of the schools debates against every other. This would mean, however, that the dates would have to be given to you and everyone would have to abide by them. I thought Friday afternoons or Saturdays would be a good time to debate. Please could you let me know what is best for your pupils, again by the 1st April, so that we get cracking with this immediately after Easter.

Maybe we could have the final debate(s) taking place at one school and the winner of the league could then be announced straight away. Let me know what you think. This should be run collectively and so it is important that we share views on this.

Right, that's about it from my side. If you have any points, queries, comments, etc., please let me know as soon as possible, so that we can clear the matter up.

All the best!